RECENT NEWS: LEARNING FROM SUCCESS

This is a piece I did last year for The Reading Clinic's newsletter. I decided to post it on my blog as it directly connects to a recent post at lars4learning.com.

It seems obvious that success motivates children. However, most of us have been frustrated by a child who does not learn from her mistakes. If only she tried to understand, we say. Can't she see she just made the same mistake a minute ago?

A recent study at Leiden University in the Netherlands offers an intriguing glimpse into young children's seeming inability to learn from mistakes. The study, summarized in Science Daily, used fMRIs to see how the brains of eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds and adults responded to positive and negative feedback when learning a computer task. Surprisingly, there were great differences. Eight-year-olds reacted far more strongly to positive feedback, adults to negative feedback, while twelve-year-olds reacted to both types of feedback.

Why? While not ready to list definite causes, Dr. Eveline Crone, the developmental psychologist leading the study, had an intriguing hypothesis:

"The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible."

If children have not reached a developmental stage where they learn from their mistakes, we have to question error handling that repeatedly points out those mistakes. We have to learn to be more positive in our approach. Here are a few techniques I use.

Look for what is right, not what is wrong.
For example, if a child is reading the word "foul," and says "fool," you could tell him that he was right about the first and last sounds in the word, and then ask what the middle sound would be. If you look hard enough, you can find something that a student is doing correctly.

Analyze success.
Because we care so much about kids, we want to help them see why they are not doing well. But we often forget to examine what's happening when they are doing well. When a child writes a great paragraph or aces a science test, help her to figure out and talk about how she did it. When you praise her work, be concrete and specific, and let her know exactly what was good.

Measure progress, not mastery.
We should keep long-range goals in mind, but we should show children when they advance toward that goal. Charting progress on a bar graph for the number of pages read daily (or any area where you think a child can make advances) is a good way to do this. We have children chart their reading rate, and even reluctant readers like the activity. Encourage children to compete against themselves instead of others. Reward improvement rather than excellence. Everyone can do better.

Using positive reinforcement is a strategy that teachers and parents already employ, and that educators like Rick Lavoie endorse, because they know it works. Now the Leiden University study provides scientific evidence that this strategy is developmentally appropriate for younger children.