power of words

***
Luin jotain tosi mielenkiintoista Today's Parent lehdesta (Halloween 2007 issue) ja ajattelin jakaa sen taalla blogissa. Kiinnostava juttu kaikille joilla on lapsia. En jaksa kertoa siita omin sanoin joten tassa sana sanalta lehdesta:

***
WATCH WHAT YOU PRAISE

***
If your child does well on a test or scores a goal in a hockey game, of course you’re going to praise him – but if your focus is too often on his achievement or abilities, he may not get the right message. Why not? A fascinating experiment by Carol Dweck at Columbia University in New York shows what happens when kids are praised for either their efforts or their intelligence.
***
Dweck had a group of fifth-grade kids do a series of puzzles – puzzles easy enough that they could all do them well. When they were done, the kids were told either “You must be smart at this,” or “You must have worked really hard.”
***
The effects of this single comment were remarkable. In subsequent tests, the kids praised for their effort chose to tackle a harder set of puzzles rather than another easy set. When given a task that was two years beyond their grade level, they worked hard and enjoyed the challenge, even when they didn’t succeed. And in a final test at the same level as the first, they improved score by 30 percent.
***
What about the kids who were told they were smart? They declined to take the harder test, choosing instead the easy test that guaranteed them a good score. They became discouraged and upset during the too-hard test, and when retested at the original level, their score declined by 20 percent.

***

Dweck’s conclusion: “When we praise kids for their intelligence, we tell them this is the name of the game. Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to failure.” By contrast, she says, “emphasizing effort gives a child a variable they can control.”

***

Picture: Kellyrae Roberts.