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I have been told that praising a kid for effort vs. results is much more important. As a child, I was told I was smart and basically tried to coast as much as

• sokoloff 9y ago
  Similar experience, but I blame it on my own never learning how to learn effectively (as it was too easy through high school). I doubt it was the wording of the praise, but rather the lack of my own effort and application in learning things that were hard for other students.
• Overtonwindow 9y ago
  I was the opposite. Good results were rare so a lot of focus was on praising my effort. That meant I put in enough effort to coast, having low confidence in my results. It's hard for me to learn new things now as well.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Basically, no matter what we do, our kids are screwed either way :/.
    • Overtonwindow 9y ago
      Point number 3 on my list of "why I'm never having kids". It really is a spin of the wheel as to where they'll land in life.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        What're the first two, if I may ask out of curiosity?
  • throwawayjava 9y ago
    I think the most effective approach is somewhere in the middle -- you have to praise successful efforts. The more crucial part is organizing the curriculum so that every student has enough opportunities to "win" that they maintain confidence, but "lose" often enough that they don't become complacent. That's hard enough to do in a 1:1 setting, let alone a 30:1 classroom. I think there's some benefit to 1:1 tutoring/individual enrichment any time a student isn't smack dab in the middle of the bell curve.
  • phkahler 9y ago
    I've take a slightly different approach. When my kid has success, I praise the effort put in to get there. This doesn't praise the kid directly (leading to inflated beliefs about how great they are) and it doesn't praise effort for it's own sake. It praises the kids ability to put in effort to get the results they want. I'm not saying it's right, or better, but like some of the other commenters here I've got my own issues in this area and it's my attempt to handle the next generation a little better. BTW to a lesser extent I apply this to myself now too.
• charlesdm 9y ago
  A bit of both is probably good. For example: in Belgium, in recent years a lot of kids are (often) given points for effort so they can pass a certain grade. More and more the case. I talked to a teacher friend about this, and while he thinks its great, I think it's ridiculous. Do we want a society of people who put in some effort yet achieve nothing? Now, not that I think the educational system shouldn't be flexible and account for the fact that not everyone has the same level of intelligence or ability (everyone is different + has different talents, which is great!), but you can end up with some weird situations. Add to that the fact that the people who become teachers are generally of quite low quality (very few bright minds end up teaching) and you can easily see the quality of education declining. While grades are to be looked at on a case by case basis (and I'm aware people don't often find their passions and talents until later in life), I don't believe that you should get (too much) points for effort. You don't get points in life for effort either.
  • rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    That's insane. When I "make an effort" to pay a parking ticket on time and I don't, nobody gives me a shiny sticker star - I have to pay double instead. EDIT: People, I said nothing about children paying parking tickets or about poor people. My comment is an example of a self-inflicted problem that is exacerbated by self-inflicted delay, to which the consequences must be borne by the individual as is the nature of life - NOT a dissertation on poverty. These distractions do little to serve the debate.
    • maxerickson 9y ago
      I got a parking ticket for parking on the wrong side of the street during plow season (even days one side, odd the other). I had habitually moved my car on the 31st-1st transition. The judge or magistrate reduced the fine by the maximum amount they could when I explained that I had made a simple error while trying to follow the parking rule.
      • rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
        You proactively took measures to address the ticket in a timely fashion, which is not at all what my comment meant to address. Good on you, though.
• Pigo 9y ago
  That's extremely self-aware, and honest of you to be able to admit.
• drawkbox 9y ago
  It is important to balance both but the single most important one is allowing kids to fail, and then teaching them how to improve on that or learn from that experience. The journey and the reward on completion are important, but the most important is teaching them improvement to prevent coasting. In life, success comes from many integration and market tests, tests can be failed but once you pass you have a solid release iteration and improvement, continuously build on that by comparing yourself to yourself via diffs at checkpoints.
• inZGBl 9y ago
  I think that's probably more personality than anything else. I was always told I was smart and was never motivated. Perfect example: I took the ACT only once because I scored a 30 and it wasn't worth it for me to try to improve that score. Meanwhile, all of my honors & AP class friends took it several times scoring 33s, 34s, & 35s. This was a direct result of my "intelligence complex" and yet I have no trouble learning new things. I actually get extremely bored if I'm not digging in depth into new subjects every 6-9 months. Speaks to why I have several unfinished websites because I wanted to learn a new framework, unused golf clubs, tons of cooking utensils but no food, etc. I love to learn, I just never learned how to be motivated or competitive or persistent.
  • subway 9y ago
    I also struggle in this manner. If I don't grok something, I'm intensely motivated to work on/with it until I do. If I'm not careful though, that motivation completely disappears the moment I achieve a sense of an understanding of the topic.
  • justherefortart 9y ago
    Being disciplined is what you never learned. It's hard to teach it to yourself (I'm the same way, so I don't mean it as a slight).
  • klnldknf 9y ago
    It's probably because the first 80% is really easy to learn so you get all the gratification of "being smart", without ever having to do anything difficult.
    • _exnk 9y ago
      It's actually because I tend to be very action-oriented so at some point I get fed up with all of the planning and have to dive in and do something. Then, at a certain point down the road, I realize that the resource requirements (typically time or money) to get to where I want to be are too high so I drop it. I actually get more frustration than gratification out of it.
  • 9y ago
• always_good 9y ago
  I see people say this on HN a lot. And even people saying they have the same behavior but with the opposite impetus, like one of my comment's siblings. I think it's more likely that praise had little to do with your behavior, and you would've been the same regardless. I think it's tempting to backsplain our behavior with things we happen to remember from our past. For example, pretty much everyone struggles with their own attention span and learning new things.
• pfarnsworth 9y ago
  I think it all depends on the person. Both my wife and I were labelled as "gifted". My wife scored 145 twice on the IQ test, so she's much smarter than me. We were both praised as smart throughout our childhood, but we were also both very competitive. We never had any problems with lacking motivation and working hard. Losing never discouraged us, because winning was always much more motivating. I was never tempted to cheat, mainly because I always felt that if I lost, I deserved the loss. To me, there's no sense in being competitive if you're going to fabricate your wins, but that's a moral system I developed on my own very young. My kids are a bit different. They're definitely much smarter than their peers, but I often see them giving up when they lose, when we plays games and such. I definitely stress to them the importance of never giving up, and the value of effort over natural skills and always trying hard. I tell them that just because they're smart doesn't mean that they will always win, and that people who work hard will always beat the lazy smart person. Also, never fear losing because winners always lose more because they're always competing, but it's the big wins that matter more than small losses. I hope they take this message to heart, because I have friends who fear failure and it's debilitating to them. Even the idea of applying for a new job is too much because they can't handle rejection, which I find extremely sad.
• eevilspock 9y ago
  Praising results regardless of effort is similar to praising innate ability. So it's in line with the gist of the article. In any case I’m totally unsurprised by this. Praising innate ability represents an entirely different value system from praising effort.
• Splines 9y ago
  > I have been told that praising a kid for effort vs. results is much more important. And yet, our work is completely the opposite. Your boss doesn't care how much effort it took you to do that thing, only that it got done. Parents inevitably take this approach at home as well. An A is an A is an A. Good marks are what we look for, and are a mental shortcut to know if your child is doing their work at school. But we see this can backfire, as children learn that getting all the answers right on a test are all that matters. Maybe instead our school system needs to instead evaluate relative performance, not absolute performance. A grade should say "Sally improved by 50% this term", and parents can praise that result. The tests that a child takes should adjust to take into account that child's proficiency, to ensure that child is always being challenged. Aside: Getting all the answers right on a test is also a poor signal - you're essentially clipping the measurement of a child's performance. Kids should be used to failure, and learning how to take on new challenges. Why not give a test where the expected mark is 50%?
  • darkengine 9y ago
    Measuring improvement is even easier to cheat. One merely has to purposefully give wrong answers in the early parts of the class, and then answer more earnestly in the latter half of the class.
    • Splines 9y ago
      You'd need to have continuous tracking of performance across grades. Low performance at the beginning of a school year would translate to a drop in progress compared to the end of the previous year. You could still game it by aiming for the average, but really the average is the expectation. And in a world where subject matter difficulty can scale with a child irrespective of the skill level of peers their age, getting an average result on a test is ok.
  • CptJamesCook 9y ago
    Boss here. I care a lot about how hard an employee is working.
• clairity 9y ago
  i disagree with this dichotomy. you shouldn't overpraise or underpraise, and you shouldn't simply prefer effort or results. when i coach kids in basketball, i like to praise "effectiveness", which is a combination of stamina (staying with a task, both physically and mentally) and decision-making (doing the best thing in the moment given your capabilities). these notions go beyond simple effort and results by weaving in underlying positive behaviors and sets the child up to succeed at their level, while also stretching them so they're never too complacent about their current accomplishments. it's a super-tricky balancing act, and i get it wrong all the time, but it's rewarding when you see a child grow without them even realizing what's going on.
• hdctambien 9y ago
  The idea is that if you are told "you got the answer, you must be smart", then your success and failure is innate to who you are. You don't have agency over it. If you are told "you got the answer, you must have worked hard", then you get to own your success and you learn that if you work hard, you can earn success.