Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Extrinsic Motivation Blog Prompt 2
Praise can de detrimental to students if they are praised by their succusses on easy tasks. This will lead children to think they are "dumb". Specifically, students should not be praised for their intelligence, because this will cause students to want to prove they are intelligent and become fearful of looking dumb. They will be more concerned with representing an image rather than actually learning. Praise should be saved for their performance and effort, because it will lead them to want to accomplish more challenging tasks.
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I think this is an interesting post. I agree with your statement about how praising effort will make students want to try harder and accomplish more difficult tasks. I am not sure if praising intelligence will really make children feel "dumb" though. I think that if you praise a child on their intelligence, they will feel smart, which will eventually make them try less because they will choose to do simpler tasks and assignments to ensure that they will continue to look smart to their peers and teacher.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your point about students trying to uphold his/her image of intelligence. I think this is 100% true, and it leads to students only completing tasks that they know they can do. If the task becomes to challenging they quit, because of a fear of looking dumb.
ReplyDeleteWhy else is it harmful to praise intelligence? What's the difference between intelligence and effort? Intelligence is usually thought of as something internal, stable, and uncontrollable. Praising it gives the student no power to change if it's uncontrollable (look at attribution theory from this week). Effort is something very concrete that the students can control.
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