Reproduction of Reid & Boeren (2026)

In ReproLab I try to reproduce or replicate findings from research articles.

This reproduction is for:

Reid, C., & Boeren, E. (2026). Growth mindset is positively associated with mathematics attainment in Scotland—But socioeconomic status plays a greater role. British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.70156

This article used Scottish PISA 2022 data to look at Growth Mindset in relation to mathematics achievement. The original article used SPSS and especially when doing multilevel modelling it always is a bit of a guess whether findings will replicate with a different package (McCoach et al., 2018). As I mainly work in R, this was the one I went for. The raw data from the OECD website was used. The authors used multilevel models, but no weights and only the first Plausible Value (PV).

The key result is in Table 1:

The first column of this screenshot shows the results for Scotland. It was very easy to add other countries with the code, so I added the home countries:

The result reproduce almost perfectly, a great indication that the authors reported enough information in their article, a sign of rigour. The key result here, according to the article is the non-significant interaction between GM_c and ESCS (growth mindset and socio-economic status). The interaction for GM*ESCS for England is notable: growth mindset matters more for students from lower‑SES backgrounds.

However, I wanted to check if perhaps the choice for not including weights and only using one PV would make a difference, so I also used code using all ten PVs and the best weighting scenario according to Mang et al. (2021) (“The simulation results revealed three weighting approaches performing best in retrieving the true population parameters. One of them implies using only level two weights (here: final school weights) and is because of its simple implementation the most favourable one. “).

Notably, the estimates are different but most of the key results stay the same, except for mean school GM. Also note, though, that if one were to extend to all home countries, the interaction between GM_c and ESCS now isn’t significant anymore for England.

The code is a bit messy but happy to send/give. I might add it to the post later. Interesting extensions could be the home countries and other countries in the global PISA 2022 sample.