Are You Smart or Hardworking? How Praise Influences Children's Motivation

Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles—University of Louisville

Imagine teaching two children how to skate. It is a hard task for both of them, and they fall down frequently. After falling down for the first time, one child says that skating is too hard and wants to go home. The other child seems to enjoy the challenge and eagerly gets back up after falling down each time. Why do the children have such different attitudes about the same task? One reason may be that they have different mindsets or beliefs about the nature of their ability.

According to psychologist Carol Dweck, some people have a fixed mindset, and some people have a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence or abilities are fixed and cannot change. When these people face a challenge, like learning how to skate, they tend to believe that if a new skill does not come easily, then they are simply no good at it. They do not see their skills as capable of changing, and thus they decide that it’s useless to continue trying. People with a growth mindset have the opposite attitude. They believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, and they continue trying to improve even if they do not initially succeed.

How do these different mindsets develop? One factor that influences children’s persistence and motivation to succeed is the way their success is described by other people. Specifically, the kind of praise children receive from adults, such as parents and teachers, can have a powerful effect on their subsequent motivation to perform a challenging task.

This video demonstrates how to measure the effect of praise on children’s motivation based on the methods developed by Mueller and Dweck.¹

Recruit children ages 9 to 11. For the purposes of this demonstration, only one child is tested. Larger sample sizes (as in Mueller and Dweck’s study¹) are recommended when conducting any experiments.

Make sure the participants have normal hearing and vision.

1. Prepare the materials.

1. Obtain three sets of similar puzzles or problems with about 10 items per set. Two sets should be of moderate difficulty, and one set should be very difficu

Researchers tested 80 9- to 11-year-old children (n = 40 in each condition) and found that the type of praise children received had a significant effect on their performance. Both groups of children started out with similar performance on the initial puzzles, but the children who were praised for ability showed a significant decrease in their performance after failing at the more difficult puzzles. Children who were praised for effort showed an improvement in performance after the failure experience, suggesting th

The finding that a brief statement of praise from an experimenter has significant consequences for a child’s motivation to complete a challenging task has major implications for how parents and teachers talk to children. Although saying “You’re so smart” might sound like a good way to praise a child, these findings suggest that doing so fosters the development of a fixed mindset, which can be detrimental to children’s willingness to persist in challenging tasks. In order to foster the develo

1. Mueller, C.M., & Dweck, C.S. Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 75 (1), 33-52 (1998).