Failure to thrive

I've been reading Jonah Lehrer's excellent new book How We Decide, and this morning I turned up something that startled me but makes utter sense.

People who are praised for innate intelligence end up learning less and performing more poorly than those who are praised for their effort.

Lehrer describes the experiments of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist who gave hundreds of school children an easy test, told them their scores, and then gave each one sentence of praise. Half were told, "You must be really smart," and the other half were told, "You must have worked really hard."

Then all the children were given a choice to take a hard test or an easy one. Overwhelmingly, the children praised for their effort chose the harder test, while those who had been commended for their intelligence chose the easier one. And on a final test of the same difficulty as the intial one, the "hard workers" improved their scores by an average of 30 percent, while the "smart" kids' results actually dropped by nearly 20 percent.

Dweck wrote that praising children for their intelligence teaches them not to risk making mistakes; Lehrer points out that "it encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes." The most effective masters of any skill actively look for their mistakes, to train their brains to avoid them next time.

I encourage you to read the book; Lehrer explains the neurological reasons why lots of failure is essential to learning.

How many of our learners (and how many of us) don't reach the levels we could because we have been taught to avoid making errors? How can we set up learning situations to help failure-averse people, whose sense of self-worth may be tied up in making no mistakes, and therefore learning nothing?