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     Vakkapodi Comedian Username: Vakkapodi Post Number: 1207 Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 124.125.106.240 Rating: N/A |
What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are âthe smart kids.â Thomasâs one of them, and he likes belonging. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that heâs smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didnât just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that heâs smart hasnât always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomasâs father noticed just the opposite. âThomas didnât want to try things he wouldnât be successful at,â his father says. âSome things came very quickly to him, but when they didnât, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, âIâm not good at this.âââ With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into twoâthings he was naturally good at and things he wasnât. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasnât very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldnât even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomasâs father tried to reason with him. âLook, just because youâre smart doesnât mean you donât have to put out some effort.â (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.) Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, itâs been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent. When parents praise their childrenâs intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think itâs important to tell their kids that theyâre smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short. But a growing body of researchâand a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school systemâstrongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of âsmartâ does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it. For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (sheâs now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal workâa series of experiments on 400 fifth-gradersâpaints the picture most clearly. Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzlesâpuzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, âYou must be smart at this.â Other students were praised for their effort: âYou must have worked really hard.â Why just a single line of praise? âWe wanted to see how sensitive children were,â Dweck explained. âWe had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.â Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that theyâd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweckâs team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The âsmartâ kids took the cop-out. Why did this happen? âWhen we praise children for their intelligence,â Dweck wrote in her study summary, âwe tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, donât risk making mistakes.â And thatâs what the fifth-graders had done: Theyâd chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed. In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the studyâs start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadnât focused hard enough on this test. âThey got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,â Dweck recalled. âMany of them remarked, unprovoked, âThis is my favorite test.âââ Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they werenât really smart at all. âJust watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.â Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweckâs researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first scoreâby about 30 percent. Those whoâd been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginningâby about 20 percent. Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. âEmphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,â she explains. âThey come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the childâs control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.â In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kidsâ reasoning goes; I donât need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatizedâitâs public proof that you canât cut it on your natural gifts. Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girlsâthe very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers werenât immune to the inverse power of praise. Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweckâs research on praise, and she flatly wasnât interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85 percent who think praising her childrenâs intelligence is important. Her kids are thriving, so sheâs proved that praise works in the real world. âI donât care what the experts say,â Jill says defiantly. âIâm living it.â Even those whoâve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary-school teacher with eleven yearsâ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweckâs research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, âI like how you keep trying.â She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, âYouâre good at math,â but sheâll never tell a child heâs bad at math. But thatâs at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her 8-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, âYouâre great. You did it. Youâre smart.â When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. âWhen I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny.â No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because theyâve seen Dweckâs theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve studentsâ math scores. Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. âEven as I was teaching these ideas,â Blackwell noted, âI would hear the students joking, calling one another âdummyâ or âstupid.âââ After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her studentsâ grades to see if it had any effect. It didnât take long. The teachersâwho hadnât known which students had been assigned to which workshopâcould pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the studentsâ longtime trend of decreasing math grades. The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores. âThese are very persuasive findings,â says Columbiaâs Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in childrenâs sensitivity to rejection. âThey show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works.â Downeyâs comment is typical of what other scholars in the field are saying. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, âCarol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results.â Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kidsâ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. Dweck and Blackwellâs work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movementâs key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everythingâfrom sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards. I am smart, the kidsâ reasoning goes; I donât need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatizedâitâs public proof that you canât cut it on your natural gifts. After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didnât improve grades or career achievement. It didnât even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were âthe biggest disappointment of my career.â Now heâs on Dweckâs side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parentsâ pride in their childrenâs achievements: Itâs so strong that âwhen they praise their kids, itâs not that far from praising themselves.â By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effectiveâa positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praiseâs efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equalâand, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.) Sincerity of praise is also crucial. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young childrenâunder the age of 7âtake praise at face value: Older children are just as suspicious of it as adults. Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyerâs findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did wellâitâs actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed itâs a teacherâs criticismânot praise at allâthat really conveys a positive belief in a studentâs aptitude. In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further. New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue for parents is one of credibility. âPraise is important, but not vacuous praise,â she says. âIt has to be based on a real thingâsome skill or talent they have.â Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well. Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and studentsâ âshorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.â Dweckâs research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concernâthey are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this. In one, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare. In another, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another schoolâtheyâll never meet these students and donât know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie. When students transition into junior high, some whoâd done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise theyâve been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recoveryâincreasing effortâthey view as just further proof of their failure. In interviews many confess they would âseriously consider cheating.â Students turn to cheating because they havenât developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a childâs failures and insists heâll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family canât acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes canât learn from them. My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. He seems supersensitive to the potential judgment of his peers. Luke justifies it by saying, âIâm shy,â but heâs not really shy. He has no fear of strange cities or talking to strangers, and at his school, he has sung in front of large audiences. Rather, Iâd say heâs proud and self-conscious. His school has simple uniforms (navy T-shirt, navy pants), and he loves that his choice of clothes canât be ridiculed, âbecause then theyâd be teasing themselves too.â After reading Carol Dweckâs research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was that the mind-set Dweck wants students to haveâa firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harderâsounds awfully clichéd: Try, try again. But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effortâinstead of simply giving upâis a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; itâs also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when thereâs a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, itâs telling the rest of the brain, âDonât stop trying. Thereâs dopa [the brainâs chemical reward for success] on the horizon.â While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all. What makes some people wired to have an active circuit? Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. âThe key is intermittent reinforcement,â says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. âA person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because theyâll quit when the rewards disappear.â That sold me. Iâd thought âpraise junkieâ was just an expressionâbut suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my sonâs brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward. What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal, each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didnât want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser. Then I tried to use the specific-type praise that Dweck recommends. I praised Luke, but I attempted to praise his âprocess.â This was easier said than done. What are the processes that go on in a 5-year-oldâs mind? In my impression, 80 percent of his brain processes lengthy scenarios for his action figures. But every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates, but heâs easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, âYou played great.â And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied. Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was. Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal âYouâre greatâIâm proud of youâ was a way I expressed unconditional love. Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our childrenâs lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we canât say during the dayâWe are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you. In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me. Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problemâit robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself. But what if he makes the wrong conclusion? Can I really leave this up to him, at his age? Iâm still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: âWhat happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?â âIt gets bigger, like a muscle,â he responded, having aced this one before. | ||
| Vakkapodi Comedian Username: Vakkapodi Post Number: 1206 Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 124.125.106.240 Rating: N/A |
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