Teacher Approval Ends Discussion

After years of classroom research, Dillon (1988) concluded that teacher interventions during student discussions tend to shut down student thinking and student talk. He found this to be particularly true of positive feedback or praise. The rationale, of course, is that when a teacher communicates agreement with one student’s thinking, both the speaker and other classmates conclude that there is no need for further thought because the teacher has gotten the answer he or she was after.

 How Brains Respond to Positive/Negative Feedback in Child...

In children up to eight or nine years old, the dopamine-modulating reward center in the nucleus accumbens reacts strongly to positive feedback (activating the prefrontal cortex) and minimally to negative feedback. In older children, increased activation still occurs in the PFC when dopamine is released in response to positive feedback (particularly in response to correct answers/ predictions). However, the greatest age-related change is the higher reactivity of the NAc to negative feedback an...

 Talk to Your Babies

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback. You can reinforce language skills through interaction: l...