Learning & Development: Praise - Good work?

What a brilliant painting', 'High five', 'Fantastic!', and 'Good sitting' are the types of phrases we are all familiar with wherever children are present. Praise, intended to reinforce good behaviour or boost self-esteem and motivation, flows freely in most early years settings. It is an integral feature of daily practice, with the implied understanding that it contributes to improving both behaviour and achievement. In all, it is generally taken for granted as a positive thing; everyone does it.

However, decades of research suggests that offering this type of praise to children is not necessarily beneficial to them and, moreover, it can actually be detrimental. It seems, then, that this notion of liberally giving praise needs to be seriously rethought. Practitioners must engage with the praise debate.

It is not by any means a new area of contention. As much as 80 years ago, in Nursery World, the early years pioneer Susan Isaacs took a stand on this issue and warned of the 'unwisdom' of verbal praise.

Writing as the agony aunt 'Ursula Wise', she answered a letter from 'Nannie' who was troubled that her charge 'loves to be flattered and praised too often'. Ursula Wise replies, 'I fully agree with your feelings about the unwisdom of constantly telling children how clever they are. Praise is very good for some children but it's a great pity to feed the child's appetite for it so much that she cannot be happy without constant flattery ... If she achieves something especially difficult with effort, then I would show my appreciation of that, but I would try to let the actual pleasure in the doing itself take the place of the verbal praise.'

More recently, the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz devoted a whole chapter to the problems of over-praising children in his best-selling book The Examined Life. Strikingly, he recounts collecting his daughter from nursery one day. He overhears a member of staff saying to her, 'You've drawn a beautiful tree. Well done.' Later that same week she praises her for another drawing: 'Wow, you really are an artist'. Grosz reveals, 'My heart sank. How could I explain to the nursery assistant that I would prefer it if she didn't praise my daughter?'

HARMLESS AND COMMONPLACE?

What is it that Grosz found problematic about this seemingly harmless and commonplace praise?

Well, he tells us that praise can be 'blunt and aggressive. Because it's saying: I don't want to engage with you as a person; I want to just praise you'. It seems that Grosz regards it as a short circuit: instead of careful listening, attention and engagement with the child, the nursery assistant just adorned her with praise.

Grosz's views resonate with the findings of researchers Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller, who have been investigating the effects of different sorts of praise for well over a decade. In The Perils and Promises of Praise, their findings suggest that children who are told how clever they are become less able to learn and may even lie about their achievements, compared to those children who are commended for their efforts alone. Dweck has found this holds true for boys and girls of all ages and from all socioeconomic classes.

The research involved taking children out of class to perform non-verbal IQ tests involving various puzzles, chosen to be easy enough for all children to do well. On finishing the test, each child was individually told their score and also given a brief line of praise. But the researchers had randomly divided them into two groups - one group were individually told, 'You must be smart at this', while the other group were told, 'You must have worked really hard'. In other words, each child in one group was praised for their intelligence: for the type of person they were. But in the other group, children were praised for their effort: for the type of processes they were involved in. All the children were given just a single line of praise, the aim being to see how sensitive children would be to this.

The children were then offered a choice for the second round of testing. They were told that they could do a test that was more difficult than the first one, but that they would learn a lot from doing it. Or they could do an easy test that was just like the first one. Of the group praised for their intelligence, the majority chose the easy test; of the group praised for their effort, 90 per cent chose the more challenging one. Dweck concludes that children are very sensitive to the type of praise they receive. If we focus on the type of person they are, telling them that they are clever, we are telling them 'that this is the name of the game. Look smart, don't risk making mistakes'.

In a further round of testing, the children were given a test that was too difficult for them. As expected, they nearly all failed. However, the group that had been praised on the grounds of effort assumed that it was due to a lack of focus on their part. They persevered at the difficult test and really got into trying out every possible solution.

On the other hand, the group that had been praised for their smartness concluded from their failure that actually they weren't smart at all. Some of this group went on to lie about their test results. Grosz comments on the power of Dweck's findings, saying: 'All it took to knock these youngsters' confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise'.

PERSON PRAISE

It seems, then, that from this research an important question for all practitioners is not so much whether we should we praise children, but how we should praise them. The sort of praise that makes a general comment about the child as a person - known as 'person praise' - can give the child a short-lived sense of pride, but has longer-term negative consequences.

Phrases such as, 'Good work', 'Great job' or 'Clever boy' do not provide any specific information. They give the child nothing to go on, in terms of how to move on and take what they are doing a bit further. Even more worryingly, these kinds of compliments can make children more afraid of messing up and less willing to work hard to acquire new skills. Children can become less adventurous with difficult challenges, more likely to cheat or give up, and less confident in their ability to be successful.

Dweck argues that this sort of praise should be avoided on the grounds that it reduces motivation to continue to learn.

Furthermore, when children are praised for something innate to them - like being 'clever' or 'good' - they can conclude that their ability to succeed depends on fixed attributes, rather than on things which they can change about themselves, like perseverance and effort.

PROCESS PRAISE

In contrast, praise that responds to the processes that the child is engaged in - known as 'process praise' - fosters motivation. It encourages children to be flexible, confront their weaknesses (without feeling that they are an innate failure) and to take on new challenges. Simple evaluation-free statements such as, 'You have used a lot of bright colours in your picture', 'You have drawn something very tall' and, even, 'You did it!' refer to the specific task in hand, in a simple way, with no implicit judgement. 'Process praise keeps students focused not on something called ability that they may or may not have and that magically creates success or failure but on processes they can all engage in to learn,' says Dweck.

Similarly, Grosz says the way to build confidence in children is quite simple. It is not by continually issuing praise: it is to listen to the child. In his book, he illustrates this by referring to Charlotte Stiglitz, mother of Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. She was his neighbour when he was a child, and a teacher of remedial reading. Grosz watched her working with a young boy who was drawing. When he stopped, Charlotte simply remarked, 'There's a lot of blue in your picture.' The child said, 'It's the pond near my grandmother's house'.

Grosz commends the way Stiglitz observed and listened, in order to be truly present with the boy. 'You can be indifferent through criticism ... or you can express indifference through praise', he concludes. 'The goal, which is very, very hard to do, is to listen to children'.

MORE INFORMATION

• The Examined Life: how we lose and find ourselves by S Grosz (2013)
• The Perils and Promises of Praise in Educational Leadership by C Dweck (2007).

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