Originally Posted by Austin
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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.

I think it is pretty sad that patience has more bearing on how well a child does in our current educational system than intelligence. Don't get me wrong; patience is a wonderful trait, and obviously one that is well worth having. But it doesn't make a child more likely to need special accommodations in school. In fact, it seems to me that it simply makes a child less likely to suffer the ill effects of not having special accommodations.