Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Research on how NOT to praise your gifted child

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she�s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work�a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders�paints the picture most clearly.



Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles�puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, �You must be smart at this.� Other students were praised for their effort: �You must have worked really hard.�