Thanks to the brilliant radio documentary on public education a few weeks ago by This American Life, the Spy was introduced to the Marshmallow Test created by Stanford University’s Walter Mischel. It is considered to be an extremely reliable tool in determining future long term success of children by evaluating the important non-cognitive skill of patience.
In short, a marshmallow was offered to each child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow over a ten minute period, he was promised two instead of one. Mischel’s data suggests that a child’s capacity to resist temptation significantly correlated with successful adulthoods for those in the study.
Non-cognitive skills like patience, tolerance, and stress management are now seen by experts as just as important as achievement scores in testing the success of education for young people. While there might be disagreement on this point, there is none in how hard this exercise is for kids.
joe diamond says
There are a few of these measurements.
I once worked with kids who would (a) Eat the marshmallow
(b) Deny they had done it.
(c) Threaten to beat you with the chair if you didn’t give them more anyway.
They had learned that if you are hungry you take what you need or want right then. If you play around another bigger kid will come along and take what you could have had.
Along these lines I did run across a similar finding in the area of multiple intelligences. Of all the skills and abilities that have been identified it is the ability to get along with others;to manipulate the actions of others, that is predictive of success. Under this model the kid would
(a) Convince you that it would be wrong to leave him alone with the marshmallow.
(b) Insist, in a convincing way, that he leave the room with you.
(c) Make you feel it was ok to trust him with your car keys for a little ride around town.
Then there were the LN Scores.
Joe
connie schroth says
The ability to delay gratification has been said to be the highest level of emotional maturity. Daniel Goldman in his book, Emotional Intelligence (1994), says impulse control is the root of emotional self-control. Those who resisted the temptation to eat the 1st marshmallow, as adolescents, were more socially competent, personally effective, self-assertive, and better able to cope with the frustrations of life. Emotional skills like impulse control can be learned; the ability to delay gratification at age four is “twice as powerful predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ.”
joe diamond says
Now we will see a test of Emotional Intelligence,
Those kids who, at four, controlled impulses and accepted deferred gratification are now graduating from college into a world where their endeavors in universities and professional schools are being rewarded by unemployment, high debt and future poverty. It looks like Grandparent Intelligence will be more predictive. Those who selected very rich grandparents will be fine.
Then there are the NL scores.
Joe