The effect of growth mindset-focused mentality theory based activities on success, mindset beliefs, grit, self regulation, motivation and attitude

The purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of the activities developed within the scope of the Development-Oriented Mindset Theory on academic achievement (reading skills, mathematics, and science), mentality beliefs, grit, self-regulation skills, achievement motivation, and attitudes of 8th grade students using the mixed-method research methodology of exploratory sequential design. The more dominant, quantitative part of the research employed the experimental research method of quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest control group, while the phenomenology design was used for qualitative purposes. The study group consisted of a total of 98 students in the 8th grade of a secondary school in a province in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey in the 2020-2021 academic year. The quantitative findings revealed that the intervention used in the experimental group (N=33) had a significantly greater effect on the mean scores students obtained in terms of their reading skills, and mathematics and science performance, as well as mentality beliefs, grit, self-regulation skills and achievement motivation when compared to the effectiveness of the activities performed in the placebo (N=33) and control (N=32) groups, with this significant difference represented by large effect sizes in favour of the experimental group. On the other hand, heterogeneous results were obtained regarding "attitude", which is another dependent variable of the study. The results obtained from the student interview questions regarding the factual meaning of the quantitative findings of the research showed that students in the experimental group associated the increase in their academic success following the intervention, with remarks related to growth mindset, grit, self-regulation processes, and motivational contexts. In addition, after the intervention, a significant number of students in the experimental group reported that they started to adopt mastery-oriented thinking and behaviour, reconsidered the meaning of their mistakes, participated in the learning process with greater effort, started to enjoy the challenges that encourage them to learn, and saw themselves as more adept at being patient and task continuity.