Growth mindset and motivation drive student success in math powerhouse nations

A sweeping new analysis of data from more than 66,000 teenagers across ten of the world’s top-performing education systems suggests that the secret to mathematical excellence is not a single psychological trait or a particular national teaching style, but a delicate interaction between what students believe about their own intelligence, how much they genuinely enjoy learning, and how much freedom their schools have to run their own affairs. The study, published in the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education by Yuanyi Zhu of the University of Exeter and Luyang Guo of the University of Macau, offers one of the most detailed cross-cultural portraits to date of how motivational beliefs translate into mathematics achievement, and why the same intervention can succeed spectacularly in one country and fail in another.

The researchers drew on the Programme for International Student Assessment, better known as PISA, administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2022. That cycle assessed approximately 700,000 students across 81 countries and economies, with mathematics as the major domain. From this enormous pool, the team selected the ten highest-performing economies with complete data: five Asian systems — Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei and Korea — and five Western systems — Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Poland. Japan was excluded because of missing motivation data, while Estonia, Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium lacked complete information on school autonomy. The final analytical sample comprised 66,789 fifteen-year-old students, each of whom also supplied information on gender, socioeconomic status and learning effort, variables the researchers statistically controlled throughout.

The theoretical backbone of the study is self-determination theory, a widely influential framework in psychology which holds that human motivation flourishes when three basic psychological needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. According to this theory, students are more creative, persistent and productive when they act out of intrinsic motivation — genuine interest and enjoyment — rather than external rewards or pressures. The study also draws on Carol Dweck’s distinction between a fixed mindset, the belief that intelligence is an unchangeable trait, and a growth mindset, the belief that ability can be developed through effort and learning. The research team hypothesised that a growth mindset would boost mathematics performance both directly and indirectly, by fostering the kind of internalised, self-determined motivation that sustains engagement through difficulty.

Methodologically, the study is a multilevel mediation analysis, a statistical technique designed for data with nested structure: students are nested within schools, and schools within countries. Because PISA does not give every student the same test items, mathematics proficiency was estimated using ten plausible values per student, a scaling approach that combines item response theory with latent regression to reduce measurement bias. Growth mindset was measured with a single, reversed item asking students whether their intelligence is something they cannot change very much. Intrinsic motivation was captured through five items measuring enjoyment of learning and engagement with challenging schoolwork, showing acceptable internal consistency across all ten economies. School autonomy was reported by school principals, who indicated who held main responsibility for decisions such as hiring teachers and determining salary increases. Missing data, ranging from about 4.6 percent to 11.2 percent depending on the variable, were handled through multiple imputation, with results pooled across ten imputed datasets using Rubin’s rules in Mplus 8.11.

The first headline finding concerns the direct effect of growth mindset. In the Western group, the belief that intelligence is malleable was significantly associated with better mathematics performance in all four of the systems where the pathway could be tested cleanly: Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Ireland, with the strongest effect in Ireland. In Asia, significant direct effects appeared only in Singapore and Chinese Taipei. Perhaps most strikingly, in Macao, Hong Kong and Korea — three economies whose students consistently rank among the world’s best — no direct link between growth mindset and achievement was detected at all. The authors interpret this through the lens of culture: East Asian systems shaped by Confucian heritage traditions tend to emphasise effort, diligence and perseverance, so students may work hard regardless of what they believe about innate ability, with effort itself driving achievement.

The second key result is that intrinsic motivation acts as a powerful bridge between mindset and performance. In all five Asian economies and four of the five Western economies — Ireland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Poland — intrinsic motivation mediated the pathway from growth mindset to mathematics achievement. In Macao, Hong Kong and Korea the mediation was complete: growth mindset had no measurable direct effect on scores, and its entire influence operated through increased enjoyment and engagement in learning. This means that simply telling students their abilities can grow may be insufficient unless that belief is converted into genuine interest in mathematics itself. In Switzerland, by contrast, growth-minded students outperformed their peers regardless of whether they enjoyed the subject, suggesting the mindset effect there runs on a different, more direct route.

One finding is bound to raise eyebrows in Poland, the only Western economy where the pattern reversed. Polish students who held a relatively fixed mindset actually reported higher intrinsic motivation and, through it, better mathematics performance. The authors point to the concept of mindsets operating within societal norms: in a culture that prizes natural talent and performance, students whose personal growth beliefs clash with prevailing expectations may struggle to convert those beliefs into effective learning behaviour. They also note that Polish education reforms between 2009 and 2018 improved outcomes mainly for high achievers, potentially reinforcing a talent-centred culture in which students identified as gifted receive praise that can inadvertently entrench fixed-mindset beliefs, heighten fear of failure and complicate the relationship between beliefs and achievement.

The third strand of the analysis examined school autonomy — the degree to which principals and school leadership control decisions about staffing, budgets and educational programmes — as a potential moderator of these motivational pathways. Here the picture was strikingly context-dependent. In the Western economies, school autonomy showed essentially no moderating influence on the relationship between motivational beliefs and mathematics performance, and in Poland higher autonomy was actually associated with lower achievement. The Asian systems told a richer story. In Korea, students in high-autonomy schools benefited more from a growth mindset: the belief that ability can grow translated into better performance only where schools enjoyed substantial decision-making freedom, a pattern the authors link partly to Korea’s Innovative Schools policy, a bottom-up reform promoting democratic governance and curricular flexibility. Yet in Korea, intrinsic motivation mattered more in low-autonomy schools, where students apparently fall back on internal drive when institutional support is thin. In Singapore, school autonomy amplified the positive effect of intrinsic motivation on performance, even though average scores were higher in low-autonomy schools — evidence, the authors argue, that Singapore’s autonomy operates within a robust framework of accountability and institutional support that keeps decentralisation from descending into bureaucratic burden.

The broader lesson, the researchers conclude, is that there is no universal formula for producing mathematically proficient students. Growth mindset, intrinsic motivation and institutional structure form an interlocking system whose effects depend on cultural values, societal norms and the architecture of each education system. Earlier research had established that mathematics skills predict higher wages and lower unemployment regardless of educational attainment, and that a country’s average mathematics performance is among the strongest predictors of its long-term economic growth and innovation capacity, which makes understanding these mechanisms far more than an academic exercise. Previous cross-national work had also shown that national culture alone accounts for roughly a quarter of the between-country variance in mathematics achievement, underscoring why psychological findings cannot simply be exported from one context to another.

The authors acknowledge several limitations. The data are cross-sectional, so the findings are correlational rather than causal; longitudinal studies would be needed to trace how mindsets and motivation develop and influence achievement over time. Growth mindset was measured with a single item, which can introduce acquiescence bias and lower reliability, particularly in Asian systems where students may simultaneously endorse growth beliefs about performance and fixed beliefs about innate intelligence. The study also focused exclusively on school autonomy as a school-level moderator; future work should examine accountability systems, teacher efficacy and teacher–student relationships. Finally, PISA’s use of plausible values rather than directly observed scores introduces additional sampling variability.

Even so, the practical implications are clear. In top-performing Asian economies and in systems like Denmark, the United Kingdom and Ireland, cultivating students’ intrinsic motivation may be the most reliable way to convert growth-oriented beliefs into actual achievement. Teachers can design classrooms that support curiosity and engagement; school administrators should weigh how autonomy shapes motivational processes; and policymakers would do well to adapt mindset interventions to local cultural and institutional realities rather than assuming that what works in one education system will work everywhere. The study reframes mathematics achievement not as the product of individual traits alone, but as the outcome of a dynamic negotiation between students’ inner beliefs and the structures around them — a negotiation that plays out very differently in Seoul, Singapore, Zurich and Warsaw.