Starter Imagine - you did not do as well as you wanted to in a biology test, but your teacher praises you for working hard and trying your best. You feel more confident about your learning and work harder for your next test. You achieve a better mark on your second test and your teacher praises you for excellent effort. Discuss with the person next to you: Why did the teacher praise your effort? Would you rather be praised for the process you went through or your individual ability? why?

Key study: Gunderson et al. (2013) Parent Praise to 1- to 3-Year-Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later.

What you will learn Background to the study. Aims, procedure, results and conclusion. Strengths and weaknesses

Background to the study The way parents praise their young children impacts a child’s later ideas E.g. praising effort rather than ability leads to the idea (framework) that working hard can change achievements. Gunderson and her team researched this - how parents praised their children. They studied this in the home - a natural setting.

Background to the study Person and process praise. Parents can praise a child personally (person praise), they can praise a child’s behaviour (process praise).

Person praise Process praise Person praise Step 1 Person praise = the child thinks ability is fixed Step 2 Leads to fixed theory - entity theory/entity motivational framework. Process praise Person praise Step 3 The result is that children might not try hard on a task they think they are not good at.

Process praise Step 1 Process praise, which involves praising behaviour and effort. Step 2 This leads children to see a link between effort and success. Step 3 Ability is changeable, keep trying to do better - this is called incremental theory/incremental motivational framework.

https://www.mindsetkit.org/topics/praise-process-not-person

Aim The researchers wanted to know whether: Children are affected by different types of parent praise given in a natural setting. Parents give girls less process praise and more person praise than boys Parents’ use of process or person praise in early childhood influences the child’s view later on

Method Sample: 53 children from Chicago (29 boys, 24 girls) taken from a larger sample of 63 families who had been taking part in a study of language development Participants (children and parents) were visited at home every four months from when the child was 14 months old as part of the original study. This meant that the data gathered was double-blind as neither the families nor researcher or transcriber at the time were aware that their interactions would later be studied for praise.

Method and participants The researchers looked at parents’ use of praise at home when the children were 14 months old, 26 months old and 38 months old. Five years later the children’s ideas about behaviour were measured and related to the type of praise they had received. Researchers looked at a child’s gender and the influences of the type of praise on later ideas. 29 boys and 24 girls, with their caregivers took part in the study. 64% were white, 17% were African-American, 11% were Hispanic and 8% were from multiracial backgrounds.

Three types of praise Category Examples Process praise Emphasises the effort of the child ‘You must have tried hard’ ‘Good job drawing’ Person praise Implies a child has a fixed quality ‘Good girl’ ‘’You’re so smart’ Other praise Often general positive praise ‘Good’ ‘Wow!’

Procedure Parental praise patterns Neither those who were collecting the data nor the participants knew that praise was being studied. They thought the study was about language development. At each visit the participants were asked to ‘go about a typical day’ in the home. The caregiver-child interactions were videotaped in 90 minute sessions.

Procedure Children’s later beliefs At 7-8 years old the same children answered two questionnaires about what they thought led to a person’s intelligence and what led people to act morally (or not). Questions included 18 items covering children’s ideas - their motivational frameworks - about what causes intelligence and six items about their beliefs about what underpins ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions (socio-moral views)

Results On average 3% of all parental comments to the child were praise. Process praise was 18% of all praise and person praise was 16%. There were gender differences in process praise - 24.4% of praise for boys was process praise compared to 10.3% for girls The more process praise there is in early childhood, the more likely the children (when older) will believe that putting effort in is worthwhile.

Praise and gender Boys Girls See ability and behaviour as changeable (incremental theory). This suggests they get more process praise. Girls See ability and behaviour as fixed (entity theory). This suggests they get more person praise.

Results There is a relationship (correlation) between the parents praising what a child does (process praise) and the child’s framework when older (believing that effort is worthwhile). The correlation was 0.35 (a positive correlation). There was no relationship between parents giving person praise and children later showing an entity motivational framework (the correlation was -0.05, a negative correlation). Early person praise did not give fixed frameworks later in life.

Conclusions A clear relationship was found between parents’ use of process praise and a child’s later use of and incremental motivational framework (ability being changeable). However the study’s aims were only partially supported as no link was found between parental use of person praise and a entity motivational framework (ability is fixed). The researchers found that boys received more process praise than girls (boys were praised more for effort and strategy) so there are gender differences in the way each gender is praised. Also boys tended to have more incremental frameworks than girls, which fits with the findings of other studies that girls tend to attribute failure to ability more than boys do.

Evaluation: This study (which was done in a natural setting, in the child’s home) supports Dweck’s study (which was done in an experimental setting). Therefore findings from two different methods - experiment and observation - support one and another and the theory itself. The research was conducted using a double blind method - neither the researchers who videotaped and transcribed the data or the parents knew what the study was really about. This helped avoid bias when collecting data.

Evaluation: Participants in the study were deceived, they were told the study was about child development but in truth it was about types of praise and the effect this has on a child. This is an ethical problem. A debrief would be needed to attempt to deal with this ethical issue. Parents may have changed the way they behaved because they were being observed. They may have changed the way they praised their child because they were being watched. The data, therefore, might not be natural, and so may lack validity.

Task In pairs create a story board/comic strip on the key study.