CONCEPT
Process Praise
Dweck's empirical finding that praising process — effort, strategy, engagement — produces growth-mindset orientation, while praising outcomes or innate ability produces fixed-mindset fragility.
Process praise is perhaps the most actionable finding in Dweck's body of research. Children praised for intelligence after success develop fixed-mindset orientations: they subsequently avoid challenge, conceal mistakes, and show performance declines when facing difficulty. Children praised for process — the effort, strategy, and engagement that produced the success — develop growth-mindset orientations: they seek challenge, engage with mistakes, and sustain motivation through difficulty. The finding has been replicated across cultures, age groups, and domains. Its simplicity made it operationally influential; teachers could change their praise practices in a single staff meeting. The AI transformation complicates the finding in ways the original research did not anticipate, because the process being produced is no longer unambiguously the student's process — and the invisible cognitive work of question formulation and output evaluation must now become the object of praise.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The premise of process praise is that the process being praised belongs to the learner. When a teacher says "you worked really hard on that essay," the