Have you noticed that in our culture these days, everyone get a trophy? Kids are not told that failure is an option. Instead, they are given an award for the hardest worker or most determined. It turns out that this might not be the best approach…
Children may perform better in school if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, suggests research conducted at the University of Poitiers in France. In once experiment, for example, scientists gave 111 French 6th graders difficult anagrams that none of them could solve. One group of students was told that learning is difficult and failure is common, but practice will help. Children in a second group were only asked how they tried to solve the problems. Then, both groups were given a working memory test. The students who were told that learning is difficult performed significantly better on the follow-up test than the second group and a control group (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, online March 5)
