It might seem counterintuitive, but if you want your kid to be better at math, don’t call him or her “smart.”
That’s the takeaway from a new study by the University of Georgia, which notes that complimenting your child’s intelligence only leads to frustrations with those fractions.
The researchers found that parents who link encouragement to their child’s personality — e.g., “you’re so smart” or “math isn’t your thing” — will only lead to a poorer performance.
Michael Barger, with the university’s Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, said of their study’s results, “Person-focused praise sounds good on its face, but ultimately, it might undermine students’ motivation if they run into challenges.”
He explains, “Because if you run into challenges after being told you’re so smart, you might think, ‘Maybe they were wrong.’ We also know that people tend to think about math as something that some people can do and others can’t, and that language is pretty common, whether it’s among parents or teachers, even with young kids.”
Those kinds of responses are rooted in the belief that somebody’s ability in math can’t change — you’re either “born with it” or your not — and that’s not true.
In fact, students who get the ol’ “You’ll get it, you’re smart” trope actually have been found to have more anxiety about the subject and have a worse performance on tests.
Instead of person-focused praise, the researchers advise using so-called “process responses,” such as “You worked hard” or “What might be useful next time you have a math test?”
Parents, too, need to be educated — or reeducated — to know that nobody is born with a math gene, Barger and his team concluded.