Management Process in healthcare

Management Process in Healthcare

How the educator can improve the self-esteem of students through praise and motivation

It would be easy to assume that praise would be at least neutral and possibly helpful to students; it might raise self-esteem or motivation. But articles periodically appear that warn teachers of potentially dire effects of praise; praise is alleged to reduce motivation, to manipulate children, or to make them less able to make decisions (Kohn, 2001; Mangin, 1998). So, does praise help or harm? Most of the research examining praise has focused on how it affects student motivation. In a typical study, the child first performs a task, then receives some praise (or not). Either immediately thereafter or perhaps following a delay, some measure is taken of how interesting the children found the task or how motivated the children are to perform it again.

For example, in one study (Koestner, Zuckerman and Koestner, 1989) the experimenters explained to fifth-graders that the illustrator Al Hirschfeld hid his daughter's name, Nina, in his drawings. They were then shown several of his illustrations with the task of finding as many "Ninas" as they could. Next, children were given one of several types of praise about their performance. Then the experimenter said that he had to leave the room for a couple of minutes and the children could either look for "Ninas" in new drawings, or read cartoon books (Garfield and The Far Side).

One measure of task motivation was whether children chose to continue working on the puzzles in the experimenter's absence. After two minutes, a different experimenter asked the students to rate, on a scale of 1-4, how interesting they found the puzzle task, how fun it was, and how well they thought they had performed. These ratings provided another measure of motivation, with ...