Article About Learning From Mistakes

My brother shared this interesting article with me about how to encourage kids to learn from their mistakes. One of the ideas that really jumped out at me is that kids who were praised for their efforts were more successful than kids who were praised for being smart. From what I see in kids here at school, it seems like this could apply to so many areas of life, from academics to career preparedness, sports, hobbies, etc. Thought some of you might be interested! Here is a quote from the article:

"One group was routinely praised for 'being smart.' They tended to slip into a fixed mindset, assuming that mistakes were a sign of stupidity, that there was nothing redeeming about failure.

By contrast, students praised for their effort tended to pursue a growth model of learning. (Teaching kids about neural plasticity—how the brain changes in response to experience—can also induce this mindset.) They were much less scared of making mistakes and routinely transformed failure into success.

On a standardized test, those praised for effort scored 30% higher after a few months, while the children praised for their smarts saw their scores drop nearly 20%. The wrong mindset had made them regress.

The psychologist David Nussbaum has shown that whether we tend to learn from mistakes or brush them aside, the response is rooted in repairing our self-esteem. Failure is never fun, but success requires that we learn to fight through our frustration and find the upside of error."