The sample size here was 22,000. Is that enough?
(the answer, by the way, is "It depends on the effect size you want to measure". I can do a study with n=2 that is pretty convincing. Question: "are these pills actually cyanide?". Study design: "I give one pill each to two healthy undergrads, after they tried to appear smart by saying 'correlation does not prove causation'". Observation: "The ethics board should definitely not have approved this!" Discussion: "Background death rate from non-violent causes for 22 year old males in the US is 0.01096/100000/day. Pill is poisonous with p<0.000000000000012")
That said, I like the study. True random design takes guts and effort and gives data to be useful for years. We're still discussing RAND... On an important subject as well.
Lot more to be found [1].
Thing that wonders me how state vs national differences are corrected for. On the one hand they shouldn't matter, since it is a random design. But the differences with national averages were huge. And far larger than the measured impact of the intervention.
[1] https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/effects-kinderga...
At some level, these do provide data to look at. Right?
From Adam Grant's Raising a Moral Child: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-...
"A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person. This dovetails with new research led by the psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who finds that for moral behaviors, nouns work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-year-olds to help with a task, rather than inviting them “to help,” it was 22 to 29 percent more effective to encourage them to “be a helper.” Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.” When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us."
If you are familiar with Carol Dweck’s work on praising action instead of intelligence, what does that tell you relative to Adam Grant?
I respect both Adam Grant and Carol Dweck, but what do common people get from reading both their work that is well backed up by research? Confusion
The key conclusion of her work is consistent with the passage you quoted. Instead of praising a child for trying in systematic ways, praise the child for being one of those 'organised' kids who tries in systematic ways rather than [insert ineffective way that kid could work hard with low likelihood of success]
However, my hope would be we could do both. Run as many cheap studies as we can. Just honestly report on the limited applicability. And keep adding to a corpus of data. Patterns may emerge.