Effort-Focused Teacher Feedback
Praising students for innate intelligence signals that failure reflects an unchangeable lack of talent, causing students to avoid challenging tasks to protect their self-image.
Picture this
Imagine a coach praising a swimmer by saying "you are a natural fish" versus "your flip-turns improved because you practiced them twenty times." If the swimmer fails the next race, the first compliment makes them feel incompetent, while the second compliment reminds them that additional practice on flip-turns will restore performance.
What the evidence says
Over 95% of participating teachers agreed with the growth-oriented teaching philosophy and over 90% implemented the effort-praise feedback framework moderately or intensely in their classrooms.
- Who
- Teachers across 23 treatment state elementary schools in two cohorts in Istanbul, Turkey (Sample A: 15 schools; Sample B: 8 schools).
- How
- Seminar-based teacher training instructing educators to praise learning attitude and effort rather than innate smartness, evaluated via post-intervention teacher implementation surveys.
What to do
Train instructors to replace outcome-and-intelligence praise with specific feedback highlighting the direct link between student effort and skill improvement.
From the source
"Teachers were also encouraged not to praise a successful student in a way which would imply that the student possesses superior intelligence (in the innate sense of the word), but were rather advised to highlight the role of effort in the student's success."
Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit