Kids Fail Less When They Know Failure Is Part of Learning, Study Finds

At http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/03/14/kids-fail-less-when-they-know-failure-is-part-of-learning-study-finds/

By Mikaela Conley
@mikaelaconley

Mar 14, 2012 7:00am

Kids perform better in school if they know failure, and trying again, is part of the learning process, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.

The research included several experiments intended to see whether parents and teachers can help students succeed by changing the way learning material is presented to them. Study experiments included anagram problems and reading comprehension, and researchers found that kids who were told it's normal to fail and try again did better on the tests than those who did not receive such a pep talk.

"In this research, we showed that helping children to interpret difficulty, not as a sign of intellectual limitation but as the normal learning outcome, improved their performance on very demanding and difficult tasks and reduced their feelings of incompetence," said study co-author Frederique Autin, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Poitiers in Poitiers... (more at  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/03/14/kids-fail-less-when-they-know-failure-is-part-of-learning-study-finds/ )