Do different types of praise and feedback about task difficulty change children’s motivational responses?

Motivational frameworks correlate with academic achievement from elementary through high school (Park, Gunderson, Tsukayama, Levine & Beilock, 2016; Blackwell, Trzesniewski & Dweck, 2007; Paunesku et al., 2015). Research on children’s pursuit of challenging goals based on motivational frameworks take for granted, however, that children can understand the relative difficulty of tasks to select their goals. Although environmental factors, such as parental praise, influence children’s motivational frameworks in early childhood (Gunderson et al., 2013; Stipek & Iver, 1989), the role of parent interactions in shaping children’s concept of difficulty and motivational frameworks remains unknown. In this study, we will experimentally manipulate the kind of “easy” feedback children receive after success and measure the effect this feedback has on children’s motivational responses, such as goal choice, persistence, attributions for failure, and strategy generation. We will also attempt to replicate previous studies showing that different types of praise (process, person) change children’s motivational responses. Finally, we will explore whether parents’ self-reported motivational beliefs relate to their children’s motivational responses.