Praising a child’s intelligence for a job well done may seem like a common and sincere action. We commonly think that this action is going to make children feel smart and in turn, motivate learning. However, studies have shown that praise for intelligence may have negative effects on children’s overall achievement. Students praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. In addition, those students praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work. This is an important study to show what motivational tactics work best for different students. These negative effects can happen when children believe the praise to be insincere or when it leads them to feel pressure to produce future good performance. A study was done that showed that children who hold performance goals are likely to sacrifice potentially valuable learning opportunities in order to get good grades now and to “seem smart.” This could have a negative effect into the future as the children are not learning the material and instead just want to get good grades on the assignments. The researchers in the article hypothesized that the children praised for ability (intelligence) and children praised for hard work when administered after success, would lead children to hold different goals for their achievement and have different responses when confronted with failure. They expected children praised for intelligence to show they had begun to see their performance as a reflection of their ability and work on tasks that would ensure good performance. They further hypothesized that praise for intelligence may influence children’s beliefs about and definitions of intelligence. In the study, 128 fifth graders, 70 girls and 58 boys, were selected. Of the participants, 49% were from one public elementary school in a small Midwestern town, and 51% were from two elementary schools in a large northeastern city. The mean age was 10.7, and standard deviation was 0.6. Fifty-one percent for Caucasian, 19% were African-American, and 31% were Hispanic. The children were asked to work on three sets of problems, each containing 10 Standard Progressive Matrices, and scores were based on the number of problems solved in each set. Achievements were measured after the first set of (success) matrices and received feedback. The measure was designed to contain a choice of tasks that embodied different goals and has been used successfully in previous studies. Three of the choices represented variation in performance goal: “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,””problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” and “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart.” The fourth choice “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart,” represented a learning goal. Three performance goal selections were used to offset the potential social desirability of a learning goal. After selections were made, the children were told their choices would be granted if there was extra time, so that children selecting different options would not differ in their expectations of the nature and difficulty of the subsequent tasks. After a second difficult trial, a series of questions were asked to probe their desire to persist on the problems, their enjoyment of the problems, their perception of the quality of their performance, and their attributions of poor performance. As for procedure, children were escorted from their usual classroom to an empty classroom, then introduced to a task, given a brief tutorial in one strategy for problem solving, and asked to work on the first set of 10 progressive matrices of moderate difficulty. They were told of a time limit, and after four minutes were told to stop working. The experimenter scored their solutions, and the children were given one of the three types of feedback that constituted the experimental manipulation. After the children were praised they were asked if they wanted to pursue perfroamcne or leaning goals. They were given four minutes to work on a more difficult set of problems and, after scoring them, the children were told they performed poorly on them. After receiving this feedback, the children were asked to rate their desire to persist on the problems, their enjoyment of the problems, the quality of their performance, and the failure attributions. Goal choice was clearly affected by the content of the praise. A chi-squared analysis revealed a significant difference in children’s choice of achievement goals after praise. Most children who received intelligence feedback chose performance goals (67%) whereas few of those that received effort feedback preferred this type of goal (8%). Those who received effort feedback chose learning goals (92%). The study showed that the researcher’s hypothesis was supported. Children who are praised for intelligence when they succeed are the ones least likely to attribute their performance to low effort. Children who received different types of feedback would prefer different goals types, as the researchers predicted in their hypothesis. Also, the study showed praise for intelligence does not teach them they are smart, but taught them to make inferences about their ability versus their effort in how well they perform. A weakness in the study could be sample size not being large enough or different types of goals not included in the study. Overall though, I believe the study to be solid and show that praise for intelligence could be detrimental to children’s overall achievement. The fact that the different groups of children from the different schools showed similar responses to praise for intelligence and praise for ability shows that regardless of ethnicity, the praise is going to affect the children the same way.

References
Mueller, C.M., & Dweck, C.S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33-52. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/209804614?accountid=27313