Raising Smart Kids

In her article “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids” Carol S. Dweck (2015) Claims that a way to raise smart kids; it to make them focus instead of telling them they have talent or a gift; for this makes them develop a different mindset that could hinder their learning ability and eventually make them more susceptible to failure. Carol S. Dweck is a psychology graduate from Yale university, and she has been researching the effect of different mindsets in children to find a way to raise smarter kids. In the article she explains that kids that are told they have talent they would set themselves into a mind-set that could really hurt them later on in learning; Carol also explains that “Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set” (1).
Carol goes on to say that children that are told they are special from a young age develop a mind-set called a “fixed mind-set”; while children that took upon themselves to work hard to become good at a specific subject developed a mindset called a “growth mind-set”. Furthermore, they did this experiment where they had 373 students monitored for 2 years; from 7th grade to 9th grade they saw that students with a “fixed mind-set” progressively got worse scores then those with “growth mind-sets”. The students with “growth mind-sets”
Carol along with Claudia M. Mueller performed a study where they had children take an IQ test; after the test the children were either told they were very smart or that they worked really hard for their score. Additionally, they found that students that were told that they were smart encouraged a “fixed mind-set”. Again, students that were told they were smart wanted easier problems, while the ones that were told they worked really well encouraged them to do much more challenging