Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".
It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?
My parents were relentless in assessing my effort, not the grade I got - the grade itself was treated as an irrelevance (of course it wasn't to them, but the pretence was enough to fool me). Yes yes you got full marks - but the questions teacher said you needed a calculator to do, can you do them by hand? It's great you're keeping up with classwork - but if you flick ahead a few pages in the textbook you'll find extension exercises, have you done them too?
At the time, I did not appreciate this approach - I could outperform any of my friends and not receive the praise I felt was due me. In fact at 18 I got the highest grades in the UK - and still my parents expressed disappointment because they knew I was capable of higher (I got 100% in one subject, but a second was also attainable with more effort). I'm not saying this was a perfect strategy - it did go a little too far the other way and make me feel I wasn't capable of anything truly impressive.
However this article made me realise how important this was. By moving the emphasis away from the grades, you can define standards that are relevant for you; that genuinely do represent an achievement because they require great effort. For me that meant aiming for things other people said couldn't be done. I did an entire maths A-level from self-study alongside my other qualifications; I switched course at Uni and taught myself the entire first year Cambridge engineering course over the summer, so I could join in second year. However smart you are, there are always goals that require effort, as well as achievement, and you do someone a disservice if you encourage them to settle for less.
Now, I'm 29, and never excelled at school, dropped out of University after one year, travel across Europe working as a programmer in many interesting projects and can say I live a normal balanced life. I don't dwell much on problems, and accept that things change and I can change.
My wife on the other hand, she has very low self esteem mostly because she believes that what she does is what she is. She can't change it. If she forgets about something she says she is dumb. If she breaks a glass, she says she is clumsy, and has a very hard time believing these things can change. She is stuck at a miserable job because she is too afraid to move and fail at the new one (even though she had better offers). She can't really separate what she 'is' from what she can become. For her, mostly due to the way her parents praised as a child, she came to believe we are born a certain way and can't really change.
Long story to mostly tell you (though, I'm not a parent yet so I can't say I know what the hell I'm talking about) that as long as you can teach your kid that what we become is product of what we do, and not who we are born, she will probably be ok. Try to find thing you can point to hard work. She does her homework? Nice, then tell her next time she gets a good grade "Good thing you did all you homework, see how it payed up". She may still think it was easy, but she her subconscious will link hard work and results.
I too, was raised on a Fixed Mindset; "You're not good at math/physics/chemistry? That's ok, I'm sure you have other skills.". This caused me some level of discomfort in trying new things (which are necessary for any sort of growth) because at some point I could just reach 'the end of the road' and the limit of 'talent'. This has often caused me to avoid new and challenging things altogether.
Since a year or so I've been trying to adapt the Growth Mindset by interrupting my thought process when I feel this discomfort and (often literally) say to myself that it is not the outcome that matters, but the chance to improve your skills and extend your abilities. Failure is not about you and it should just be a trigger to try harder; the road does not end. I still fall in the same traps I used to, but I've said Yes to more (challenging) things this year than any other year and I haven't 'failed' nearly as much as I thought I would, nor did the failures have the impact I feared them to have. Growth really is a marvelous (and endless) thing.
As it should, since that was the point of the posted article...
I sailed through my cow-town high school and then got my ass handed to me in the first semester of a competitive engineering program. Academic probation, failed classes, and all the low self-esteem that came with it.
Yes, I eventually figured out how to succeed by working hard, but it would've been better to have known this going in. Plus I had the capacity to learn a lot more as a child than I actually did.
Plus I had the capacity to learn a lot more as a child than I actually did.
I would suggest shifting your parenting focus away from school. If she's truly smart, she is going to be top of her class without any effort for at least another 6-8 years. So, what I would suggest is to first try and cultivate an ethic of going above and beyond, and always doing work you "can take pride in" (when the work is too easy, without established values it can get very hard to keep caring and avoid turning in B- after B-) and second turning her on to more outside of school. When I was a little kid this manifest as a voracious appetite for books and Legos, which fed my imagination and logical thinking. Magic (the card game) was my replacement for chess.
Different kids will be interested in different things, but in general they are hungry to learn, so if school is easy you just have to find that extra interest outside of school and they will go crazy. Science, especially life sciences, geology, and such are usually solid choices because a sharp child is going to be inquisitive about the world around them.
(Don't ignore school, of course)
Nowadays, there are some really excellent textbooks, so that with enough effort, everyone can learn CS or Math himself, and with some funds also Physics, Chemistry etc. Unfortunately you cannot talk and share ideas with books.
"It may not seem like a lot of effort now, but that is because you have worked so hard on so many similar tasks in the past; long practice makes for easy work."
Yeah, in my case that was confusing up until it became insulting, probably somewhere around 7 or 8. Into the teens and adulthood, it might end up encouraging someone to reducing their efforts until they just squeak by, depends on the personality. I'd focus more on figuring out what she actually finds hard or easy, boring or interesting.
Positive reinforcement isn't bad, per se, but that particular statement acts like everything should be hard, which can be just as damaging, albeit in different ways, than acting like everything is easy.
(By the way, if you haven't already, read up on Asperger's syndrome now. A lot of gifted kids have it and go undiagnosed into adulthood. Some end up fine, some end up junkies, almost all have a very confused adolescence and even more confused parents. If your daughter shows any signs, now is the time to start paying attention and trying to compensate. Notably, it can totally screw with how reward works. A lot of us place essentially no value on verbal praise, we require tangible rewards.)
If it wasn't hard, why should you be praised at all?
Whether the task would have required effort by some other hypothetical person isn't really relevant to the point. It would be appropriate to praise me for completing a marathon, but not Haile Gebrselassie.
To start with, that fails to account for things like moral and ethical choices that don't require significant effort, but should still be praised when the correct choice is made.
More seriously, it distorts self-esteem and worldview. Results become unimportant, it is effort alone that matters. A child raised in such an environment will get its ass kicked in the real world where nobody cares about effort, only results.
Effort must be encouraged as a means to an end, not the end itself.
However, it doesn't seem to me that praising someone for not stealing every day is a good idea either. You should not steal because it's wrong, not because you get praised for it.
I don't know how you interpret the Dweck research as implying that results are unimportant. Why would you expend effort trying to accomplish something that is unimportant? Besides, the research shows that results improve when you encourage a growth mindset, regardless of your philosophical feelings about this.
Comment threads frequently run far away from the specifics of the originally linked article. You're imbuing the conversation with a context that isn't entirely there.