Educational Leadership

The Association For Supervision and Curriculum Development publishes a magazine titled, Educational Leadership. The October 2007 issue (Vol. 65 No. 2) has an excellent article, The Perils and Promises of Praise. Let me share a portion of the article written by Carol S. Dweck.

Thus, we found that praise for intelligence tended to put students in a fixed mind-set (intelligence is fixed, and you have it), whereas praise for effort tended to put them in a growth mind-set (you’re developing these skills because you’re working hard).

We then offered students a chance to work on either a challenging task that they could learn from or an easy one that ensured error-free performance. Most of those praised for intelligence wanted the easy task, whereas most of those praised for effort wanted the challenging task and the opportunity to learn.

Next, the students worked on some challenging problems. As a group, students who had been praised for their intelligence lost their confidence in their ability and their enjoyment of the task as soon as they began to struggle with the problem. If success meant they were smart, then struggling meant they were not. The whole point of intelligence praise is to boost confidence and motivation, but both were gone in a flash. Only the effort-praised kids remained, on the whole, confident and eager.

When the problems were made somewhat easier again, students praised for intelligence did poorly, having lost their confidence and motivation. As a group, they did worse than they had done initially on these same types of problems. The students praised for effort showed excellent performance and continued to improve.

Finally, when asked to report their scores (anonymously), almost 40 percent of the intelligence-praised students lied. Apparently, their egos were so wrapped up in their performance that they couldn’t admit mistakes. Only 10 percent of the effort-praised students saw fit to falsify their results.

Praising students for their intelligence, then, hands them, not motivation and resilience but a fixed mind-set with all its vulnerability. In contrast, effort or “process” praise (praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, and the like) fosters hardy motivation. It tells students what they’ve done to be successful and what they need to do to be successful again in the future.

Process praise sounds like this:

• You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
• I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
• It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, kept working. That’s great!
• I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work-doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things.
  

. . . 7th grade because this is a time of great vulnerability. School often gets more difficult in 7th grade, grading becomes more stringent, and the environment becomes more impersonal. Many students take stock of themselves and their intellectual abilities at this time and decide whether they want to be involved with school.

They learned that the brain is like a muscle-the more they exercise it, the stronger it becomes. They learned that every time they try hard and learn something new, their brain forms new connections that, over time, make them smarter. They learned that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence, but rather the formation of new connections brought about through effort and learning.

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