The Southwest Voice

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I think it is safe to say that most people believe they learn from their mistakes. I know I have had more than a few lessons from mistakes. I think it is also safe to say that positive feedback feels pretty empowering. 

According to a recent article in The Journal of Neuroscience, adults and children strongly respond in the brain—specifically in the basal ganglia, just outside the cerebral cortex-- when we get positive remarks like, “Great job!,” and “You got it!”

As it turns out, however, not everyone learns from their mistakes. Developmental psychologist Dr. Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab suggest that children under 12 are not processing negative input to the degree they process positive input. So when parents or teachers tell youngsters about the deficiencies in a project or paper the brain does not respond. Comments like, “Got that wrong,” and “You’re not doing this right,” fall on deaf ears essentially. Tell them what they did right, however, and the brain lights up! 

According to a ScienceDaily.com article on the study, the brains’ 'control centres' of children of 12 and 13 (and also adults’) are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

What that means to me as a junior high English teacher is that I will continue to closely edit my students’ papers and continue to require them to rewrite with corrections while also giving them plenty of comments about what they do right daily in class. It also means my colleagues in the younger grades and loads of parents are doing a great job focusing on the positive with their little ones.

Peggy Dewane-Pope is an eighth grade teacher at Stonecreek Junior High School in the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District.