The purpose of this study is to investigate whether “growth mindset” contributes to statistical learning in the social sciences, and to address the controversy whether growth mindset is positively associated with academic achievement. Students enrolled in a statistics course were invited to participate in a two-stage online questionnaire, resulting in cross-sectional data (including only the first-wave data) and longitudinal data (two-wave data). Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data show that compared with general growth mindset, statistical growth mindset has a significant indirect effect on academic achievement in statistics courses acting through academic engagement, which supports the idea of “domain specificity”. Perceived difficulty moderated the effect of the statistical growth mindset and academic engagement, only in cross-sectional data. This study provides empirical evidence for the application of a statistical growth mindset to statistical learning and partially addresses the controversy over the predictive effect of growth mindset.

本研究的目的是调查“成长心态”是否有助于社会科学中的统计学习，并解决成长心态是否与学业成就正相关的争议。参加统计课程的学生被邀请参加两阶段在线调查问卷，产生横截面数据（仅包括第一波数据）和纵向数据（两波数据）。横断面和纵向数据均表明，与一般成长心态相比，统计成长心态通过学术参与对统计课程的学业成绩产生显着的间接影响，这支持了“领域特异性”的观点。感知困难调节了统计成长心态和学术参与的影响，仅在横截面数据中。本研究为统计成长心态在统计学习中的应用提供了经验证据，并部分解决了关于成长心态预测效果的争议。