Chapter 10 page 213
Thus, teachers must make their recognition meaningful, or students will begin to discount this
recognition as meaningless. Teachers should criticize all students work honestly (and with kindness, of
course) so that students learn where they can improve. Now, teachers can and should praise improvement
(this will be discussed below). But teachers should not pretend that mediocre performance is excellent.
Students will either see through this as a sham, or they will get the wrong idea about what counts as
excellent work.
Vary the method of evaluation. By using different methods of evaluation, teachers provide greater
opportunities for success. Teachers shouldn’t use the same kind of test item all the time. By mixing
different kinds of exam questions, and by mixing exams with other kinds of assessments (various kinds of
homework, performances or presentations, projects, writing, etc.), teachers can give students who are
weaker at one type of assessment an opportunity to succeed at other types of assessment.
Provide recognition for effort and good strategy use rather than ability. Suppose that a teacher
says to a student, “Your paper is very clearly written. You’re really good at writing!” Is this a good thing to
say? Research by Mueller and Dweck (19xx), as well as by other researchers, strongly supports the
conclusions that statements such as this can be very harmful to students. The problem is this: When the
teacher says this, she is attributing success to ability. That’s fine as long as the student is succeeding. But
when teachers give feedback such as this, students come to believe that they are successful because they
have a lot of ability. But what happens when the child who has received this ability-based feedback
encounters a more difficult assignment and does more poorly? Because the student has come to believe that
her success is based on her ability, she will now believe that her failure is a result of lack of ability. She
will think she only has enough ability to do easy assignments, and she will quickly give up when she
encounters more difficult assignments. This is true even when the teacher doesn’t say anything about the
failure! The problem is that the ability-focused praise leads to a general belief that ability is what matters,
and then the child attributes failure to lack of ability, too.
Motivational researchers recommend avoiding ability-based recognition and making at least some
recognition based on effort. By saying to the young writer introduced in the previous paragraph, “Your
paper is very clearly written. You must have worked really hard on this paper,” the teacher communicates
that success is predicated on effort. The same research discussed above shows that when the student
encounters a more difficult writing assignment, she is much more likely to work at it persistently and
eventually achieve success.
Recognize improvement. Grade on individual progress and improvement as well as mastery.
As I noted earlier, students should not be told their work is excellent when it is not. That poses a problem,
though. How can you encourage students whose work is in fact mediocre? The solution is to recognize
improvement as well as mastery. You do not have to say that a composition is excellent when it is not, but
you can point out the many ways in which a student has made marked improvements. When you do this,
your recognition of improvement as a number of positive consequences. Students will continue to try to
make improvement, and they will begin to attribute their success to the specific things they are doing to
make these improvements.
If you grade partly on individual progress and improvement, then you give students an incentive to
work hard and make effort. One way to do this is give students’ opportunities to improve their
performance. Teachers might allow students to rewrite an essay in response to feedback. Another way is to
include in component of the grading that is explicitly focused on recognizing improvement.
Tie recognition to specific aspects of a child’s performance. Vague, global recognition and
feedback is less effective than highly specific recognition and feedback. Teachers will have a much greater