I would note that this statistic has been obtained through regression analysis rather than through any actual studies of 4 and 17 year olds.
I've fought that battle and had to give it up. A good regression analysis is almost always right. And in any case, the result on IQ change IS based on longitudinal studies.
But giftedness can be extinguished, and it can be nurtured.� He mentions a New York Times education analysis from 2008, which noted that after the city streamlined its G&T program, requiring specific cutoff scores for the OLSAT, the percentage of white students had shot up from 33 to 48 percent, while the percentage of black and Hispanic enrollment had fallen. �Sometimes,� he says, �you look at a big city�s decisions to do this and wonder if it�s about nurturing giftedness or if it�s about keeping middle-class families in the city limits.�
and :
Many, especially boys, can�t sit still for the full duration of an exam; others can�t stay awake or concentrate for that long, choosing at some catastrophic point to crawl under their desks and give up. Nor is the context in which these tests are administered exactly relaxing for young children. Both IQ tests require that they sit alone in a room with a tester they probably haven�t seen before. .....
�Much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.� It�s hard not to think about that observation in the context of intelligence-testing 4-year-olds. The script is so rigid, the tasks are so narrow and precise.
I doubt most bright Hispanic or Black kids would sit through this, either. The black kid would be even more active while the Hispanic kid would be suspect of the tester the moment he walked into the room.
But my money�s on the marshmallow test. It�s quite compelling and, apparently, quite famous�Shenk talks about it with great relish in The Genius in All of Us. In the sixties, a Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel rounded up 653 young children and gave them a choice: They could eat one marshmallow at that very moment, or they could wait for an unspecified period of time and eat two. Most chose two, but in the end, only one third of the sample had the self-discipline to wait the fifteen or so minutes for them. Mischel then had the inspired idea to follow up on his young subjects, checking in with them as they were finishing high school. He discovered that the children who�d waited for that second marshmallow had scored, on average, 210 points higher on the SAT.
Two hundred and ten points. Can Princeton Review boast such a gain? Maybe our schools ought to be screening children for self-discipline and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification, rather than intelligence and academic achievement. It seems as good a predictor of future success as any. And Mischel�s test subjects, too, were just 4 years old.
I would agree.
