Radio Lab

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/96056-your-future-marshmallow

• • Walter Mischel- Marshmallow study
    • 2-5 years old
    • Concept of delayed gratification starts around the age of 4
      • They increased dramatically compared to 2-3 year olds
    • Children would get 1 marshmallow now or if they waited they’d would get 2
    • Tested 500~ children total
    • After 10~ years the children who performed better in the initial test were successful later in school
      • Seconds of their wait time had correlation to their SAT scores
        • 210 points
    • Also kept track of health, body mass, goal keeping

This American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/474/back-to-school

• • Parents tend to be anxious about children’s brains and test scores
  • What matters in child’s life is not the skills school teaches mostly
  • GED- high school graduation exam
    • Class claimed to change people’s attitude in 2 months
  • If its true, why do we have schools
  • Is GED same as high school?
  • Farther investigation showed GED students performed slightly better than undergraduates, but didn’t perform as good as high school students
    • Performance in occupation, reading, success rates in college/marriage/military….
    • This didn’t show up in the test results, however
  • GED and high school, in terms of score/passing, its only cognitive ability
  • Non-cognitive ability affecting this?
    • Character
    • Self regulation, self consciousness, delaying gratification,  resisting impulse
  • Why testing?
    • • Testing can be showed in data form, while character is not quantifiable (cognitive)
      • Character testing is also expensive, and school runs on taxpayer money (non-cognitive)
  • Poverty is unhealthy environment that gives off stress to children, which in turn makes them perform less in school environment
  • Stress hormones distracts students from learning
    • Adrenaline- short term
    • Cortisone- long term
    • Learning part of the brain shuts off, and only fight or flight is active
  • Repeated stress affects development of brain, especially pre-frontal cortex
    • Hard to pay attention
    • 1/4 of low income students had short attention span
  • Kewauna- traumatic childhood (dramatic experience)
    • Always angry, but never knew why
      • Bad temper / anger control
    • 72 referrals in 6th grade
      • Sent to the ‘Wings’ program, was not a productive class
      • Got arrested for punching a cop (assault of a police) when she was 15
      • Her mom didn’t want Kewauna to have the same life as her
      • Entered a program in high school that taught students non- cognitive skills
      • Her grades and SAT scores improved after learning the non- cognitive skills, eventually got accepted to University
  • Stress from family issues couldn’t be resolved with school
  • Non- cognitive skills can be learned even when someone is old
  • Nurture at young age leads to better performance as an adult
  • 8% of Chicago high school freshmen will graduate from college
    • One goal program (Kewauna)? 85% of them returned to college as sophomores