Associating growth mindset with social-emotional skills through school belonging and academic anxiety: Insights from SSES 2023 China survey

The specific mechanism by which growth mindset affects social-emotional skills remains unclear in the East Asian setting. In view of this, the present study explored the structural associations between growth mindset, school belonging, academic anxiety, and social-emotional skills in China (N = 3283), based on the 2023 Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) data. The results revealed that growth mindset is positively linked to school belonging, task performance, emotional regulation, collaboration, open-mindedness, and engaging with others, but negatively related to academic anxiety. Further, growth mindset may positively affect task performance, emotional regulation, collaboration, open-mindedness, and engaging with others via the mediation of school belonging. As well, growth mindset may improve emotional regulation and engaging with others by reducing the negative impact of academic anxiety, and may impair collaboration by decreasing the positive effect of academic anxiety. Currently, the promotion of social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a national educational priority in China, thus the empirical research findings are conducive to guiding SEL programmes in light of Chinese social, cultural, and educational contexts.