Browsing by Author "Peltola, Saana"

This thesis is a literature review which aims to view and describe growth mindset as well as how teacher’s praise affects to it’s development. Growth mindset was chosen as the main subject of this thesis since the previous research has found that the growth mindset contains of factors that could result in school achievement. As in known motivation theories, growth mindset can be seen to explain positive outcomes in pupils as well as providing intriguing perspectives to consider various factors behind an individual’s thinking and behavior. During the past decade, growth mindset has increasingly been at the centre of educational and psychological debate. In addition, growth mindset has considerably been studied in the scientific frameworks of these fields. According to the previous research, teacher’s praise has a remarkable effect on the development of a child’s motivation and mindset in different situations and circumstances. Since both the motivation and mindset have a significant im-pact on the school success and achievements of a child, it is important to study this subject and bring awareness to the outcomes of growth mindset. This thesis was conducted as a descriptive literature review. In this thesis the motivation theories explaining school success as well as growth mindset were described and studied by reviewing previous literature on these themes. In this literature review the effects of teacher’s praise to pupils’ motivation and mindset were reviewed and defined based on seve-ral previous studies and the results in them. According to the results of this thesis, two approaches to teacher’s praise could be pointed out. In the previous studies, teacher’s praise was divided into two categories. These categot-ries were separated based on whether the praise was focused to the children’s personal traits and abilites (person praise) or their efforts, investments and used strategies (process praise) in performing a task. According to the results of this literature review, praising the pu-pils by using a person praise lead to the increasment of a fixed mindset. This attitude re-sulted in operating models in both thinking and behavior that were harmful to a child’s school success. However, praising the pupils by using the process praise, positive operating mo-dels and thus growth mindset evolved in the children. Growth mindset and these positive operating models can be stated to be significant in succeeding and thriving in schools.