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Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

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Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#21

Post by Roritharr »

Mahh wrote: post #15

I feel like reading this article may make me react in the same way that the sample groups of the tests did. Hopefully in the much greater long term, that'd be nice. Good thing I read it(maybe). I had noticed the same pattern in myself. My parents would tell me that I'm smart, and then I'd get pissed and frustrated at my math homework if I didn't understand the concepts within a grand total of 15 minutes. Then Discret…

That is exactly what happened to me, made cs at the university unbelievably hard...

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#22

Post by anateus »

_delirium wrote: post #16

These things seem to go in waves. In the 1990s, I remember the opposite worry, that a bunch of new educational theories had put too much emphasis on praising effort rather than results, the whole A-for-effort thing. It's interesting that the politics have shifted a bit, though. I remember the emphasize-effort view being associated with clearly "liberal", almost hippie approaches, that what's important is encouraging…

Emphasize effort doesn't mean emphasize effort that lead to bad results. That is, it's not "as long as you put in effort" (which is the approach you're talking about), it's that when there is success the thing that should be praised is the effort to reach that success.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#23

Post by _delirium »

naz wrote: post #20
_delirium wrote: post #16

These things seem to go in waves. In the 1990s, I remember the opposite worry, that a bunch of new educational theories had put too much emphasis on praising effort rather than results, the whole A-for-effort thing. It's interesting that the politics have shifted a bit, though. I remember the emphasize-effort view being associated with clearly "liberal", almost hippie approaches, that what's important is encouraging…

The idea is to take good results as evidence of effort.

Hmm, that one I could see more, but unless my schooling was very atypical, it often wasn't the case in K-12 that good results actually were evidence of effort. Would kids believe it if you told them?

If I remember, say, algebra class, the kids who did best were mostly kids who found algebra easy. Somehow it just made sense to them, and the concepts clicked with them as soon as they were introduced. If you praised them for putting in effort, would that be believable? Maybe it's different in classes which are heavy on memorization, but that was my experience in concept-heavy classes; the best students just got stuff instantly, and subjectively felt it to be nearly effortless.

Certainly in my own strengths/weaknesses, I felt that I put in the least effort in the classes I did best in. Where I put in more effort was stuff I wasn't as good at. Praising me for that might've been believable, but if someone praised me for putting in effort in the stuff I was really good at, my reaction would've been sort of incredulous, since I hadn't done so. Not consciously as "effort", anyway; though it's plausible there are things I did in my spare time as "fun" that shaped what I was good at (like puttering around with computers, and reading a lot of books).

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#24

Post by ojbyrne »

_delirium wrote: post #23
naz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to take good results as evidence of effort.

Hmm, that one I could see more, but unless my schooling was very atypical, it often wasn't the case in K-12 that good results actually were evidence of effort. Would kids believe it if you told them? If I remember, say, algebra class, the kids who did best were mostly kids who found algebra easy. Somehow it just made sense to them, and the concepts clicked with them as soon as they were introduced. If you praised the…

I'm having a hard time thinking of classes where memorization dominated "being good at." Even history, if it was taught as a bunch of meaningless dates, treaties and battle names, was still amenable to learning through outside reading, because if you found the right books, they'd make those dull meaningless facts memorable.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#25

Post by yummyfajitas »

kmfrk wrote: post #10
brg wrote: post #3

There's an excellent quote from the Korean file "My Sassy Girl" about this. To paraphrase, "Never tell a child he's smart, after a while he'll begin to believe it and start to get lazy."

It's such a shame that people who want to be popular define "smart as" smart = results/effort It gives them an incentive to slack, and while that may work in the lower tiers of the school system, they're going to hit a brick wall at some point, and for many, it will be too late for them to do anything to catch up. I also recall someone on Quora referring as the distorted picture in places like Stanford described as t…

Your equation is mathematically equivalent to:

    results = effort x smart
The problem is optimizing this equation for smart, rather than for results.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#26

Post by robryan »

Calling someone smart has little meaning, because it means different things in different contexts and one persons smart may not even be considered smart at all to others. A lot of it is age related to, being good at multiplication in the first grade is going to get you called smart, later in life it's just assumed.

Also as a related example people confuse memorization with smarts, here in Australia times tables are generally taught up to 12*12, if a kid if very fast at these but falls over once the number goes over 12 they have just put a lot of time into memorization without picking up the principles properly.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#27

Post by PaulBland »

When praise becomes the reward, the strategy is to do whatever it takes to get praise. When success is the reward, the strategy becomes learning how to succeed, which often means passing through failure. We all have an innate ability to find the success strategy. For example, video games have no mercy--the only way to succeed is to keep trying until you get better. And yet most kids will continue to play a new game until they improve because, in this case, learning is an adventure, its own reward. The best teachers seem to apply this to the classroom.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#29

Post by nostrademons »

ericd wrote: post #6

The real world doesn't care nearly as much about effort as it does about the end result, except as a mitigation for failure. Why effort and not .2 x effort + .8 x accomplishment?

You can control your effort directly. You can only control your accomplishment indirectly, through the effort you put in.

Re: Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts'

#30

Post by sliverstorm »

The article actually gets it wrong.

I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

No, I don't think that's it. At least for me, I have caught myself thinking many times "I'm not good at X, so odds are I won't be able to be one of the best at X, so it's not worth trying"

(My parents never praised smarts and neither did my teachers, but I unfortunately discovered far too early I could skate by in even the hardest classes with very little effort.)

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