ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Healthcare Professions Education
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1550214
Development and validation of the Nursing Students' Growth Mindset Scale (NSGMS)
Provisionally accepted
- 1Huzhou University, Huzhou, China
- 2Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
ABSTRACT Background: Growth mindset is increasingly valued for its important role in the training of nursing students. However, research on the development of tools to measure growth mindset effectively among nursing students is limited. Objective: To develop a measurement tool to evaluate nursing students' growth mindset. Design: A cross-sectional methodological study. Participants and Setting: A total of 271 nursing students from 4 universities or university colleges in Zhejiang and Hunan participated in the study. Methods: Domains and items of nursing students' growth mindset were identified and created by conducting a literature review and qualitative interviews. To test the content validity, a 2-round Delphi was adopted, and a pilot implementation was conducted with 30 nursing students. The construct validity of the scale was tested using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (n = 206). Results: According to the exploratory factor analysis results, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin value was 0.87, and the Bartlett test's χ² was 2659.680 (P < 0.05). One item with a factor loading value below 0.50 was removed from the scale, and the obtained factor structure explained 67.01% of the variance. The fit indices of the scale model tested in the confirmatory factor analysis were determined as χ²/df = 1.42, RMSEA = 0.05, CFI = 0.97, TFI = 0.97, IFI = 0.97. The scale structure was confirmed using 4 factors and 21 items. The Cronbach's alpha values were found to be 0.77–0.90 for the subdimensions of the scale and 0.88 for the total scale. The data also showed good test–retest stability (ICC = 0.90). 2 Conclusion: This scale is a reliable and valid measurement tool to determine nursing students' level of growth mindset. Further studies with larger and more diverse samples are recommended to evaluate the psychometric structure of this scale.
Keywords: growth mindset, nursing students, scale development, Nurse, scale
Received: 11 Mar 2025; Accepted: 21 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cao, Zheyi, Chunqi and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Meijuan Cao, cmj828@126.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.