It is much wiser, Dweck says, to praise children for work and persistence. (To understand this third group, think of the Puritans: They did not believe they had any control over whether they were among God’s elect, but they nonetheless searched endlessly for ways to display that they had been chosen, and they were terrified of any evidence that they were not.) Still others might care intensely about school but withdraw from difficult tasks or tie themselves in knots of perfectionism. Others conclude that the people who praise their intelligence are simply wrong, and decide that it isn’t worth investing effort in homework. Some students become lazy, figuring that their smarts will bail them out in a pinch. When young people’s sense of self-worth is bound up in the idea that they are smart-a quality they come to understand as a genetic blessing from the sky-at least three bad things can happen. Most famously, Dweck and her collaborators have demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence can backfire. Over the last two decades, Dweck has become one of the country’s best-known research psychologists by documenting the follies associated with thinking and talking about intelligence as a fixed trait. Dweck says that her graduate students here at Stanford University are hard-working, creative, and resilient in the face of failure.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |