Navin’s posterous

This article, reports that making school students go through positive psychology exercises helps them get a better impression of school in general, improves their behavior in classroom, and a bunch of other good stuff.

For example, one exercise in the positive psychology asked students to list 3 good things that happened to them each day for a week - then the follow-up questions asked what the event meant to them and what can increase the likelihood of this happening again (kind of connecting the dots for the students).

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The net result: positive thinking and resiliency training improved students' school outlook and engagement, improved classroom behavior and cooperation, resulted in more self-control, and more empathy. Not bad!

That's not all - think about this:

students who believed that intelligence was a fixed entity were more likely to show no improvement in their math achievement from 7th to 8th grade, more likely to withdraw or cheat, and less likely to demonstrate mastery-reactions to setbacks. Not surprisingly, the students who believed intelligence could be 'grown' - were more likely to persevere, show resiliency behaviors to setbacks, and improve performance.

See full article.

(Via: http://twitter.com/sandygautam)