A new study has discovered that children who are praised for being smart are more likely to cheat in exams.
Carol Dweck, who led the study, has spent 40 years studying the ‘growth mindset'. Carol states that celebrating a child’s efforts rather than their abilities is more beneficial because it pushes them more.
Dweck and her team found that children who understand that they can develop their intelligence will be better at dealing with setbacks in the future.
She believes using phrases like, “biology isn’t one of your best subjects yet”, will help children believe that intelligence isn’t a fixed thing, but is something they can work on and improve.
There is a lot of pressure on children to perform well in school, and children who achieve strong grades have a reputation to live up to. The study finds that they are interested in keeping up their good reputation and may resort to cheating to do so.
The authors of the study say, “We propose that telling children that they are smart may have the opposite effect by motivating them to cheat to appear smarter.”
Praising your children is a natural thing to do. Parents and teachers do it on a day to day basis, especially during their first few years in school.
Is giving pupils gold stars in class and praising their top score on a spelling test really damaging their development? Researchers believe ability praise makes, “a child more willing to cheat in order to do well.”
The researchers understand how easy it is to praise children, but they believe that it is having a negative impact on children’s moral domain.
The experts behind this study carried out an experiment to back up their findings. 300 children from Eastern China were asked to participate. Half of the children were aged three and the other half were aged five.
Some children were praised for their intelligence, others were praised for their performance and the rest did not receive any praise at all.
The researcher asked the group of children who were praised to promise not to cheat on the game they were taking part in.
The researcher then exited the room and whilst they were absent the children cheated by checking the answers that were left on a piece of paper on the table.
This experiment supports their theory that children who are praised are more likely to cheat than those who aren’t.
You can read the full study in Psychological Science.
