"the secret to raising smart kids"

I can't even keep up with all the links and book recommendations palisdesk & Liz Ditz have left! (Am currently searching for their posts on motivation. How is it that I have distinct memories of having recorded the URLs in my Scrivener program -- not only of recording the URLs, but of checking repeatedly to make sure I had recorded the URLs? If there's the faintest chance that my Scrivener program has gone buggy on me, that could be a very bad thing.)

When he was not quite into his teens, John Mighton Vic 7T8 read his older sister’s psychology textbook on gifted children and came to a crushing conclusion: his chances of being a genius were slim to none. He just didn’t have the spontaneous brilliance and long list of natural abilities apparently required of whiz kids. He was a child who read widely, voraciously and beyond his age range. He had believed that one day he would travel in time and write great literature. Yet this harsh encounter with the prevailing authorities on intelligence changed him, and it was years before he fully regained his confidence as a student. Fortunately, in the last two decades the playwright, mathematician, educator, social activist and philosopher has more than made up for any lost time.

Mighton says he was an “erratic student” right into his early undergraduate years at Vic. “I think I was subconsciously afraid of meeting my limitations, so sometimes I wouldn’t work very hard or would give up on things. I thought if you ever had to struggle at something you just didn’t have it in you.” His intellectual interests always ran deep and wide, however, covering everything from drama to science fiction. Studying philosophy at Vic seemed like the best choice, he says, because it allowed him to explore fundamental questions that sprung up in all his pursuits. Even so, he only began to get serious about his studies towards the end of his degree, thanks to what he calls “phenomenal professors” who engaged and challenged him.

While completing an MA in philosophy at McMaster University, Mighton read another book that changed his life – this time for the better. It was the collected letters of Sylvia Plath to her mother. “After reading her letters I realized that she taught herself to be a writer by sheer determination,” he says. “Nobody had ever told me that you could actually learn a craft, so it came as a real revelation.”

[snip]

But it wasn’t until after he had succeeded in playwriting that he felt ready to pursue his lifelong fascination with mathematics. His first step into the discipline was answering an ad seeking math tutors. He landed the job and was soon teaching himself long-forgotten math concepts the night before he had to teach them to his students. Many of the kids he tutored were far behind grade level and barely understood basic concepts when they arrived, but his careful instruction and consistent encouragement produced dramatic changes in their performance. He saw it as further proof that, instead of being innate and unchangeable, intelligence and ability are quite plastic.

The excitement of this discovery led Mighton to establish a not-for-profit organization called JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) in 1998.

[snip]

At its core, JUMP is about demystifying math and rebuilding confidence in kids. Mighton says the majority of JUMP students have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that they will never be good at math, and they have come to believe it. This, he says, is the dangerous power of the Myth of Ability. “JUMP starts by breaking down very basic concepts and giving kids lots of praise for the simplest accomplishments, because many of them have had their spirits broken by the system and need a sustained period of success. Children are naturally passionate about learning if you don’t make them feel awful and if they think they are meeting challenges.” Many JUMP students move up into academic streams at school and several have gone on to graduate studies. One even did a doctoral degree in math.

I have his book, but haven't read it (may have to move it up to the top of the heap). What I loved about Mighton, back when I first heard about him on the old site, is that he starts with fractions.

I like a math tutor with chops (homage to Carolyn).

and.... an aside: reading your big sister's psych textbook and concluding you're not a genius and can't be a writer strikes me as just the kind of boneheaded thing a gifted kid would do.

I say that with affection.


Carole Dweck on raising smart kids

I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change—a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

[snip]

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

[snip]

How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about math geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

My neighbor says psychologists used to believe that the most functional worldview was for a person to blame his failures on factors outside his control while taking credit for success. I'd forgotten that, but now that she's reminded me I believe I do recall Martin Seligman making this argument.

Given that context, Dweck's research is quite radical. She's saying it's just as bad to attribute your successes to innate ability as it is to blame your failures to lack of innate ability. You don't want to go around thinking you're smarter than everyone else.

I believe this absolutely. I was raised on a Midwest farmer ethic of hard work and no bragging; it was so out of bounds to be special in any way that we kids were directly told we weren't special on more than one occasion. We were expected to be hardworking, fun-loving, and uncomplaining.

That upbringing has stood me in good stead for lo these many years.


bonus points

homework and intelligence at 11D (thank you to Amy Pruss)

and

Practice Makes Perfect on the Blackboard (pdf file)