[rkowalick]

I have been told that praising a kid for effort vs. results is much more important.

As a child, I was told I was smart and basically tried to coast as much as possible. I still have a lot of trouble learning how to do something new, especially because I have kind of internalized that I'm good at everything.

[charlesdm]

A bit of both is probably good.

For example: in Belgium, in recent years a lot of kids are (often) given points for effort so they can pass a certain grade. More and more the case. I talked to a teacher friend about this, and while he thinks its great, I think it's ridiculous. Do we want a society of people who put in some effort yet achieve nothing?

Now, not that I think the educational system shouldn't be flexible and account for the fact that not everyone has the same level of intelligence or ability (everyone is different + has different talents, which is great!), but you can end up with some weird situations. Add to that the fact that the people who become teachers are generally of quite low quality (very few bright minds end up teaching) and you can easily see the quality of education declining.

While grades are to be looked at on a case by case basis (and I'm aware people don't often find their passions and talents until later in life), I don't believe that you should get (too much) points for effort. You don't get points in life for effort either.

[bildung]

The point is people usually get better objective results if you praise their relative effort.

Employers are obviously interested in grades that reflect the objective skill level of the to-be-employed.

The problem is people subconsciously build up explanations for their observed performance. If a kid routinely has a hard time with maths, its more probable that they develop a causal model that puts themselves in a static role: "I'm just not good at maths". What inter-subjective grading does is strengthening this belief: Imagine this kid learning really hard for a test, then still getting a bad grade. Lesson learned: Effort makes no difference.

What you want school to archieve is the exact opposite. You want to build up a mental model where the personal effort is the differentiator between good and bad results: "I just didn't learn well enough" instead of "I'm just bad at maths."

Grading that way makes it hard to assess objective performance, but it enables the kid to get nearer to his/her optimal performance.

(The opposite is probably more fitting for HN: Kids who didn't develop this model in school because they were "just good in maths" often didn't learn to learn and later have a hard time in college and beyond. Me included :))

Ideally schools would allow for both: Relative grading all the way up to the last school year, then a final test assessing objective performance. That way you maximize the development of a mental model of self-efficiacy while also allowing employers and universities to decide wheter the person is good enough for the position in question.

(I'm an educational scientist by trade)

[xorcist]

> Employers are obviously interested in grades that reflect the objective skill level of the to-be-employed.

Employers are hardly interested in grades at all. Do you know anyone that does? Society uses grades as a selector for higher education pretty much exclusively. This is a goal for which we can objectively measure its relevance. I suspect there's a thing or two to learn from that.

[lotsofpulp]

Employers are interested in grades, just not directly. The higher education institutions from which they hire from are the proxy for grades. The target schools for attaining employment at certain firms and other graduate schools do the job of weeding out those with low SATs or grades or the wrong type of background.

An invididual's letter grades are not important, but selecting from a cohort of individuals that outperform others is important (also why it's important to be from that cohort). You're not aiming for every single hire to be successful (probably not practical or possible to invest enough resources to be able to evaluate that), but you can make the odds tilt in your favor.

[lagadu]

Pretty much my impression too. My CV doesn't list my grades and I never got a transcript of records from my university because I've never been asked for one, including in my first couple of jobs. Hell in fact I've never even had to prove to an employer that I finished my studies, it's pointless now that I'm an experienced professional in my mid-thirties but I feel that anyone could get away with it too.

[pc86]

If you're in the US, degree verification happens constantly but it's always in the back-end of HR. The folks that don't pass (or have a questionable degree from an institution that may or may not exist) are removed from the process without much fanfare.

[icebraining]

Relative grading all the way up to the last school year, then a final test assessing objective performance.

Couldn't the lack of absolute feedback lead to uncertainty and therefore overcompensation? I'm thinking of my school colleagues who were set on entering college courses with very high entrance requirements. Without a clear idea whether they were doing enough, I could see them absolutely burning out.

[evan_]

Objective score would obviously be a conponent, it's not like you wouldn't tell them what they got right/wrong

[nwah1]

In some classes, where grades can be determined purely subjectively, instructors can use effort-based logic as a guiding principle.

The problems, however, are multifold.

I remember a high school art class where I just had a complete writers-block - or maybe artists-block - and was not able to do much on a large pencil drawing while sitting in class. I just couldn't work while seated in rows with everyone else sketching away, for some reason.

But as the deadline came due, I sat down at home and sketched for 16 hours straight, barely even stopping for eating. It required so much shading that my hand hurt like never before. It ended up looking quite good, from what everyone told me.

When the grades came back, I had a D, while others who had much worse looking and mostly unshaded drawings received Bs. Naturally, I asked about this, and I was told that I must not have put in much effort, because he didn't see me putting in effort.

My burning rage at this event and the entire logic behind it all has been permanently seared into my memory.

[Noos]

Actually it's a good lesson I think.

You can't really sustain what you did long term. You have to learn how to draw in every situation over a longer period of time to do well. You can't binge draw like this over the long term and be healthy; you could very well have not been able to overcome the drawing by talent alone and have been unable to seek the teacher's help through technique.

Teachers don't just care about the result, they also want you to learn good process too.

[rleigh]

The same could also be said of the world of work.

I have to write code in an open plan office which I find uncomfortable, noisy, distracting and without any sense of personal space. I'm vastly more productive at home. But I can't mess around at work all day, and then do all my productive work in the evening; I have to force myself to get to it.

Unfortunately, employers as a whole would rather see the appearance of productive work rather than create an environment that fosters actual work. It's alleged that saving money is the reason, but I struggle to see how the huge waste of human capital makes any rational sense.

[conductr]

Seems like a decent life lesson though. I wonder how this would have played out if you communicated with your teacher. Either telling them you were having trouble being productive in class, or When you turned in your work by telling him how much work you put in at home.

It's important that you tell people how much effort you spend on things when they don't see it happen. It's true in so many ways; you learned it early.

Also I'd add that something like art class is particularly hard to grade because you don't want to let the naturally gifted coast through. You want to hold everyone to higher individual standards. The teacher may have thought this must have been easy for you and if you put in more effort it could have been way better. Not always right, but sounds like that was the info available to him.

[lagadu]

> you don't want to let the naturally gifted coast through.

As someone who isn't in the arts field at all, so please bear with my probable ignorance: why do you not want to let them coast through?

Each class has a set of requirements that need to be passed and the pupil's level of performance at it graded; if someone is gifted at it then they're already at a high performance level.

To put it in a way that's more related to me: I'm a software engineer and lets say that I decide to go take some first year software engineering classes again, particularly the ones related to learning how to program: I will blow through the classes in 1/5th of the time while playing a game on another monitor and still do very well. Shouldn't I get a high grade despite the fact that I put a lot more effort into my invasion of the Soviet Union while playing Japan on Hearts of Iron while I was also developing?

[TremendousJudge]

My guess is that kids are different than adults. You don't want kids sitting bored in class because it's easy for them. It's awful (speaking from experience here). They either turn inside and do nothing, or disturb the class. You don't want the smart kids to learn less, you want them to learn more

[charlesdm]

Making them work harder for the same grade doesn't mean they still won't be bored, though.

[nwah1]

This was the story of my entire educational career. The gifted underachiever who instructors took a special interest in.

However, teaching people life lessons in the form of a permanent black mark on their record isn't exactly for their own good. For better or worse, those high school grades do actually matter for college admittance.

Yet, maybe they did me a favor. I was able to underachieve to my heart's content at a college full of dummies. Who really needs a prestigious college anyhow.

[EGreg]

Might I suggest that, like Full Time Employment, the Classroom setting is trying to be too many things to too many people and is too one-size-fits-all?

Rather than make this a long comment, here is what I think should be done:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158

[spentrent]

The point is not to choose between praising for effort or praising for results. It is to praise for effort instead of results when the results are good.

[tertius]

Grades should be solely based on production. But intelligence without work is useless.

Effort should be praised, but not rewarded if it's result did not get anyone further than they were before.

Getting all B's is not a very good indicator of anything...

[charlesdm]

Right. Grades in itself are often also not a good metric. There are plenty of intelligent kids who just skate through school achieving acceptable yet not amazing results, and you have others who have to work really hard to achieve similar results.

[tertius]

I had a B average at school, no need to study except the day before.

This has caused some issues later in life...

[pc86]

My zero effort, A- average in HS pretty quickly became academic probation in college. It's unfortunately very common, and I was even warned about it before (and while) it was happening.

[pc86]

One thing I learned in college is that grades should be but are almost never an objective measure of how well someone understood the material covered.

[knappa]

> I talked to a teacher friend about this, and while he thinks its great, I think it's ridiculous.

It seems to me that having parents and teachers praise hard work are different things. Kids likely aren't looking for the same kind of emotional support from the two.

Relatedly, even evaluating the hardness of hard work would be difficult if you don't observe it. I've had (university) students occasionally tell me that they have spent implausibly long hours studying for my classes. Hey, maybe they aren't lying about the time spent, but my general suspicion is that "studying" consists of opening the textbook and placing it to the side while they play around on Facebook or some such nonsense.

[icebraining]

OTOH, if a kid makes a lot of effort and still fails, is the kid to blame or the teachers? Isn't their job (and of the parents, I suppose) to guide those efforts in a productive direction?

[charlesdm]

That's the question now, is it? It depends?

I had some horrible teachers in high school (one IT and physics teacher comes to mind). Most people flunked both subjects. I passed both, but only because I liked both subjects and had some affinity for them.

But he was definitely to blame: he understood the subject matter well, but was horrible at teaching and arrogant about it. I think they fired him a few years later.

If you have 85-90% of students failing your subject, something is probably wrong with the teaching (or the subject matter is too hard).

I think any kid should at least be able to pass a subject if he is of average intelligence + puts in some effort. Not too hard, but not too easy either. But perhaps also account for the fact that some people will always be horrible in one or two subjects.

[marcosdumay]

Or is it an environmental issue, or are you simply teaching him the wrong subject, or the right subject at the wrong time? Or are you measuring it wrong, so he should have succeed, but you mislabeled him?

[rm_-rf_slash]

That's insane. When I "make an effort" to pay a parking ticket on time and I don't, nobody gives me a shiny sticker star - I have to pay double instead.

EDIT: People, I said nothing about children paying parking tickets or about poor people. My comment is an example of a self-inflicted problem that is exacerbated by self-inflicted delay, to which the consequences must be borne by the individual as is the nature of life - NOT a dissertation on poverty. These distractions do little to serve the debate.

[fahadkhan]

Interestingly, in the London, UK at least, demonstrating that you made an effort to pay a parking ticket but were not able to will normally mean you do not have to pay the fine.

For instance, I was fined for not displaying a parking ticket. But I took a picture of the machine that wasn't able to process my payment. I emailed picture to the appeals process and was forgiven the fine. Which essentially meant I got to park for free (shiny sticker)

[rtpg]

This comment lacks a bit of empathy.

If someone is trying, even if they fail, that means they are more likely to improve if they receive the right sort of feedback or support. Someone who isn't trying lacks even the basic motivation necessary to try.

Instead, if you treat someone who tries and fails the same as someone who doesn't and fails, then there is an incentive for the person to not even try!

For your parking ticket, if you geniunely tried to pay a parking ticket but couldn't (for example because you didn't have the money at the time) it totally doesn't make sense to charge you double. It would make more sense to do something like put you on a payment plan, or otherwise take into account that you have legitimate difficulties. Financial, organizational, or otherwise.

Zero tolerance policies do not "solve problems" because they ignore the individual contexts.

[rm_-rf_slash]

I lack ALL empathy for me when I am confronted with such a double fine. It was my wrongdoing, so I suck it up and pay up.

I, an adult of sound mind and stable finances, occasionally forget to pay parking tickets on time. I am punished by a doubling of the fine. I deserve that punishment by breaking the law a second time, and I pay for that violation of the law by paying the double fine. It sucks but I move on.

These edge case straw-men are not a productive retort to my statement.

[Bjartr]

The strawman here is the ticket & fine argument. Great that you can make an argument for how we should handle them, but it's not a productive argument because the goals of tickets & fines and grades are too different. Tickets & fines have (usually and for the most part, I don't doubt you could find some kind of counterexample) one goal, disincentivize the behavior that was ticketed. Grades serve multiple goals (and not everyone will even agree on the relative priority, and the two I mention are not comprehensive): First to measure attained level of skill, and second to incentiveize improving those skills over time. Both of these serve the higher level goal of actually educating students in a manner that results in them being productive members of society. If we acurately measure that half of all students are not adequately prepared we have failed them. So rather than throw around talk of zero tolerance policies, let's talk about how we might change things so that students will be better prepared for contributing to society, which is not well served by instilling in students a feeling of futility.

[rtpg]

I would say that even in the case of tickets, you can instill futility with the fines.

Many Americans spend basically their entire adult lives with outstanding fines against them, if only because it's not possible for them to ever pay the cumulative fines + subsequent punishments. Throw on issues like bail and you've built a system someone can fall into and never get out of

[maxerickson]

I got a parking ticket for parking on the wrong side of the street during plow season (even days one side, odd the other). I had habitually moved my car on the 31st-1st transition.

The judge or magistrate reduced the fine by the maximum amount they could when I explained that I had made a simple error while trying to follow the parking rule.

[rm_-rf_slash]

You proactively took measures to address the ticket in a timely fashion, which is not at all what my comment meant to address. Good on you, though.

[maxerickson]

I understood it wasn't exactly the scenario you described, it's just that the judge gave me partial credit for trying to park correctly.

[_jal]

And interestingly, societies in which children routinely pay parking tickets are rare.

There are different purposes to different activities. Teaching kids how to learn, for instance, anticipates a different outcome than chastising people for antisocial parking.

Or do you believe yelling at sick children until they get healthy is the proper approach?

[rm_-rf_slash]

Let me put it this way: if someone has a wound in the foot, the solution is not to rub their neck with aloe vera.

[dragonwriter]

Whether unsuccessful effort is productive is a very different question to whether praise for effort, even when unsuccessful, is beneficial in developing productive habits.

[charlesdm]

Hah, I should remember that one.

[Splines]

> I have been told that praising a kid for effort vs. results is much more important.

And yet, our work is completely the opposite. Your boss doesn't care how much effort it took you to do that thing, only that it got done.

Parents inevitably take this approach at home as well. An A is an A is an A. Good marks are what we look for, and are a mental shortcut to know if your child is doing their work at school. But we see this can backfire, as children learn that getting all the answers right on a test are all that matters. Maybe instead our school system needs to instead evaluate relative performance, not absolute performance. A grade should say "Sally improved by 50% this term", and parents can praise that result. The tests that a child takes should adjust to take into account that child's proficiency, to ensure that child is always being challenged.

Aside: Getting all the answers right on a test is also a poor signal - you're essentially clipping the measurement of a child's performance. Kids should be used to failure, and learning how to take on new challenges. Why not give a test where the expected mark is 50%?

[ThrustVectoring]

>Your boss doesn't care how much effort it took you to do that thing, only that it got done.

Err, that's not quite true, since your boss is an agent of the company and not the company itself. Your boss has to look good to his boss and "manage up", and looking like you're putting in effort is important for that.

[Balgair]

Yeah, many open-plan/cubicle filled places have moved past the product and towards visible effort. I can't count how many stories I've read on HN about how the quiet hard working coder was passed over for a raise in favor of the dumb but verbose coder. Heck, even the founders just need to look good, as is also a common complaint on HN about companies that are all jazz and no drums.

[darkengine]

Measuring improvement is even easier to cheat. One merely has to purposefully give wrong answers in the early parts of the class, and then answer more earnestly in the latter half of the class.

[Splines]

You'd need to have continuous tracking of performance across grades. Low performance at the beginning of a school year would translate to a drop in progress compared to the end of the previous year.

You could still game it by aiming for the average, but really the average is the expectation. And in a world where subject matter difficulty can scale with a child irrespective of the skill level of peers their age, getting an average result on a test is ok.

[CptJamesCook]

Boss here. I care a lot about how hard an employee is working.

[Splines]

Perhaps I was too harsh with my words. You do care, but would you rewards hard work in and of itself? Results are important - and to be fair sometimes you can't get the results you want and failure is ok and should be expected. That's a result too.

[inZGBl]

I think that's probably more personality than anything else. I was always told I was smart and was never motivated. Perfect example: I took the ACT only once because I scored a 30 and it wasn't worth it for me to try to improve that score. Meanwhile, all of my honors & AP class friends took it several times scoring 33s, 34s, & 35s.

This was a direct result of my "intelligence complex" and yet I have no trouble learning new things. I actually get extremely bored if I'm not digging in depth into new subjects every 6-9 months. Speaks to why I have several unfinished websites because I wanted to learn a new framework, unused golf clubs, tons of cooking utensils but no food, etc.

I love to learn, I just never learned how to be motivated or competitive or persistent.

[klnldknf]

It's probably because the first 80% is really easy to learn so you get all the gratification of "being smart", without ever having to do anything difficult.

[_exnk]

It's actually because I tend to be very action-oriented so at some point I get fed up with all of the planning and have to dive in and do something. Then, at a certain point down the road, I realize that the resource requirements (typically time or money) to get to where I want to be are too high so I drop it. I actually get more frustration than gratification out of it.

[subway]

I also struggle in this manner. If I don't grok something, I'm intensely motivated to work on/with it until I do. If I'm not careful though, that motivation completely disappears the moment I achieve a sense of an understanding of the topic.

[SamReidHughes]

My rule for cooking is now to never buy any cookware unless I'm going to use it that day.

[pfarnsworth]

I think it all depends on the person.

Both my wife and I were labelled as "gifted". My wife scored 145 twice on the IQ test, so she's much smarter than me. We were both praised as smart throughout our childhood, but we were also both very competitive. We never had any problems with lacking motivation and working hard. Losing never discouraged us, because winning was always much more motivating.

I was never tempted to cheat, mainly because I always felt that if I lost, I deserved the loss. To me, there's no sense in being competitive if you're going to fabricate your wins, but that's a moral system I developed on my own very young.

My kids are a bit different. They're definitely much smarter than their peers, but I often see them giving up when they lose, when we plays games and such. I definitely stress to them the importance of never giving up, and the value of effort over natural skills and always trying hard. I tell them that just because they're smart doesn't mean that they will always win, and that people who work hard will always beat the lazy smart person. Also, never fear losing because winners always lose more because they're always competing, but it's the big wins that matter more than small losses.

I hope they take this message to heart, because I have friends who fear failure and it's debilitating to them. Even the idea of applying for a new job is too much because they can't handle rejection, which I find extremely sad.

[Overtonwindow]

I was the opposite. Good results were rare so a lot of focus was on praising my effort. That meant I put in enough effort to coast, having low confidence in my results. It's hard for me to learn new things now as well.

[phkahler]

I've take a slightly different approach. When my kid has success, I praise the effort put in to get there. This doesn't praise the kid directly (leading to inflated beliefs about how great they are) and it doesn't praise effort for it's own sake. It praises the kids ability to put in effort to get the results they want. I'm not saying it's right, or better, but like some of the other commenters here I've got my own issues in this area and it's my attempt to handle the next generation a little better. BTW to a lesser extent I apply this to myself now too.

[throwawayjava]

I think the most effective approach is somewhere in the middle -- you have to praise successful efforts. The more crucial part is organizing the curriculum so that every student has enough opportunities to "win" that they maintain confidence, but "lose" often enough that they don't become complacent.

That's hard enough to do in a 1:1 setting, let alone a 30:1 classroom. I think there's some benefit to 1:1 tutoring/individual enrichment any time a student isn't smack dab in the middle of the bell curve.

[TeMPOraL]

Basically, no matter what we do, our kids are screwed either way :/.

[Overtonwindow]

Point number 3 on my list of "why I'm never having kids". It really is a spin of the wheel as to where they'll land in life.

[TeMPOraL]

What're the first two, if I may ask out of curiosity?

[sokoloff]

Similar experience, but I blame it on my own never learning how to learn effectively (as it was too easy through high school).

I doubt it was the wording of the praise, but rather the lack of my own effort and application in learning things that were hard for other students.

[always_good]

I see people say this on HN a lot. And even people saying they have the same behavior but with the opposite impetus, like one of my comment's siblings.

I think it's more likely that praise had little to do with your behavior, and you would've been the same regardless. I think it's tempting to backsplain our behavior with things we happen to remember from our past.

For example, pretty much everyone struggles with their own attention span and learning new things.

[hdctambien]

The idea is that if you are told "you got the answer, you must be smart", then your success and failure is innate to who you are. You don't have agency over it.

If you are told "you got the answer, you must have worked hard", then you get to own your success and you learn that if you work hard, you can earn success.

[drawkbox]

It is important to balance both but the single most important one is allowing kids to fail, and then teaching them how to improve on that or learn from that experience.

The journey and the reward on completion are important, but the most important is teaching them improvement to prevent coasting. In life, success comes from many integration and market tests, tests can be failed but once you pass you have a solid release iteration and improvement, continuously build on that by comparing yourself to yourself via diffs at checkpoints.

[clairity]

i disagree with this dichotomy. you shouldn't overpraise or underpraise, and you shouldn't simply prefer effort or results.

when i coach kids in basketball, i like to praise "effectiveness", which is a combination of stamina (staying with a task, both physically and mentally) and decision-making (doing the best thing in the moment given your capabilities).

these notions go beyond simple effort and results by weaving in underlying positive behaviors and sets the child up to succeed at their level, while also stretching them so they're never too complacent about their current accomplishments.

it's a super-tricky balancing act, and i get it wrong all the time, but it's rewarding when you see a child grow without them even realizing what's going on.

[eevilspock]

Praising results regardless of effort is similar to praising innate ability. So it's in line with the gist of the article.

In any case I’m totally unsurprised by this. Praising innate ability represents an entirely different value system from praising effort.

[Pigo]

That's extremely self-aware, and honest of you to be able to admit.