蜜桃影视

Even at MIT, no one鈥檚 been able to create a computer as powerful as the brain of a baby.

鈥淭hey鈥檙e better at doing this fast learning from one or two examples than any computer algorithm we have right now,鈥� MIT graduate student Julia Leonard said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a big interest here 鈥� everyone鈥檚 like, 鈥榃e want a computer to learn like a baby.鈥欌��

Leonard was curious about how babies learn too, so she gathered up more than 200 to analyze their genius brains. Specifically, she was interested in studying how babies learn skills like grit and growth mindset from adults, especially as schools are placing more emphasis on developing student character and social-emotional competencies.

In a study Leonard published in , she found that babies were able to persist in a difficult task if they first saw an adult struggle to succeed, suggesting that grit and perseverance can be taught by example to the powerfully observational young baby brain.

Leonard conducted her research on babies 13 to 18 months old. She had one set of babies watch an adult struggle for 30 seconds to retrieve a toy from a tomato container and succeed, and then repeat the process to try to remove a key chain from a carabiner. Another group of babies watched an adult successfully complete these tasks without any struggle.

Then the babies were shown a toy that played music, but only the researchers knew how to activate the sound. The babies were given the toy, and the researchers noticed that the ones who had watched an adult struggle beforehand made more attempts at pushing a button on the toy to try to get it to play music. The babies who had watched the adult who didn鈥檛 struggle exerted less effort and pushed the button fewer times than their toddler peers.

The experiment showed that the babies鈥� actions were not mere imitation, Leonard said, because the children were given an entirely different toy than the ones they saw the adults struggling with.

For Leonard, these results revealed that after just a few brief moments of observation, babies鈥� brains are able to learn the value of effort and persistence.

鈥淭his study suggests that we鈥檙e not born necessarily with a certain amount of grit that can鈥檛 change,鈥� Leonard said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not a stable character trait. It can be learned and influenced by social context.鈥�

However, it is unclear from the study how long these effects last, or whether these effects apply as well at home as in a laboratory. But if parents do want to try modeling grit, the best way is to make sure the adult is engaging the child with eye contact and saying the child鈥檚 name while demonstrating overcoming a difficult task. Leonard鈥檚 study found that adults who used these cues when struggling with the toys in the study had a greater effect on the children鈥檚 perseverance than the adults who purposely didn鈥檛 engage with the children but solely modeled the effort-filled behavior.

Character traits like grit and perseverance are teachable, according to researcher Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. 鈥淭he parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive,鈥� she said in with The New York Times.

But, Duckworth , 鈥測ou cannot will yourself to be interested in something you鈥檙e not interested in,鈥� and grit is best developed in areas where people already have passion.

Journalist Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, wrote in that learning these skills isn鈥檛 something that can simply be written into a curriculum. 鈥淲hat is emerging,鈥� he said, 鈥渋s a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of 鈥榯eaching鈥� 鈥� but rather through a child鈥檚 environment.

When it comes to the classroom, researcher Carol Dweck has documented the importance of praising children for effort rather than success in order to develop a growth mindset. A found that children who were praised for intelligence were less likely to persist after they failed, compared with those who were praised for their hard work. A of middle schoolers in New York City found that students who believed that their intelligence was malleable rather than predetermined were able to do better in math class over time.

The next step for Leonard is trying to determine how long the effects she saw in the lab might last with young children.

鈥淓ven in infancy, babies are paying attention to what adults are doing and using that information to guide their persistence,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 think that鈥檚 an interesting message for educators to think about how they鈥檙e modeling behavior.鈥�

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 蜜桃影视鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.