In laboratory studies, praising children’s effort encourages them to adopt incremental motivational frameworks—they believe ability is malleable, attribute success to hard work, enjoy challenges, and generate strategies for improvement. In contrast, praising children’s inherent abilities encourages them to adopt fixed-ability frameworks. Does the praise parents spontaneously give children at home show the same effects? Although parents’ early praise of inherent characteristics was not associated with children’s later fixed-ability frameworks, parents’ praise of children’s effort at 14-38 months (N=53) did predict incremental frameworks at 7-8 years, suggesting that causal mechanisms identified in experimental work may be operating in home environments.

In a previous study, parent-child praise was observed in natural interactions at home when children were 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Children who received a relatively high proportion of process praise (e.g., praise for effort and strategies) showed stronger incremental motivational frameworks, including a belief that intelligence can be developed and a greater desire for challenge, when they were in 2nd or 3rd grade (Gunderson et al., 2013). The current study examines these same children's (n = 53) academic achievement 1 to 2 years later, in 4th grade. Results provide the first evidence that process praise to toddlers predicts children's academic achievement (in math and reading comprehension) 7 years later, in elementary school, via their incremental motivational frameworks. Further analysis of these motivational frameworks shows that process praise had its effect on fourth grade achievement through children's trait beliefs (e.g., believing that intelligence is fixed vs. malleable), rather than through their learning goals (e.g., preference for easy vs. challenging tasks). Implications for the socialization of motivation are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

In two experiments, we used a novel approach to educating young children about nutrition. Instead of teaching simple facts, we provided a rich conceptual framework that helped children understand the need to eat a variety of healthy foods. Using the insight that children's knowledge can be organized into coherent belief systems, or intuitive theories, we (a) analyzed the incipient knowledge that guides young children's reasoning about the food-body relationship, (b) identified the prerequisites that children need to conceptualize food as a source of nutrition, and (c) devised a strategy for teaching young children a coherent theory of food as a source of diverse nutrients. In these two experiments, we showed that children can learn and generalize this conceptual framework. Moreover, this learning led children to eat more vegetables at snack time. Our findings demonstrate that young children can benefit from an intervention that capitalizes on their developing intuitive theories about nutrition.

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