Lời khen năng lực và lời khen nỗ lực đối với sự tự tin vào năng lực của sinh viên

little above the recipient’s ability. Other researchers have also agreed on the importance of sincerity in praising (Bandura, 1999; Delin & Baumeister, 1994). However, we found that sincerity did not moderate the effect of frequent effort praise, which contradicts Henderlong and Lepper (2002) who suggest that the effects of both ability and effort praise should be moderated by sincerity. Henderlong and Lepper (2002) argue that if effort praise does 588 not match with one’s level of expended effort, i.e. praising a person for their hard work when they think that they did not expend much effort, the praise will be disregarded (Henderlong & Lepper, 2002). Here, we argue that self-judgment of one’s effort is not as simple as self-judgment of one’s ability, because effort is a more complex construct for assessment. It might be possible that one person expends a great deal of effort but perceives that it is not high enough, while another person who does not put as much effort as required for the difficulty level of a task but self-judges that their effort is substantial. In other words, judging effort is like judging a whole process of trying, which is invisible, intangible, and hard to quantify (e.g. nights of sleeplessness, personal struggle, and time spent on task), while judging ability is like judging the end product, which is visible, tangible and quantifiable (e.g. a final test score). Thus, because there is no clear benchmark to judge effort, evaluations of effort can be easily influenced by other people’s evaluations because the evaluators themselves (both the recipient of praise who evaluates their own effort and the giver of praise who evaluates other people’s effort) are unsure and unconfident of how correctly they evaluate the expended effort. If this is the case, then we argue that both sides (the recipient and the giver) will find an equilibrium to match their effort evaluations, resulting in praise that always seems sincere. We found at least two experiments that investigated the effect of reward on the judgement of effort. In 2015, Pooresmaeili et al. asked 26 adult participants to perform a task requiring physical effort by continuously pressing two keyboards to push a ball up a virtual ramp. Half of the participants in the experimental group received an amount of money equivalent to the level of difficulty they reached, and the other half in the control group also received a monetary reward but was random and unrelated to the task difficulty. Their results showed that participants revised their self-judgement of effort after receiving the rewards, suggesting that reward magnitude has an effect on self-judgement of effort. When receiving higher rewards, participants overestimated their effort, with a converse effect observed for lower rewards. Later, Rollwage et al. (2020) replicated and extended this research design to investigate whether this reward magnitude effect still exists for evaluators who judge other people’s efforts. Using the same experimental paradigm, 51 participants were asked 589 to rate both their own and other participants’ efforts on the same ball task. The results were parallel with Pooresmaeili et al. (2015), showing that higher rewards were associated with higher effort rated for both self– and others-judgement. As praise can be a kind of verbal reward, based on these studies, we suggest that being praised for high effort by other people makes one reassesses their own level of effort, whether or not they truly expended much effort. Thus, frequent effort praise might always work even if it is exaggerated or understated. Several limitations in this study will be discussed with suggestions for future direction. Firstly, because of the retrospective cross-sectional design, our result still implies a bidirectional relationship between praise and self-efficacy. While much of our discussion is on how praise can be a booster of self-efficacy, it is still possible that highly self-efficacious people tend to receive more praises because they achieve more than low self-efficacious peers, hence the report of a positive association between frequency of praise and self-efficacy. In order to make causal conclusion on the effect of praise, more experiments should be done in the future, in which participants should be assigned into at least three groups: receiving ability praise, receiving effort praise, and receiving no praise. Secondly, future research can explore qualitatively and quantitatively how Vietnamese perceive ability praise and effort praise differently from a cultural standpoint. In real-life circumstances, praising is oftentimes a form of greetings in Vietnamese culture (Ngô Hương Lan, 2016), which can make it more susceptible to be non-specific and untrustworthy. This cultural characteristic of Vietnamese people should be considered when designing studies on praise. Thirdly, the majority of our sample were students from one university in Ho Chi Minh city and were mostly females, which may hinder the generalization of our results. Fourthly, because we did not use back-translation when translating the GSE and CASES scales, misunderstandings might have occurred that hinder accurate measurements. Future studies should always use back-translation when using non-Vietnamese scales. Finally, it would be necessary to explore whether our findings on praise and self-efficacy are also applied to other special and underrepresented groups such as Vietnamese students with learning disabilities (LD). As it has been found that students with LD often 590 underestimate their self-efficacy (Seyed et al., 2017) and social persuasion is not a significant source of efficacy information (Hampton, 1998), using praise to persuade that they are capable might not work in the same way as for typical functioning students. Thus, more research is warranted to examine how ability and effort praise work differently for Vietnamese students with LD. V. CONCLUSION Our findings support Bandura’s self-efficacy theory that social persuasion in forms of verbal praise is a significant predictor of self- efficacy. Here, we found that different types of praise, including ability and effort praise, have differential and sophisticated associations with self- efficacy in general and in academic contexts. Furthermore, regardless of which type of praise is given, sincerity of praise, i.e. the extent to which the recipient of praise perceives that the praise matches themselves, is an important factor. As the first study looking at the role of praise on self- efficacy of Vietnamese university students, we hope that our results give a few highlights to inform the practice of praising for teachers and parents, that if ability praise is used, it needs to be frequent and honest, while effort praise can be either frequent or honest. REFERENCES In Vietnamese Bùi Thị Phương Chi & Phạm Thị Thu Hà (2018). Một vài khảo sát về đặc điểm văn hóa của người Châu Âu và người Việt thể hiện qua lời khen. Retrieved from: mot-vai-khao-sat-ve-dac-diem-van-hoa-cua-nguoi-chau-au-va-nguoi- viet-the-hien-qua-loi-khen Ngô Hương Lan (2016). Đặc trưng văn hóa ứng xử của người Việt Nam và người Nhật Bản qua một số hành vi. Đề tài cấp Viện thuộc Viện Nghiên cứu Đông Bắc Á. Retrieved from: Nguyễn Văn Quang (1999). Một số khác biệt giao tiếp lời nói Việt – Mỹ trong cách thức khen và tiếp nhận lời khen. Luận án Tiến Sĩ, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội. 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