Bringing up the children. can we just shift from praise for achievement, effort,To, a learning reaction...It helps.... 01-010

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point.

It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory.
Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable.

But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.

It seems the growth mindset has run amok. Kids are being offered empty praise for just trying. Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.

Teachers say they have a “growth mindset” because not to have one would be silly. But then they fail to teach in such a way that kids can actually develop growth mindset muscles. “It was never just effort in the abstract,” Dweck tells Quartz. “Some educators are using it as a consolation play, saying things like ‘I tell all my kids to try hard’ or ‘you can do anything if you try’.”
“That’s nagging, not a growth mindset,” she says.

The key to instilling a growth mindset is teaching kids that their brains are like muscles that can be strengthened through hard work and persistence. So rather than saying “Not everybody is a good at math. Just do your best,” a teacher or parent should say “When you learn how to do a new math problem, it grows your brain.” Or instead of saying “Maybe math is not one of your strengths,” a better approach is adding “yet” to the end of the sentence: “Maybe math is not one of your strengths yet.”

The exciting part of Dweck’s mindset research is that it shows intelligence is malleable and anyone can change their mindset. She did: growing up, she was seated by IQ in her classroom (at the front) and spent most of her time trying to look smart.

“I was very invested in being smart and thought to be smart was more important than accomplishing anything in life,” she says. But her research made her realize she could take some risks and push herself to reach her potential, or she could spend all her time trying to look smart.

She and other researchers are discovering new things about mindsets. Adults with growth mindsets don’t just innately pass those on to their kids, or students, she says, something they had assumed they would. She’s also noticed that people may have a growth mindset, but a trigger that transports them to a fixed-mindset mode. For example, criticism may make a person defensive and shut down how he or she approaches learning. It turns out all of us have a bit of both mindsets, and harnessing the growth one takes work.

Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.

In a follow-up, the kids who had more early process praise—relative to person praise—sought more challenges and did better in school. “The more they had a growth mindset in 2nd grade the better they did in 4th grade and the relationship was significant,” Dweck wrote in an email. “It’s powerful.”
Dweck was alerted to things going awry when a colleague in Australia reported seeing the growth mindset being misunderstood and poorly implemented. “When she put a label on it, I saw it everywhere,” Dweck recalls.

But it didn’t deflate her (how could it, with a growth mindset?). It energized her:

I know how powerful it can be when implemented and understood correctly. Education can be very faddish but this is not a fad. It’s a basic scientific finding, I want it to be part of what we know and what we use.

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Layers of Motivation 01-22

Layers of Motivation

The more I consider motivation, the more I realise it is one of those things we

 in gamification use as a catch all. It’s a bit like how we treat the term “game 

mechanics” and, well, gamification!

Generally speaking, you will hear the terms intrinsic and extrinsic when motivation 

is spoken about. You will hear Deci & Ryan, Dan Pink, Maslow and more spoken 

about. However, when it comes down to it our argument is always the same. 

Intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic rewards. At times you will also 

hear a futher comment that a balance of extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation 

will yield the best results.

I myself bang on about RAMP; relatedness, autonomy, mastery and purpose. I 

talk about supporting these motivators with well planned and thought out extrinsic 

rewards and nudges. However, It seems to me that motivation has several layers 

and we only seem to speak about one or two of them. There is a more 

fundamental and core level of motivation that we all seem to ignore. I have 

spoken about it before here, but I wanted to make my case more clearly!

Let’s think about your job for a moment. Most go to work for one reason, to earn 

money. Money leads to security. It provides you shelter, it keeps your family safe, 

it provides food for you all. Before money and jobs and the like, this was all much 

more primal. You secured your family by physically protecting them. You hunted 

for food and you built shelters. 

Now, this is all handled for most by getting money. 

We don’t need to hunt or build huts for ourselves, we buy all of those things. If we 

extrapolate that, and take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs again, we see 

the most core motivations for humans are physiological needs and safety / 

security.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Having just shown that in this day and age, money is what provides the majority 

of security (including food) for most, it stands to reason that money is actually 

now one of our most core needs. I am not talking about begin rich – rather having 

enough to guarantee physiological needs and safety.

Many people enjoy their job, which is great. But even those who say “I would 

work here if they didn’t pay me” are generally talking bollocks. You need to 

survive and in our world work gives you that opportunity.

Once these core needs and motivations are satisfied, then we can focus on the 

other more emotional motivations, which this is where RAMP starts to come in. 

Our need for relatedness, autonomy, mastery, purpose, status, friendship etc.

Finally we can look at the trivial things. More money than we need to survive, 

bonuses and other types of extrinsic rewards. In gamification things like points, 

badges, leaderboards, competitions, prices etc.

The Three Layers of Motivation

The question becomes, how can we benefit from this knowledge in gamification? 

The answer is, by understanding what people actually need. Forget motivation for 

a moment, and look at core needs. If a person feels they cannot support 

themselves and guarantee the security and safety of their family – no amount of 

emotional or trivial motivation is going to actually motivate them, at least not in 

they way you are probably hoping it will.

This is obviously focused on Enterprise gamification. It is not the job of an 

advertising company using gamification to sell a product, to ensure the core 

needs of their target audience. This is the job of the individual and their employer. 

However, if their target audience does not feel they have their core needs 

satisfied by work or other means, it is pretty unlikely that the adversing will work 

on them, gamified or otherwise!

In the enterprise, be aware that if your employees are struggling financially and it 

is perceived that you could improve this, gamification could seriously backfire. 

The money you spend on that, could be seen to be spent on improving the lives 

of the employees at a core level rather than a trivial one!

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