ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1655086
Validating the Language Mindset Inventory in Finland: A study of higher education students' language-learning mindsets
Provisionally accepted
- Helsingin yliopisto Kasvatustieteet, Helsinki, Finland
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In recent years, mindset research has increasingly focused on domains of learning, such as mathematics. Foreign/second language (L2) learning is a recent addition to the domain-specific mindset literature. However, few studies have focused on language mindsets in a European context. Moreover, the Language Mindsets Inventory (LMI), the instrument commonly used to measure such mindsets, has not been validated outside North America and Asia.The LMI was administered to over 300 students taking compulsory L2 courses at a university in Southern Finland. The construct validity of the LMI was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical factor analysis (HFA). The study then used the LMI data to assess the orientation of the students' language mindsets (fixed or growth) and their correlation with beliefs about general intelligence and giftedness.The results indicated that the LMI's three subscales-general language beliefs, L2 beliefs, and age-sensitive beliefs-represent distinct constructs, in turn stratified by growthmindset (incremental) and fixed-mindset (entity) beliefs. The students' language mindsets measured by all six resultant factors were more growth oriented than their mindsets about general intelligence and giftedness. In addition, the students' language mindsets were more growth oriented as measured by the incremental items of the LMI than by the entity (fixed) items.The results suggest that the LMI is a valid instrument for use in Finnish higher education contexts. However, the data do not support combining the scores from the subscales, as the constructs they measure are too distinct. In general, more research is required on why entity and incremental mindset items in mindset scales produce different results about the strength of respondents' mindset orientations.Reviewer 1 wrote: The authors refer to an "Implicit Theories of Giftedness (ITG)" scale but do not cite the source, authors, or version of this instrument. As there is no single standardized ITG scale, it would provide clarity on which scale the authors used, including a citation. This will assist future researchers compare findings and ensure reproducibility. "Here, I have added clarification about the wording of the giftedness scale items and cited two previous studies that have used the same four-item ITG scale
Keywords: mindsets1, language mindsets2, intelligence3, giftedness4, Validity5
Received: 27 Jun 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Billington, Laine and Tirri. 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: Matthew Billington, Helsingin yliopisto Kasvatustieteet, Helsinki, Finland
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