Family context of mindset matters: Students’ perceptions of parent and sibling math mindsets predict their math motivation, behavior, and affect

Abstract

Mindsets are defined as people’s beliefs about the nature of intelligence, and previous research has found effects of students’ mindsets on their academic outcomes. In the present study, we bring together two recent lines of mindset research: research that has demonstrated that the mindset contexts that surround students matter above and beyond students’ own mindsets; and research that has demonstrated the importance of parents’ mindsets on students’ academic outcomes. Specifically, we explored associations among the family mindset context—operationalized as undergraduate students’ perceptions of their parents’ and older siblings’ mindsets beliefs about math ability—and their motivation, behavior, and affect in math. We found that students’ (N = 358) perceptions of their parents’ and older siblings’ fixed math mindsets were negatively associated with their motivation, engagement, and help-seeking behaviors in math. These findings underscore the importance of family mindset contexts to students’ math motivation and engagement, especially the role of older siblings, which is a particularly novel contribution.

Data availability statement

All materials used in the present study (e.g., exact items and measures) are available in the supplemental online materials. The data presented share sensitive information including students’ GPA. Though the data could be anonymized so as not to include any direct identifiers such as student names or emails, students may still be identifiable through a combination of other variables including math course, gender, and/or race/ethnicity. Therefore, in order to protect participants’ privacy, we do not plan to share our data in a publicly accessed data repository. However, data supporting the results or analyses presented in this paper are available upon reasonable request.

Ethics approval

Approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of Texas at Austin for this research project (No. 2015-09-0013) was obtained.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that we have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.

Notes

1 Because much research has demonstrated how students’ own mindsets relate to their motivation, behavior, and affect (see Dweck & Yeager, 2019, for review), we added students’ own mindsets to isolate the unique effects of students’ perceptions of their family mindset context on their math-related outcomes.

Additional information

Funding

Shengjie Lin was a graduate student trainee in the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. This research has received support from the grant, T32HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.