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.
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