How Children Succeed

Marshmallows Image by John-Morgan at Flickr.com

Notes taken on: No These Things Will Not Be on the Final Exam

Walter Mischel tests will power

• • Gathered kids up from a preschool and put them in a room
  • Give choice: one marshmallow now, or two later then he leaves the room
  • They can ring the bell and he’ll give them one, but if they wait for him to get back and he’ll give them 2 
  • Tested 500 kids, 4 year olds are way better than their younger counterparts
  • Some could last 1-20 minutes, average 7 minutes
  • Later in life, the kids who could hold out longer were more successful
  • Wanted to see if there was a correlation between the time and their success later in life
    • Looked at their SAT scores, and there were strong correlations
    • 210 points between a kids who can wait 1 minute and 20 minutes
    • Their behavior also reflects the time they waited
  • They waited for the kids to be 30
    • Checked their health, their jobs 
    • Kids who waited went farther in their jobs and were in better shape

How Stress Affects the Brain

James Heckman: psychologist at the center of all the research

• • Used to be school smarts: cognitive skills
  • New way is non-cognitive skills: tenacity, resilience, will-power
  • Getting a GED is way more efficient than getting a high school diploma
    • Saves money and time
  • If this were true, should we even have high school
  • Is the GED equivalent to a diploma, do people with GEDs do as well as people with diplomas
    • People with a GED are doing better than dropouts without one, but way worse than those with a high school diploma
    • Success in college, military, marriage, is way lower than those with a diploma
  • On the test, people with GEDs had the same scores as those who went through high school, but they were way less successful later in life
    • Non-cognitive skills were what made the difference between the two
      • Soft skills, social skills, personality traits
  • LeDuc: We only test what is easy to measure, so we don’t test these other crucial skills that we need later in life
  • Character and Academic should have better balance in schools
  • He has now been doing research on non-cognitive skills
    • Self-control is one of the key ones: the ability to resist impulses, delay gratification, etc
  • Poverty is not the direct cause of unsuccess, it is the stress of poverty
    • You cannot be successful if you are stressed
    • Staying out of your fight or flight helps you stay able to handle the situation rationally, give yourself time to process instead of going into  an instinctual reaction
  • People will diagnose their kids with a mental illness even if they don’t have one
    • Witnessing violence on a daily basis
  • Long-term stress causes children to release the chemicals that are necessary for fight or flight, but on a daily basis 
    • This causes those pathways to become more and more ingrained in their brains, so some parts of their brains never develop fully
    • Having 4+ adverse childhood experiences is all you need for a huge impact
  • Early stresses from family created problem that cannot be solved in the school system other than putting them in the “slow classroom” even if they don’t need that kind of care
  • Cognitive skills cannot be taught, but non-cognitive ones can 
  • Idle school kids were given a college mentor, and only told them how scientists have found that you can improve your intelligence
    • The kids who were told that improved greatly just from those few experiences
    • Especially those who had the most reason for pressure to succeed
  • Certain mother rats tended to groom / soothe their babies in stressful situations
    • Studied those who were groomed, and those were better at mazes, less fearful, did better on the scientists tests
    • The grooming only happened in the first few weeks of their life, then they never saw their parents again
  • ⅔ of american kids have a secure attachment
    • Those who do are much better at handling life problems, are more social, etc.
  • If kids live in a stressful home but have a secure attachment, didn’t have as many of the biological effects that others didn’t
    • Having that close relationship with a parent can actually protect them from the effects of a stressful home
  • When the mother can see what their child can do, they begin to attach more with their baby as well
  • The attachment with a mother / parent can save a child from near every single bad impact that the home’s stress could cause on the child’s brain
  • Coaches helping teach parents how to form that bond has made it so 61% of kids have a bond vs 2% without intervention

Paul Tough

• • Kiwana signed up for an All One Goal class, she trained and learned non-cognitive skills, and behavioral skills in a classroom to boost her grades and confidence
    • In every college class, she sat in the front, and introduced herself to the teacher before class
  • America has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world
    • Too focused on getting kids to college, but not on keeping them there
    • 58% of kids who start college graduate in 6 years or less
  • People need support to do things themselves, so people are trained on how to be self-sufficient, and they will be extremely successful