New York Magazine has an interesting article on the best way to use praise in education. Experiments show that praise can be an effective teaching technique, but interestingly, only praise for someone’s work ethic. Praise of someone’s intelligence can actually hurt performance.
[...] Via Ars Mathematica I found a long article in the New York Magazine about praise and self-esteem. The two-line conclusion is that praising children’s intelligence will only hurt them by making them complacent and causing them to view failures as embarrassments, while praising their effort will make them work harder. In addition, praise needs to be specific - e.g. “It’s good that you can concentrate for so long” - or else it will be perceived as disingenuous. Draw your own conclusions about education. This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Home» [...]
“Praise attitude, not ability” — this was one of the unspoken principles of work of the old Soviet system of mathematics circles, mathematics correspondence schools, mathematics competitions which led to highly selective physics/mathematics boarding schools, etc. The principle was especially important in the post selection environment, where a teacher had to deal with a class of highly able and confident (very frequently — aggressively confident) teenagers.
Shame upon me…. I’m sort of involved in education as I coach small kids the basics of maths. But I haven’t heard and what’s more - applied the principle of praising just effort, not intelligence. And I’ve always used to say “So clever you are”.
Thanks for useful information. The more you live - the more you learn…
Praise is two sides of one coin.If you use it to solidate the stimulus in the educational situation and the right response,it will help the learners to reach the further next right responce in their own .However,if you praise the doer not the doing ,you will lose both.