When Smart Kids Grow Up

[BridgeTheGap]

Were you one of those students who made schoolwork look easy, earning a galaxy of gold stars and an alphabet of A’s between your first morning of kindergarten and your graduation day? Did everyone gush over how smart you were?

If so, you might know the curse of the gifted child. An overload of affirmations can hamper the future success of bright kids, reports Heidi Grant Halvorson for Harvard Business Review. Students who receive praise for intellect rather than effort, she says, develop a belief that their abilities are innate and unchangeable. As adults, they lose confidence in trying to develop new, difficult skills. They get stuck. Halvorson writes:

People with above-average aptitudes—the ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished—often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do (particularly in Western cultures). Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable, and less confident, even when they should be the most confident people in the room.

In a study conducted by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller of Columbia University, fifth graders were evaluated to determine how different kinds of praise affected their performances. The students were given three sets of problems—the first relatively easy, the second nearly impossible, and the third simple. Dweck and Mueller found that offering the praise “You did really well. You must be really smart!” to one group resulted in a 25 percent drop in performance on the third set of problems, after they had failed the second set. Conversely, the group that received praise that focused on their effort (“You did really well. You must have worked really hard!”) improved their performance by 25 percent. The “smart” group became stymied, doubting their abilities, while the “hard-working” group persisted, feeling that if they tried hard enough, they would succeed.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/The-Sweet-Pursuit/When-Smart-Kids-Grow-Up.aspx#ixzz1flqthiFn

[saras]

1. The article says nothing about America's profound hatred of intelligence...

I would venture to suggest that, given the present condition of the country, "stupid crime" columns replacing ordinary crime reporting, and a third of Americans voting for immediate self-destruction, that what's going on is that the smart ones have a realistic, accurate sense of their competence in the REAL WORLD. And the majority of Americans are FAR too confident for their actual abilities, largely due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Stuff doesn't generally get done wrong because someone knows it's wrong and does it anyways, although that does happen. Most stuff gets done wrong because the person doing it genuinely doesn't know that there is a difference between their way and doing it correctly, let alone what that difference is.