Four accounts of how praise may impede performance: it signals low ability, makes people feel pressured, invites a low-risk strategy to avoid failure, and reduces interest in the task itself.
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS JUDGE a book by its cover, but you can sometimes feel justified in discarding one on the basis of its title. Anything called How to Motivate Your Work Force, Making People Productive,...
When we set children against one another in contests—from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science fairs (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting...
What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I’ll show, studies find that unco...
Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don't see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win...
There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer...
The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn't permissiveness, but the fear of permissiveness. We're so worried about spoiling kids that we often end up over controlling them.
So if pundits were throwing up their hands even during the Eisenhower era about schools on the decline and students who could barely read and write, the obvious question is this: When exactly was that...
Most children seem eager, even desperate, to please those in authority, reluctant to rock the boat even when the boat clearly needs rocking. In a way, an occasional roll-your-eyes story of excess in t...
Again, the most effective (and least destructive) way to help a child succeed—whether she’s writing or skiing, playing a trumpet or a computer game—is to do everything possible to help her fall in lov...
A willingness to question the way things are paradoxically affirms a vision of the way things ought to be.
A growing number of educational theorists over the last couple of decades have made the point that facts come and go, while what endures, what we really require, is the ability to look up facts, to in...
Малко противоположности в образованието са толкова силни и значими, както тази между отправянето на изисквания към учениците и инструктирането им какво могат и не могат да вършат, от една страна, и за...
We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about.
We accept without question that children have to memorize the state capitals even though they could look up that information whenever they need it. Like any other tool for facilitating the completion...
They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inocu...
We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those proble...
The more we try to measure, control, and pressure learning from without, the more we obstruct the tendencies of students to be actively involved and to participate in their own education. Not only doe...
My mother maintained a sense of loving connection with me even during our worst conflicts or When my dad disagrees with me, I know that he still loves me.13 So, how would you like your children to ans...
Most people who refer to an epidemic of permissive parenting just assume that this is true, that everyone knows it, and therefore that there's no need to substantiate that claim. My efforts to track d...