February 01, 2006
You can measure self-discipline? Cool!
Someone is asking: Which is more important, IQ or self-discipline?. What's self-discipline? According to the article, it includes the ability to delay gratification:
Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds' ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later.
It makes sense, but self-discipline is very under-studied, compared to IQ (the article points out a more than 10-to-1 ratio of studies of IQ to studies of discipline).
Is this related somehow to Accustoming children to hardship?
That study sounds like a great idea. And it makes me think of so many other subjects to study. What other qualities are measurable? Compassion? Fair-mindedness? And what outcomes can be measured, beyond academic performance?
Posted by Billy at February 1, 2006 02:42 PM
The myth of I.Q. as a valid measure of potential to learn is, thankfully, being debunked. The origins of the I.Q. test in the U.S. are nefarious. It was created to "prove" that some immigrants were mentally defective and therefore not deserving of an opportunity to come into the U.S. Several "test runs" were needed before the results came out right in the early days. Men had to do better than women (which meant that more questions were geared to sports than to common sense solutions to problems), lighter-skinned Europeans had to do better than people from countries with more darker-skinned people, populations that tended to be Christian had to be better than Jewish-dominant populations, and English speakers (our allies) had to do better than non-English speakers. (That last was not so hard -- just don't let anyone translate the questions as the new arrival took the test.) The history on this is fascinating for the lengths that test-makers had to go to so that the results were consistently what had been pre-determined as "right."
I wish I could find a good web site that traced the history and the flaws of I.Q. testing. We do a great dis-service to our children to peg them as "able" or "less able" by this kind of test. But giving them the confidence to TRY and to learn all they can works wonders. I heard a wonderful lecture on the subject by Greg Ciardi of Boston in the summer of 2003. He completely changed the way I viewed "ability" in human beings.
