“In her own research, Dweck has shown that these mindsets have important practical implications. Her most famous study, conducted in twelve different New York City schools along with Claudia Mueller, involved giving more than 400 fifth graders a relatively easy test consisting of nonverbal puzzles. After the children finished the test, the researchers told the students their score, and provided them with a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
The students were then allowed to choose between two different subsequent tests. The first choice was described as a more difficult set of puzzles, but the kids were told that they’d learn a lot from attempting it. The other option was an easy test, similar to the test they’d just taken.
When Dweck was designing the experiment, she expected the different forms of praise to have a rather modest effect. After all, it was just one sentence. But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth graders dramatically affected their choice of tests. When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test. What explains this difference? According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.”
Yes. This is so awesome. Hard work is so much more important than intelligence anyway.
Ed Cripps from UWA gave a talk to my stats group last week on people who believe that talent is innate versus people who believe that talent is something you can develop. Rather than looking at kids, his work looked at (I think) MBA students doing simulated business tasks, grouped by which talent approach they identified with.
Those who thought that they either “had it” or “didn’t have it” (the innate approach) did okay in the early stages, had a setback and then crashed into this spiralling behaviour of doing worse and worse at the task. Those who took the other view of themselves didn’t spiral.
To me, the take home message was that we shouldn’t tell kids they’re naturally good at something when they do well, but that they’ve clearly worked hard. Dweck’s work seems to show that, too, but for slightly different reasons.
(via yiduiqie)
