(Extracted from Raising the Best Kids You Can by Ben Carlson)
In his book, Sapolsky references the work of psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller. In the late-1990s, they worked with a classroom of 5th graders to determine how kids react to different forms of praise.
After giving the children a moderately difficult set of test questions to answer, the researchers offered two forms of feedback:
- “What a great score, you must be so smart!”
- “What a great score, you must have worked so hard!”
Next they gave the children a much harder problem set where they were sure to get lower scores.
Those kids who were praised for being smart in the first set of problems looked at the ensuing lower score as a failure. But those kids who were praised for their hard work in the first set of problems looked at the low score as an opportunity to get better.
The children who were praised for effort worked harder to improve on their next assignment and did even better than the group who was praised for their smarts. So praising kids for their effort helps them value the process of learning more than the grade while praising kids for how smart they are could backfire because it could actually deter them from working hard.