Milton Chen at Edutopia has an interesting article: “Don’t Weigh The Elephant — Feed The Elephant.”

Up front Chen recounts the following experience of a friend that visits India and has a discussion that includes:

“In America, you test your students a lot, don’t you?” She replied, “Well, indeed, the United States has a national policy that requires testing of all students in certain grades.” The Indian educator said, “Here, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don’t weigh the elephant.”

Next Chen talks about the research findings of Carol Dweck, Stanford University’s William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology, and her colleagues, Columbia University’s Lisa Blackwell and Stanford’s Kali Trzesniewski, published in the journal Child Development and highlighted in a recent National Public Radio report.

Math grades typically decline during the early teen years, but students who were taught to think about their brains, and about how their intelligence could expand, reversed the expected decline; students in the control group continued to worsen academically. In the NPR interview, Dweck described how seriously students took this neurological learning: “When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections. When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

Read the whole article – it’s an easy, short read and is good food for thought.