Smart Praise For Students

Smart praise for students: how we commend undergraduates affects not only their attitudes but also their performance, by James M. Lang, explains a study that Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller did to observe the effects of two different types of praise. The study was done on 100 fifth graders. To begin all the students were given 10 math problems and told to solve them. Once they were all solved the teacher gave some students “effort praise” and other students “ability praise.” Effort praise is when somebody is praised for working really hard on a task, while ability praise is given in by commending somebody for their natural intelligence in order to accomplish a task. The students were then given 10 more math problems that were much more difficult than the ones originally given. Every student was then told that they performed …show more content…
Some students starting points will be far behind those of other students, but in this method it is important that teachers are not judging their students. The teachers need to provide activities and material that will provide a new skill for each student. This approach allows each student to adopt a growth mindset because the students at the bottom aren’t discouraged by never being able to meet the standards and the students at the top aren’t unmotivated because they are being challenged by their work. This form of assessment teaches students to value the learning process rather than the grade and/or praise they get. When the students value the process of learning they will want to master material and learn it for themselves, not for the positive reinforcement they get for accomplishing something. For them, the positive reinforcement is the fact that they put so much effort into learning something and the feeling that they accomplished