Praise Effectiveness Audit
Effort against ability praise, and what the pattern looks like across a typical week — where the research is genuinely useful and where it has been overstated.
The research on praise supports two modest claims — that specific accurate praise beats general or inflated praise, and that praising ability after an easy success is associated with avoiding harder tasks afterwards — and the popular version claiming a sentence can transform a child overstates it considerably.
Praise Effectiveness Audit
Frequently asked
Should I stop saying "you're so clever"?
Not in isolation, and the concern is narrower than the popular version suggests: ability praise after an easy success is the specific pattern associated with later task avoidance. Naming what was actually done is more useful in almost every case anyway.
Is growth mindset research reliable?
The core observations have held up, and effect sizes in replications have generally been smaller and more conditional than early popular accounts implied. It is a real finding that was oversold, which is a different thing from a finding that was wrong.
Can you praise a child too much?
Inflated praise — praise that is obviously inaccurate — is associated with worse outcomes, particularly for children with low self-esteem, who tend to discount it. Accuracy matters more than quantity.
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