The secret of educating smart children (part 1)
Tip: Do not tell your children that they are smart. Research over three decades has told us that focusing on effort, rather than opportunity or intelligence, is the key to success in school and life.
Translation of an article in Scientific American
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Being a brilliant student, Jonathan was no problem in elementary school. He easily coped with tasks and got the top five behind the top five. Jonathan wondered why some of his classmates had to try a lot more, and his parents told him that he had a special gift. In seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework and prepare for tests. Because of this, his grades rapidly deteriorated. His parents tried to keep his faith in himself, convincing him that he was very smart. But their attempts could not motivate Jonathan (in fact, he is a collective image, drawn from several children). He went on to say that school assignments are boring and meaningless.
Our society worships talent, and many imply that excellence in intelligence and capabilities — along with confidence in this excellence — is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than thirty years of research by scientists leads to the conclusion that excessive attention to intelligence or talent develops in people the fear of failure, the fear of difficult tasks and the reluctance to get rid of their shortcomings.
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All of this leads to the emergence of children like Jonathan, easily coping with elementary classes with the dangerous notion that unrestrained academic success is a consequence of their particular mind or gift. Such children secretly believe that intelligence is innate and constant, and therefore it seems less important to make efforts to learn, than to be (or seem) intelligent. And this leads to a loss of self-confidence and motivation when work ceases to be easy for them.
Praising the innate abilities of children, as Jonathan’s parents did, strengthens their belief in the constancy of intelligence. This can lead to the fact that in private life and in work a person will not use his potential. On the other hand, our studies show that when people are taught to constantly grow over themselves, they focus on efforts, not on intelligence or talent, it helps them to achieve more in school and in life.
A good chance to lose
I first began to explore the foundations of human motivation, and how people continue to try after failing as a psychology student at Yale University in the 60s. Animal experiments conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman, Stephen Mayer and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania have shown that after repeated failures, most animals believe that the situation is hopeless and out of their control. Scientists have observed that after such a conclusion, the animal often remains inactive, even when it can affect events - a condition that they called helpless.
People can learn helplessness, but not everyone reacts to failure in this way. I asked the question: “Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, while others, less experienced and knowledgeable, continue to try and learn?” One of the answers, as I soon found out, is that people see the reasons for their failures differently.
In particular, if we see the cause of poor performance in lack of capacity, this weakens the motivation more than blaming the lack of effort. In 1972, when I convinced a group of junior and middle schoolchildren who showed helpless behavior at school that lack of effort, not opportunity, led to errors in mathematical problems, children learned to keep trying when tasks became more difficult. They solved a lot of problems, despite their complexity. Another group of helpless children, who were simply rewarded for the successful solution of simple problems, could not better solve complex mathematical problems. These experiments were the first signal that attention to effort can eliminate helplessness and lead to success.
Subsequent studies have shown that the most persistent students are not lost in thinking about their failures, but they think of mistakes as problems that need to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 70s, together with my student Carol Diener, we asked 60 fifth-graders to speak out loud their thoughts when solving very complex problems of pattern recognition. Some students reacted to mistakes by standing up in a defensive position, denigrating their skills with comments like “I never knew how to memorize well”, and their strategies for solving problems lost their power.
Others at the same time focused on correcting mistakes and honing skills. The student advised himself: "I need to slow down and try to figure it out." Two schoolchildren behaved especially inspiringly. One, at the moment of difficulty, lifted himself in a chair, rubbed his palms, licked his lips, and said, “I love complexity!”. Another at such moments looked at the experimenter and approved approvingly, “I hoped it would be instructive!”. As expected, the students with such a tendency performed better than their comrades.
Two views on intelligence
A few years later, I developed a more extensive theory about the differences between the two main classes of students - helpless versus those oriented towards improvement. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures in different ways, but also believe in different “theories” of intelligence. Helpless people believe that intelligence is a permanent property of a person: you have a certain amount of intelligence, that's all. I call this the “installation of permanence”. Mistakes destroy the self-confidence of such people, because they explain mistakes by a lack of opportunities that they cannot compensate for. They avoid complexity, because then they make more mistakes and look less clever. Like Jonathan, these children avoid the effort because they are convinced that having to work means that they are stupid.
Children with an attitude toward perfection, on the contrary, think that the intellect is malleable and can be improved through study and hard work. First of all, they want to learn. After all, if you believe that you can improve your intellect, you want to do just that. Since mistakes are due to lack of effort, not ability, they can be corrected with a lot of effort. Difficulties are energizing, not intimidating: they become learning opportunities. We predicted that students with the “attitude to perfection” achieve great academic success and, most likely, overtake the rest.
We tested these assumptions in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blequel from Columbia University and Kali Tresnievski from Stanford together with me observed 373 students for 2 years during the transition from elementary school to secondary school when assignments become more difficult and grades more severe in order to determine the effect of their attitudes on math grades. At the beginning of the seventh grade, we identified the students' attitudes by checking their agreement with statements like “Your intellect is a feature that you cannot change.” Then we identified their beliefs about other aspects of the educational process and began to observe what happened to their grades.
As we predicted, students with a focus on improvement felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they respected hard work, considering that great efforts in one direction lead to improved skills in this area. They understood that even geniuses have to work a lot to achieve a lot. Faced with an obstacle in the form of a bad mark for a test, such students said that they would study harder or try another way to study the material.
Permanent students, however, tried to look smart and did not put much effort into their studies. They had a negative attitude towards making efforts, because they believed that hard work is a sign of weak abilities. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence does not need to work hard to achieve much. By attributing a bad grade to their abilities, these students said they would study less in the future, try to avoid this subject in the future, and try to write off on future tests.
Such differences in worldviews greatly influenced the work results. At the beginning of high school, the results of tests in mathematics among students with a setting for improvement were comparable with the assessments of students with a setting of constancy. But with the increasing complexity of tasks, the installation for improvement allowed for greater persistence. As a result, the assessment of such students became better than the others, by the end of the first semester - and the gap between the two groups increased steadily over the course of two years.
Together with the Colombian psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a similar relationship between attitudes and achievements in a study in 2003 of 128 Colombian first-year students at a medical college who attended general chemistry courses. Although all students cared about their grades, more was achieved by those who considered learning important, and not those to whom it was more important to show their knowledge of chemistry. The emphasis on learning strategies, effort and perseverance for these students paid off.
The second, last, part - the secrets of raising children, focused on self-improvement, should be!
Translation of an article in Scientific American
-
Being a brilliant student, Jonathan was no problem in elementary school. He easily coped with tasks and got the top five behind the top five. Jonathan wondered why some of his classmates had to try a lot more, and his parents told him that he had a special gift. In seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework and prepare for tests. Because of this, his grades rapidly deteriorated. His parents tried to keep his faith in himself, convincing him that he was very smart. But their attempts could not motivate Jonathan (in fact, he is a collective image, drawn from several children). He went on to say that school assignments are boring and meaningless.
Our society worships talent, and many imply that excellence in intelligence and capabilities — along with confidence in this excellence — is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than thirty years of research by scientists leads to the conclusion that excessive attention to intelligence or talent develops in people the fear of failure, the fear of difficult tasks and the reluctance to get rid of their shortcomings.
')
All of this leads to the emergence of children like Jonathan, easily coping with elementary classes with the dangerous notion that unrestrained academic success is a consequence of their particular mind or gift. Such children secretly believe that intelligence is innate and constant, and therefore it seems less important to make efforts to learn, than to be (or seem) intelligent. And this leads to a loss of self-confidence and motivation when work ceases to be easy for them.
Praising the innate abilities of children, as Jonathan’s parents did, strengthens their belief in the constancy of intelligence. This can lead to the fact that in private life and in work a person will not use his potential. On the other hand, our studies show that when people are taught to constantly grow over themselves, they focus on efforts, not on intelligence or talent, it helps them to achieve more in school and in life.
A good chance to lose
I first began to explore the foundations of human motivation, and how people continue to try after failing as a psychology student at Yale University in the 60s. Animal experiments conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman, Stephen Mayer and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania have shown that after repeated failures, most animals believe that the situation is hopeless and out of their control. Scientists have observed that after such a conclusion, the animal often remains inactive, even when it can affect events - a condition that they called helpless.
People can learn helplessness, but not everyone reacts to failure in this way. I asked the question: “Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, while others, less experienced and knowledgeable, continue to try and learn?” One of the answers, as I soon found out, is that people see the reasons for their failures differently.
In particular, if we see the cause of poor performance in lack of capacity, this weakens the motivation more than blaming the lack of effort. In 1972, when I convinced a group of junior and middle schoolchildren who showed helpless behavior at school that lack of effort, not opportunity, led to errors in mathematical problems, children learned to keep trying when tasks became more difficult. They solved a lot of problems, despite their complexity. Another group of helpless children, who were simply rewarded for the successful solution of simple problems, could not better solve complex mathematical problems. These experiments were the first signal that attention to effort can eliminate helplessness and lead to success.
Subsequent studies have shown that the most persistent students are not lost in thinking about their failures, but they think of mistakes as problems that need to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 70s, together with my student Carol Diener, we asked 60 fifth-graders to speak out loud their thoughts when solving very complex problems of pattern recognition. Some students reacted to mistakes by standing up in a defensive position, denigrating their skills with comments like “I never knew how to memorize well”, and their strategies for solving problems lost their power.
Others at the same time focused on correcting mistakes and honing skills. The student advised himself: "I need to slow down and try to figure it out." Two schoolchildren behaved especially inspiringly. One, at the moment of difficulty, lifted himself in a chair, rubbed his palms, licked his lips, and said, “I love complexity!”. Another at such moments looked at the experimenter and approved approvingly, “I hoped it would be instructive!”. As expected, the students with such a tendency performed better than their comrades.
Two views on intelligence
A few years later, I developed a more extensive theory about the differences between the two main classes of students - helpless versus those oriented towards improvement. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures in different ways, but also believe in different “theories” of intelligence. Helpless people believe that intelligence is a permanent property of a person: you have a certain amount of intelligence, that's all. I call this the “installation of permanence”. Mistakes destroy the self-confidence of such people, because they explain mistakes by a lack of opportunities that they cannot compensate for. They avoid complexity, because then they make more mistakes and look less clever. Like Jonathan, these children avoid the effort because they are convinced that having to work means that they are stupid.
Children with an attitude toward perfection, on the contrary, think that the intellect is malleable and can be improved through study and hard work. First of all, they want to learn. After all, if you believe that you can improve your intellect, you want to do just that. Since mistakes are due to lack of effort, not ability, they can be corrected with a lot of effort. Difficulties are energizing, not intimidating: they become learning opportunities. We predicted that students with the “attitude to perfection” achieve great academic success and, most likely, overtake the rest.
We tested these assumptions in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blequel from Columbia University and Kali Tresnievski from Stanford together with me observed 373 students for 2 years during the transition from elementary school to secondary school when assignments become more difficult and grades more severe in order to determine the effect of their attitudes on math grades. At the beginning of the seventh grade, we identified the students' attitudes by checking their agreement with statements like “Your intellect is a feature that you cannot change.” Then we identified their beliefs about other aspects of the educational process and began to observe what happened to their grades.
As we predicted, students with a focus on improvement felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they respected hard work, considering that great efforts in one direction lead to improved skills in this area. They understood that even geniuses have to work a lot to achieve a lot. Faced with an obstacle in the form of a bad mark for a test, such students said that they would study harder or try another way to study the material.
Permanent students, however, tried to look smart and did not put much effort into their studies. They had a negative attitude towards making efforts, because they believed that hard work is a sign of weak abilities. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence does not need to work hard to achieve much. By attributing a bad grade to their abilities, these students said they would study less in the future, try to avoid this subject in the future, and try to write off on future tests.
Such differences in worldviews greatly influenced the work results. At the beginning of high school, the results of tests in mathematics among students with a setting for improvement were comparable with the assessments of students with a setting of constancy. But with the increasing complexity of tasks, the installation for improvement allowed for greater persistence. As a result, the assessment of such students became better than the others, by the end of the first semester - and the gap between the two groups increased steadily over the course of two years.
Together with the Colombian psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a similar relationship between attitudes and achievements in a study in 2003 of 128 Colombian first-year students at a medical college who attended general chemistry courses. Although all students cared about their grades, more was achieved by those who considered learning important, and not those to whom it was more important to show their knowledge of chemistry. The emphasis on learning strategies, effort and perseverance for these students paid off.
The second, last, part - the secrets of raising children, focused on self-improvement, should be!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/18725/
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