What Gunderson set out to find

1. Gunderson and colleagues wanted to know what kind of praise parents naturally give children aged one to three.
2. They also wanted to know whether that early praise predicts the child's motivational framework five years later.

How the study was run

1. The sample was 53 children, 29 boys and 24 girls, drawn from a larger group of 63 Chicago families already taking part in a study of language development.
2. Researchers recorded 90 minutes of ordinary family interaction at home when each child was 14, 26 and 38 months old, then coded every piece of parent praise.
3. Praise was sorted into three types: process praise for effort or strategy, such as you worked hard at that, person praise for a fixed quality, such as you are so clever, and other praise for everything else, such as a plain well done.
4. The same children were reassessed at seven to eight years old using questionnaires measuring whether they treated ability as fixed or as something that grows with effort.

What they found

1. Praise made up only about 3 per cent of everything parents said, and of that praise roughly 18 per cent was process praise, 16 per cent person praise and 66 per cent other praise.
2. More process praise between 14 and 38 months significantly predicted a growth, or incremental, framework at seven to eight years.
3. Person praise did not significantly predict a fixed, or entity, framework, so the effect showed up on one side only.

What the findings mean

1. Gunderson concluded that the praise a toddler hears helps shape the motivational framework they carry into school.
2. This supports Dweck directly, because it is process praise, the kind that points at effort and strategy, that tracks the growth mindset.

Strengths and weaknesses

1. A strength is that it is longitudinal and naturalistic, recording real praise in real homes over years, which gives it high ecological validity.
2. A further strength is objectivity, since the coders did not know praise was the focus and agreement between them was high, with a kappa value of .81.
3. A weakness is that the design is correlational, so something else about those families could explain the link.
4. Generalisability is limited too, because 53 children from a single American city may not represent children elsewhere.

Turning this into marks

1. Use the exact terms process praise and person praise, because vaguer wording like praising effort tends not to secure the mark.
2. Give the direction and the time gap, so say process praise at one to three predicted a growth framework five years on.
3. Finish with what this shows about Dweck's theory rather than restating the result.