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In sports, youth are coached to see persistence and hard work as important paths to personal improvement and success. They come to understand through practice that mistakes are tools to help them improve and that collaboration and teamwork are keys to success in team sports (Kovács & Szakál, 2024; Rottensteiner et al., 2015). These ideas about the importance of effort, persistence, mistakes, and collaboration are important components of a growth mindset, the belief that ability is not fixed but can be improved through effort (Dweck & Yeager, 2020). People with a growth mindset view challenges and mistakes as opportunities to learn; they believe that success depends on effort and practice. Further, research shows that a growth mindset is associated with learner persistence and has positive effects on learning in school and beyond, including in sports (Biddle et al., 1996; Blackwell et al., 2007; Dweck 2006). However, young people who have a growth mindset in sports may not extend it to subjects such as mathematics and science (Chan et al., 2022; Kyler & Moscicki, 2024). In this paper, we describe a strategy of combining growth mindset principles, mathematics concepts, and sports examples to support students in shifting their mindsets about their own abilities. We share outcomes from implementing these activities at five out-of-school settings. 

Growing Mathletes is an NSF-funded program that is developing a curricular model to successfully integrate growth mindset principles, baseball, and math and science concepts for youth in grades 3 to 8 in out of school learning settings. Using a Design-Based Implementation Research framework for implementing, testing, and revising a curriculum and professional learning model, we are working on best practices to support youth learning and confidence as well as facilitator training and support in both afterschool and summer programs. We present youth outcomes as evidence of successes in how the program has integrated growth mindset with other content as a way to support youth’s productive mindset in their own learning along with content gains.