The unique importance of motivation and mindsets for students’ learning behavior and achievement: An examination at the level of between-student differences and within-student fluctuations.

This study examined the unique and interactive role of students' quality of motivation, as defined in selfdetermination theory, and their mindsets about intelligence, as conceptualized in Dweck's framework, in predicting a variety of learning outcomes (engagement, learning strategies, persistence, procrastination, and test anxiety) and achievement.Moving beyond past work, this study examined their effects both at the level of between-student differences and at the level of semester-to-semester fluctuations within students' own functioning, thereby controlling for students' cognitive ability.The study had a four-wave longitudinal design, following 3,415 seventh-grade students across a 2-year period with 6-month intervals (49.8% female; M age = 12.65 years).Multilevel analyses demonstrated that autonomous motivation and effort beliefs had independent and favorable associations with most outcomes and that controlled motivation and a fixed mindset related more uniquely to maladaptive outcomes, findings that emerged at both levels of analysis.This pattern of associations was held after controlling for students' cognitive ability and applied to both students with high and low cognitive ability.The number of interactions between motivation and mindsets was quite limited.It can be concluded that the quality of motivation and mindsets about intelligence represent compatible resources for learning that help to explain between-student and within-student differences in learning and achievement. Educational Impact and Implications StatementBoth students' quality of academic motivation and their beliefs about the role of effort and intelligence in performance were found to predict students' learning outcomes and achievement.Students reported more favorable outcomes when they perceived the learning material as interesting and personally relevant and when they thought that efforts led to improved learning.The benefits of such autonomous motivation and effort beliefs emerged both when students scored higher on these motivational resources compared to others (i.e., between-student level) as well as when they scored higher on these resources in a given semester (i.e., within-student level).As such, the findings indicate that both students' quality of motivation and their effort beliefs are useful targets for intervention that should perhaps be combined in educational interventions.