The most-cited growth mindset studies, the two meta-analyses that disagree about whether interventions work, and search strings for your literature review.
Growth mindset research starts from Carol Dweck's work on implicit theories of intelligence and now centres on one question: do short interventions raise achievement, and for whom? Read Blackwell et al. (2007) for the original longitudinal evidence, Yeager et al. (2019) for the largest trial, and the two Psychological Bulletin meta-analyses (Burnette et al., 2023; Macnamara and Burgoyne, 2023) side by side, because they reach different conclusions from overlapping studies.
How the literature is organised
The field grew out of Carol Dweck's research on implicit theories of intelligence: the belief that ability is fixed (an entity theory) or can be developed (an incremental theory). The most-cited paper still uses that vocabulary, so a search for "growth mindset" alone misses earlier studies. The most-cited paper, Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007), links the two eras. It followed 373 seventh graders through two years of junior high school and then tested a classroom intervention.
From there the literature splits into three strands. The first is correlational: does mindset predict achievement, engagement or wellbeing in a given population? The second is interventionist, led by David Yeager and colleagues, and culminates in the National Study of Learning Mindsets reported in Nature in 2019. The third carries the construct into new settings such as medical education (Richardson et al., 2021), second-language learning and adolescent mental health, where Schleider and Weisz (2018) tested a single-session intervention for anxiety and depression.
Main debates
The central dispute is effect size. Yeager and Dweck's 2020 article "What can be learned from growth mindset controversies?" states the defence. Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) give the sceptical reading of the intervention literature. The argument has also become methodological: Tipton et al. (2023) explain why meta-analyses of the same interventions can disagree and what good practice looks like. A second debate concerns moderators. Claro, Paunesku and Dweck (2016) reported that a growth mindset predicted achievement across a national sample in Chile and that students from lower-income families were less likely to hold one. Whether that pattern holds in other countries is a realistic question for a replication with local data.
Where recent work is heading
Recent work asks where it works, the heterogeneity-attuned question that Tipton et al. (2023) recommend. Yeager et al. (2022), matching 9,167 student records with 223 maths teachers, found support for the hypothesis that students' growth mindsets need to be supported by their teacher's own growth mindset, and Yu et al. (2022) and Mesler et al. (2021) examine teacher beliefs and practices directly. Language-learning mindsets are a further strand in the wider literature.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Krista De Castella, Donald Byrne (2015). European Journal of Psychology of Education.
Cited by 304doi:10.1007/s10212-015-0244-y
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Rhiannon MacDonnell Mesler, Catherine M. Corbin, Brittany Harker Martin (2021). Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
Cited by 118doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2021.101299
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Marlena Calo, Belinda Judd, Casey Peiris (2024). Medical Education.
Cited by 52Open accessdoi:10.1111/medu.15391
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 3,867 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
6
2001
1
2002
3
2003
2
2004
3
2005
5
2006
4
2007
10
2008
11
2009
12
2010
11
2011
17
2012
29
2013
26
2014
30
2015
45
2016
85
2017
160
2018
221
2019
219
2020
316
2021
273
2022
266
2023
311
2024
427
2025
650
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 190 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Frontiers in Psychology12 papers
British Journal of Educational Psychology7 papers
Social Psychology of Education7 papers
Personality and Individual Differences5 papers
Contemporary Educational Psychology4 papers
Journal of Youth and Adolescence4 papers
Learning and Individual Differences4 papers
Psychological Bulletin4 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Core concept, including the older term
"growth mindset" OR "fixed mindset" OR "implicit theories of intelligence" OR "mindset intervention*"
Interventions and achievement outcomes
("growth mindset" OR "implicit theor*") AND (intervention* OR "randomised" OR "randomized") AND (achievement OR grades OR GPA)
Teachers and classroom context
("growth mindset" OR "teacher mindset*") AND (teacher* OR classroom OR "school climate")
Explore growth mindset in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Intervention effects and heterogeneity
Who benefits, by how much, and under what classroom conditions. This is where the two Psychological Bulletin meta-analyses and the National Study of Learning Mindsets sit.
Teacher mindsets
Whether a teacher's own beliefs and practices let a student's growth mindset take hold (Yeager et al., 2022).
Mindset and socioeconomic status
Claro et al. (2016) found that mindset tempered the effect of poverty on achievement in a national sample in Chile.
Language-learning mindsets
Mindset applied to second-language learning; one listed study relates it to self-regulated learning and English language achievement.
Mindset is often modelled alongside these constructs rather than alone.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention” (2007), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x
MLA 9th edition
Blackwell, Lisa S., et al. “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention.” Child Development, vol. 78, no. 1, 2007, pp. 246–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most cited paper on growth mindset?
Among journal articles with the term in the title, it is Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007) in Child Development, a longitudinal study of students entering junior high school plus a classroom intervention. Books without a DOI do not appear in lists like this one.
Is growth mindset research reliable?
It is contested. Yeager et al. (2019) found that a short online intervention improved grades among lower-achieving students in a nationally representative US sample. Two meta-analyses in the 2023 volume of Psychological Bulletin disagree: Burnette et al. ask for whom, how and why interventions work and close with a discussion of heterogeneity, while Macnamara and Burgoyne conclude that apparent effects on achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws and bias. A literature review should present both.
What is the difference between growth mindset and implicit theories of intelligence?
They name the same construct. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007) write of an incremental theory, the belief that intelligence is malleable, and an entity theory, the belief that it is fixed; later papers such as Claro, Paunesku and Dweck (2016) call the first a growth mindset. Search for both vocabularies or you will miss the earlier studies.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("growth mindset" OR "growth mindsets" OR "fixed mindset" OR "mindset intervention" OR "implicit theories of intelligence"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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