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Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick

“Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. “It’s a gift, you either have it or you don’t. And that it’s most indicative of your intelligence.” This attitude presents an especially sticky problem to educators working to boost girls’ interest and passion for science, technology, engineering and math – STEM subjects. For many boys, believing math is a fixed ability doesn’t hamper achievement — they just assume they have it, Dweck said. But girls don’t seem to possess that same confidence, and in their efforts to achieve perfection, Dweck’s research shows they shy away from subjects where they might fail.

“We have research showing that women who believe math is an acquired set of skills, not a gift you have or don’t have, fare very well,” Dweck said. “Even when they have a period of difficulty and even when they’re in an environment that they say is full of negative stereotyping.” This research suggests parents and educators should rethink what implicit and explicit messages are being sent to young girls about achievement.

"A first study of 357 children found that the lower a child’s self-esteem, the more the balance of praise tended to tip toward personal — intuitively, adults seem to want to bolster these children’s self-esteem and do so with encouraging words aimed at personal traits that seem lacking. In fact, kids with low self-esteem got more than twice as much person praise than kids with high self-esteem — 30 percent and 14 percent of total praise, respectively. But then a second study of 313 children found that this personal praise predisposed children with low self-esteem to feel even more ashamed following failure. In kids with high self-esteem? Person praise didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help either."

— Kids With Low Self-Esteem: The Parental Praise Paradox

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

— Bill Gates (via fraserbaker)

(Source: brainyquote.com)

"Irrespective of how well they had been doing in school, students were subsequently less successful at the tasks, and also reported less interest in those tasks, if they received a grade rather than narrative feedback. Other research has produced the same result: Grades almost always have a detrimental effect on how well students learn and how interested they are in the topic they’re learning. But because Ms. Butler had thought to include a third experimental condition—grades plus comments—she was able to document that the negative effects of grading, on both performance and interest, were not mitigated by the addition of a comment. In fact, with the task that required more original thinking, the students’ performance was highest with comments, lower with grades, and lowest of all with both. These differences were all statistically significant, and they applied to high- and low-achieving students alike."

— Grading & Commenting

Top 12 Ways to Increase Student Participation →

The best part of this article is that it’s really 3 ways to increase participation in 4 different scenarios. Those include:

1. The content is repetitive
2. The content is too hard
3. There’s too much information to present in too short a time
4. The lesson emphasize the teacher, not the students

What Drives College Students to Learn? →

A really fascinating lunchtime read.

Mazur grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer.

“When I was five years old I fell in love with the universe,” he says. “I tried to get my hands on to every accessible book on astronomy. I was so excited by the world of science.”

But when Mazur got to university, he hated the astronomy classes.

“It was all sitting in the lecture, and then scribbling down notes and cramming those notes and parroting them back on the exam,” he says. “Focusing on the details, focusing on memorizing and regurgitation, the whole beauty of astronomy was lost.”

Can Mobile Phones Help Teachers Manage Classroom Behavior? →

There may be a solution with the use of tech — at least that’s what ClassDojo founder Sam Chaudhary believes. His startup is working on a Web and mobile app that will allow teachers to quickly and easily track class behavior.

Those two things are key. Rather than filling out paperwork after a disruptive incident or trying to recall values to praise come report-card time when a child has no record of disruption, ClassDojo provides real-time feedback loops. ClassDojo hopes both teachers and students will benefit from this, and parents will eventually be able to tap into it, as well.

This is a pretty cool idea. I’d be curious to see how it plays out.

Hey High School (teacher/student) Tumblr…ers:

Can you think up a response for this student, and maybe share it with some other folks? http://world-shaker.tumblr.com/post/6218950328/hi-there-im-a-sophomore-in-high-school-and-ive-been

Hi imaginecalliefornia,

First, good for you for being so proactive with someone who you know needs help. I do have concerns about you “taking care” of him. As much as we try to help others, sometimes we end up creating dependent relationships in the process. It’s possible your friend may occasionally feel like he doesn’t have to stay on top of his homework or remember tests because he knows you’ll remind him. This isn’t your fault. It’s his responsibility. It’s just a side-effect of trying to help others.

Motivation can be one of the most maddening things in all of education. Because I work in higher education, the students I work with have shifting, and occasionally vastly different motivations than high school students (my students are mentally and physically entering Adulthood rather than growing through Adolescence).

Because of this, I’d like to invite some of the other educators on Tumblr, and even students around your age to hop into this Google Doc and share their responses with you. I can’t guarantee a huge turnout, but I’m hopeful you’ll get some good advice.

Either way, I’m always glad to hear that someone your age cares enough about someone else to try and make a difference in their life. You’re a good person, imaginecalliefornia.

"

In 1998, Carol Dweck and a colleague took four hundred fifth-graders and gave them a series of simple puzzles. Afterward, each of the students was given his or her score, plus something else: six words of praise. Half the students were praised for intelligence: “You must be smart at this!” The other half were praised for effort: “You must have worked really hard!”

After the first test, the students were given a choice of whether to take a hard or an easy test. A full two-thirds of the students praised for intelligence chose the easy task: they did not want to risk losing their “smart” label by potentially failing at the harder test. But 90 percent of the effort-praised group chose the tough test: they were not interested in success, but in exploring a potentially fruitful challenge. They wanted to prove just how hardworking they were.

Next, the students were given a test so tough that none of them succeeded. But once again, there was a dramatic difference between the ways they responded to failure. The group praised for effort persevered on the test far longer, enjoyed it far more, and did not suffer any loss in confidence.

Finally, the experiment came full circle, giving the students a chance to do a test of equal difficulty to the very first test. What happened? The group praised for intelligence showed a 20 percent decline in performance compared with the first test, even though it was no harder. But those in the effort-praised group increased their scores by 30 percent: failure had actually spurred them on.

"

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Bounce by Matthew Syed

Wow.

(via jodymichael)

3 Tips for Engaging and Motivating Students Using Technology in the Classroom →

CELL PHONE TESTS
One of the first things I did was to incorporate cell phone tests. These were daily one or two question quizzes about the content of lessons from the day before. Questions would be written on the board and students would text their answers to my cell phone. This took up about 2 minutes a day once we got into the habit and the kids understood the rules. The rules were quite simple.

It’s an interesting read. If you want to see those rules, you’ll have to click through.

Does anyone have some feedback they can share?

UPDATE: Some people are chiming in with great feedback via the Disqus Comments area.

Mount Olive Schools Ban the D - It’s C or Flunk →

As promised, I’m not going to send people to the New York Times and force them to sign up for an account to be spammed. Here’s the article in full:

August 7, 2010

By WINNIE HU

MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. — Who wants to pay for “D”-quality plumbing? Fly the skies with a “D”-rated pilot? Settle for a “D” restaurant?

Exactly.

The way the Mount Olive school district sees it, its students should not be getting by with D’s on their report cards, either. This fall, there will no longer be any D’s, only A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s.

“D’s are simply not useful in society,” said Larrie Reynolds, the Mount Olive superintendent, who led the campaign against D’s as a way to raise the bar and motivate students to work harder. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”

The no-D policy, which was adopted by the school board last week, has led to a flurry of Facebook messages from students calling it the worst idea ever, and has been debated on soccer fields and around swimming pools in this suburban township in northwestern New Jersey. Even some teachers have expressed concerns that it may result in more students failing.

“I really don’t like it,” said Chris Radler, 13, who is entering ninth grade; he said it was unfair and would increase the pressure on students. “If you’re a little bit less than a C, but not quite an F, you’re still going to fail. Some kids aren’t at that level yet. They aren’t able to get that upper grade.”

But parents like Christine Priest, a mother of six, applaud the new policy for reinforcing a message that they have long taught at home: D’s are not good enough. “With my kids, we always told them a D is an F,” she said. “D just wasn’t enough of an effort.”

Under the old system, students could pass with a 65 — 389 of the 1,500 students at Mount Olive High had a “D” on their final report cards in June — but now anything lower than a 70 will be considered failure.

While few high schools have banned D’s outright as Mount Olive has, some have sought to tamp down grade inflation by quietly tightening their standards over the years. Several New Jersey high schools, for instance, have raised the minimum for D’s to 70, which is traditionally the C-minus range, with anything below deemed an F.

Mount Olive, an above-average school in a middle-class community, is developing a support system to help students meet the tougher grading standard. When students receive a failing grade on a test, a paper or a homework assignment in the future, they will have three days to repeat the work for a C, and their parents will be notified by phone or e-mail.

Students who continue to fail will be placed on a “watch list” to receive extra-help classes, as well as tutoring from other students. If they need to make up a failed course, they will be given the option of attending an evening school, known as “Sunset Academy,” that will charge a fee of $150 per class.

The total cost of these support efforts to the district is expected to be less than $10,000, school officials said.

Max Werner, 17, an A-student whose father, Mark, is president of the school board, said he and his friends liked the no-D policy because no one should be satisfied with such a low mark. “People are going to have to try harder,” he said. “It’s not like a nice college is going to see all D’s on a report card and want to accept that student.”

Dr. Reynolds said he used a similar grading policy — “A, B, or do it over” — when teaching college classes in Wichita, Kan., in the late 1990s. About half of his students in those classes had to rewrite their initial papers, he recalled, but eventually nearly everyone was turning in work that merited an A or B. “I have never given less than a B,” he said.

In summer school last week, 79 Mount Olive High students were repeating classes they had failed during the year. Mark Fiedorczyk, the summer school principal, said he expected to see an increase next summer because of the no-D policy.

Still, Mr. Fiedorczyk, who teaches seventh-grade science during the year, said the higher standard was just what some students needed. In June, he handed out D’s to a half-dozen students, all of whom, he said, were capable of C’s if they had tried harder. Instead, they had skipped homework and projects, and showed up unprepared for tests.

“I have kids who walk the borderline,” he said. “They know it. They admit it. They calculate what they need to get the D.”

At which, another teacher joked: “Then they’ll turn around and say they can’t do math.”

For Aphrodite Georgakopoulos, 16, the no-D policy means she will have to work a lot harder to avoid summer school again. She is repeating world history and Algebra 2 after getting lazy about assignments or just giving up in frustration, she said.

“It’s not like I can’t do it; it’s just that I won’t push myself,” she said. “I don’t know why. I need someone to be constantly on top of me, making sure I do everything.”

Down the hallway, Sean Robinson, 17, who is retaking Spanish, said he hoped that students would feel better about themselves in a D-free school, and that Mount Olive’s higher standard would raise its profile in the region.

“Normally, I just wouldn’t try, but I feel like if I did badly, I’d bring down my school’s G.P.A.,” he said. “My mom will be happy.”

"Citing both worker morale and the potential to use the tools for work-related activities, Cisco recommends better security education and social media policies in the work place instead of technical restrictions that employees would likely route-around anyway."

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Ex. Act. Ly. This stuff isn’t going anywhere. If you look at a person’s time awake every day, they spend the majority of their time at work. What makes any business think their employees are drones who, for at least 8 hours a day, won’t want to connect with their friends and family?

If they want to block anything, block eBay. I could tell you stories.

To Block or Not to Block Facebook and Social Media in the Workplace