There was a great Po Bronson article recently in New York Magazine. Here’s my favorite passage:
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
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Yes, Dweck and her researchers found out exactly how sensitive children are. And if one sentence of praise can have that dramatic of an impact, consider the collective impact of several years’ of grading.
By the time kids entered my 10th grade English class, their identity as a learner had already been set in concrete, and there was nothing I could do to change that. There were some kids that had received enough C’s, D’s, and F’s in elementary school to realize that school was not a place they were going to succeed. Rather than endure the psychological trauma of consistently negative feedback, it made sense for them to simply stop caring.
Remember, school tests kids on what the teacher, the state, and the federal government think is important. If we supported kids in learning things that they think is important, and then invited them to reflect on their own experience, we might see different outcomes.
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There’s a great concept from Sir Ken Robinson’s awesome book The Element that I like to steal. He says the old way of thinking about our approach to school is defined by the question, “How intelligent are you?” Then, we give kids a test to make them prove it.
Leading-edge schools ask kids, “How are you intelligent?” and then allow them to set their own goals, which invariably are much loftier than the “standards” established by the state.
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