On March 16, 2020, French schools suddenly closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and middle school students were asked to study from home with no direct interactions with teachers or classmates. However, school plays an important role in the development of social, intellectual, and mental competencies and can counteract the negative effects of adverse life events on learning and early school dropout. In this study, we investigated how the unusual context of school closure during the COVID-19 pandemic affected school engagement. Specifically, we focused on inter-individual differences in the motivational determinants of school engagement. We thus performed an online survey of 170 students focusing on the time spent on mathematics assignments, motivation regulation, implicit theories of intelligence, such as adopting a growth or a fixed mindset about his/her intellectual abilities, and optimism. Importantly, the students participated in the online survey during the first lockdown period, with schools closed (T1), and the second lockdown period, with schools remaining open (T2). During T1, identified motivation positively predicted the time spent on math homework assignments: the more the students thought that working on math exercises was useful for their future life, the more time they spent studying. Importantly, the link between identified motivation and school engagement was specific to T1, when schools were closed, as indicated by a significant interaction between identified motivations by type of lockdown. These results suggest that having self-determined motivation is of particular importance when students are deprived of social and intellectual interactions with classmates and teachers. This finding paves the way toward the development of wise rational interventions that target identified motivation and can be applied during challenging societal times and adverse, common life events to keep students engaged with school.

Research in social psychology and education proposes that adopting a growth mindset of intelligence is an important mediator for student’s wellbeing and performance at school. As a consequence, wise interventions have been developed to target student mindsets and change their beliefs about how much their intelligence can grow with training and experience. However, the efficacy of mindset interventions are much debated as effects sizes vary a lot across studies. Here we hypothesized that the study environment, and in particular the teacher’s mindset about intelligence is an important moderator of mindset intervention efficacy. To causally test this hypothesis, six middle schools from underprivileged neighborhoods in the Paris area in France were randomly assigned to a no intervention condition, a condition with mindset interventions delivered only to the students, and a condition with mindset interventions for teachers and students. The result showed that the combined teacher and student mindset intervention condition was most efficient to increase the student’s growth mindset. This finding indicated that a short and easy to implement mindset intervention to teachers can help students develop their growth mindset.

Growth mindsets, the belief that intelligence can grow with effort and training, have been associated with the adoption of mastery goals in children and adolescents. However, it is unknown whether these two factors are also correlated in adults. We conducted two online studies among three hundred participants to challenge this association. Results from (1) zero-order correlations, (2) structural equation modeling and (3) out-of-sample predictions converged on the finding that growth mindset was associated with the adoption of mastery goals in mathematics. This association generalized across different ways of measuring mindsets. Taken together the results provided new evidence for the idea that mindset and goal achievement are intrinsically related concepts, which remain associated across different life stages and generalize across populations.