Tuesday, May 18, 1999
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

Praise Effort, Not Intelligence

Your 3-year-old daughter fits the last piece into a 20-piece puzzle, and what do you tell her? That she’s the smartest little girl in the world, of course.

It’s the most natural thing in the world to tell your child how smart she is. All parents do it. (And some insufferable ones tell everybody who comes into sight.)

But as it turns out, this kind of praise may not be the most constructive you can give your child. It may even undermine her motivation to work hard and meet new challenges.

It is far better to praise for hard work. That is the conclusion of new research looking at children’s motivation, and many psychologists believe it may help explain why some intelligent kids never meet their potential.

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Columbia University, studied fifth-graders and kindergartners from diverse economic and social backgrounds from Indiana to New York. She gave them an easy pattern-recognition test, praising one group for its innate intelligence and another group for its good effort. The schoolchildren praised for intelligence “got these little proud smiles, but that was their high point,” said Dweck.

After failing a more difficult test, they tended to give up, lose pleasure in their work and show a general loss in confidence. Their intelligence was viewed as a fixed trait; once lost, they didn’t know how to get it back.

The Process of Learning

By comparison, the students who were praised for their hard efforts tended to focus on the process of learning. In the face of criticism, they adopted new strategies and consistently refused to take their failures personally.

“Children who are vulnerable are very focused on their intelligence,” concluded Dweck. “ ‘Am I smart? Am I not smart? Is this test going to make me look smart?’ They are enmeshed in it. Whereas, the kids who are really hardy don’t think of it that much. They see it as a set of skills that can be developed, but they don’t worry how it looks at any given moment.”

Cross-cultural studies reveal huge differences in the motivational factors that govern U.S. and Japanese students. Hazel Marcus, a psychologist at Stanford, has found that when U.S. students are told that they’ve performed well in a test, they are motivated to work harder. When they learn they’ve done poorly, they lose interest. Japanese students, on the other hand, respond in the opposite way. Those who are told they’ve done poorly work hard to improve themselves.

Mark Lepper, another Stanford psychologist, has spent 20 years studying motivation in children. He has looked at both intrinsic and extrinsic learningand concluded that a student’s motivation makes all the difference. An intrinsically motivated student who pursues an activity for its own sake ultimately works harder and reaches for higher challenges. The extrinsically motivated student who works for stickers, happy smiles or the ultimate reward—money—often puts forth the minimal amount of effort necessary to get the maximal reward.

‘Inherently Rewarding’

“With young children it’s just so obvious that the process of learning is inherently rewarding,” says Lepper. “No one has ever seen a 3-year-old with a motivational deficit. Parents are more likely to complain of their child being overly curious, always asking ‘why,’ exploring here and there. Yet, four or five years later, a substantial number of children are diagnosed as having ‘motivational problems.’

“When we get into school, because of the constraints of wanting to educate everybody we now have to teach everybody the same thing at the same time, and we have to do it on a schedule. That means that you’re not learning right at the point when you’re most excited, but because it’s the middle of March, you’re in second grade, and that’s when we study subtraction with borrowing.”

All too often, it is second grade when children get their first real taste of failure. Streamlined into reading groups with fuzzy-sounding names of birds and animals, the kids quickly figure out the score—who among them are good readers and who aren’t.

“Giving up is a long process,” says Lepper. “A lot of it depends on the child’s theory of success and failure. Do you believe it’s because you’re dumb and you’ll never be able to change? Or do you believe it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or have the right strategy?”

There’s a lesson in all this for parents and teachers, which is to teach children to focus on the process and to delight in challenges, what William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet, called “the fascination of what’s difficult.” And, of course, children need praise.

“But it needs to be sincere, not condescending,” says Karen Friedland-Brown, director of parent education at the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto. “Let’s say they’re trying to make their bed. Say, ‘I like your effort.’ Not ‘You did a beautiful job.’ Use as few words as possible; us parents tend to over-talk.”

Copyright 1999 San Jose Mercury News