Praising students can often hurt their intellectual self-esteem. If a student completes an easy task and is praised, the praise may make him feel dumb or unworthy, because that task was so easy. Praising students after they complete a hard task will make them think that the praise was just given to make them feel good. In the study that was described in the article, an experiment was conducted that gave praise to students on their intelligence, effort, and performance. Students praised for their intelligence did not want to try the harder tasks and were left questioning their intelligence. Students praised for their effort wanted to try out the harder tasks and take them home to practice. They felt that they had to try harder in order to succeed, thus maintaining their intellectual self-esteem. Praise can be detrimental to students when it is about their intelligence. If they fail, the failure is personal and they become affected by it.
A problem with a kid who is obsessed with proving his intelligence may be that he will do anything to show he is smart. After failing a test for the first time, for example, he might go about cheating on the second exam, just so he can prove he’s smart. He may also feel that making an effort showed that he was dumb.
According to the Dweck article, as teachers, we should instill in students the idea of reaching their highest potential. Then, we should teach them how to value challenging situations and learning, rather than having to prove that they are smart. Lastly, we should help them concentrate on exerting more effort and improving their learning process instead of focusing on intelligence.
I like your ideas here. Look at the connections between the feedback given and the task itself. For an easy task, being praised (given positive reinforcement) feels like a mismatch, because the task was easy.
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for the intelligence/effort issue, but it brings in the idea of attribution--pay attention to that in next week's reading. If you praise 'intelligence', which most people think of as an innate stable quality, then there isn't a behavior to increase. The feedback doesn't really do much, because the child isn't in control of this concept (as most people think of it). If you praise something uncontrollable, the child might feel that they're intelligent, so they don't REALLY need to put effort into their work--they're intelligent either way. If they believe they aren't intelligent (and attribute intelligence as being uncontrollable) then they will feel very helpless and may turn to strategies of 'not looking stupid'.
It's a very different situation if you praise effort (a controllable behavior), and you can imagine why.