Wednesday, September 4, 2013

My daughter's good, but don't call her smart!

This story on NPR reminded me -- again -- of how much it bothers me when we call kids smart.  In fact, calling successful kids smart is one of the worst things we can do: to (and for) them, and to (and for) other kids.

Many years ago I decided to stop using the word "smart" to describe my students, on the grounds that the word "smart" is so imprecise, using it is just an excuse for sloppy thinking.  There are a bunch of different ways a student can be "smart":
  • Catches on to new ideas and techniques quickly.
  • Doesn't forget things he or she has learned, even a long time ago.
  • Anticipates consequences and implications of new ideas and issues.
  • Sees generalizations; synthesizes readily.
  • Sees new applications for already-learned facts and skills.
  • Makes few, if any, mistakes in applying already-learned knowledge and skills.
  • Generates new, unusual ideas.
  • Is intellectually playful: likes wordplay, quasi-argumentative banter, hypotheticals.
After a year or two I backed off, but I still use lists like this when I'm writing college and scholarship recommendations: it doesn't help my students if my praise is essentially meaningless.

The NPR story took a different tack.  It compared Western and Asian parents' comments to their children, both when their children are successful, and when their children are unsuccessful.  This ground has been trodden many times -- notably by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, in articles and in their awesome book Nurtureshock.  I'll summarize typical comments in the chart below:


Western Parent
Asian Parent
Successful Child
“You’re so smart!”
“You worked so hard!”
Unsuccessful Child
“I wasn’t good at math either!”
“You must work harder!”

There are two major takeaways from an educational-policy perspective:
  • Teaching kids that success is a result of being smart sets them up for failure.  When these kids encounter genuine struggle, they often conclude that they are simply not talented enough to be successful.
  • Teaching kids that success is a result of working hard sets them up for further success, because attributing their success to the only factor that an individual can control (as opposed to talent, luck, and ease of task).
But I'd add a third issue--one that I've encountered with my students and my own child, and especially with talented girls who work hard.  These students are proud of their hard work, and when someone says "You're so smart" or "You're a genius," they don't experience those comments as praise.  Instead, they feel that their hard work has been devalued, because they've just been told, "Look, you're not successful because of anything you chose to do -- you're successful because you were born that way."  (The variation on this that drives my daughter bananas is "Of course you're good at math--your dad's a math teacher"--which is why she never lets me actually teach her math.)

So telling successful kids they're smart is bad for at least five reasons:
  1. It tells successful kids that they shouldn't get credit for their success, because that success isn't due to anything they actually did. So it's insulting.
  2. It sets successful kids up for failure, because it doesn't give them anything to fall back on when they encounter challenging tasks.
  3. It tells unsuccessful kids that they can't do anything to become successful, because the successful kids are the ones who are already smart.  So it's implicitly insulting to unsuccessful kids:  you're not doing well because you're dumb.
  4. It sets unsuccessful kids up for continued failure, because--in this worldview--there's nothing they can do to become smarter.
  5. It's an inexcusably-sloppy way for a teacher to describe a student, because it doesn't say anything about what the student actually does.
So please do recognize your successful students' (and children's) achievements--just don't call them smart.

4 comments:

  1. My son runs into the same problem in middle school. He is constantly being introduced as "Dr. Lassak's son." I keep impressing upon them that he is his own person.

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  2. I appreciate the post and would like to add this summary of a study as well, strong corroboration for your ideas:

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070207090949.htm

    The gist is that kids perform much better if they are taught that intelligence is not static but can grow.

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  3. Well put. In addition to that, telling a student they are "smart" fails to identify additional areas in which they can grow. Our goal should be to help kids figure out that it is OK to be weak in one or more area, and just because you have a easy/hard time with a topic or skill it doesn't mean you are terminally Good/Bad At Math.

    I just found this poster recently, and I think it's a great summary of what we've been talking about, in a way that might be digestible by students:
    http://bowmandickson.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/fixedgrowth-copy.jpg

    (shamelessly cribbed from here: http://bowmandickson.com/2012/08/19/teaching-beliefs-in-poster-form/)

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  4. Thanks, everyone! Today's NYT has the following additional support from Po Bronson & Ashley Merriman (full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/opinion/losing-is-good-for-you.html?src=recg):

    "Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they’re talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.

    In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they’d made in their pictures."

    ReplyDelete