Thursday, January 19, 2006

Self-Discipline May Beat Smarts as Key to Success

The article below is rather unrealistic in downplaying the importance of innate ability but what it reports is nonetheless of great importance. Nobody could deny the importance of self-discipline or the grievous results of lack of it. Given my own background in educational research, however, I guess I have to note that most research on delay of gratification (including that reported below) generalizes far more widely than the evidence allows

Zoe Bellars and Brad McGann, eighth-graders at Swanson Middle School in Arlington, do their homework faithfully and practice their musical instruments regularly. In a recent delayed gratification experiment, they declined to accept a dollar bill when told they could wait a week and get two dollars. Those traits might be expected of good students, certainly no big deal. But a study by University of Pennsylvania researchers suggests that self-discipline and self-denial could be a key to saving U.S. schools. According to a recent article by Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E.P. Seligman in the journal Psychological Science, self-discipline is a better predictor of academic success than even IQ.

"Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes," the researchers said. "We suggest another reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline. . . . We believe that many of America's children have trouble making choices that require them to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain, and that programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement."

But how, educators, parents and other social scientists want to know, do you measure self-discipline? Duckworth, a former teacher studying for a doctorate in psychology, and Seligman, a psychology professor famous for books such as "Learned Optimism," used an assortment of yardsticks, including questions for the students (including how likely they are to have trouble breaking bad habits, on a 1-to-5 scale), ratings by their teachers and parents and the $1-now-or-$2-later test, which the researchers call the Delay Choice Task.

The results: "Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report card grades, standardized achievement test scores, admission to a competitive high school and attendance. Self-discipline measured in the fall predicted more variance in each of these outcomes than did IQ, and unlike IQ, self-discipline predicted gains in academic performance over the school year."

The study looked at one group of 140 eighth-graders and another group of 164 eighth-graders in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse magnet school in a Northeast city. The names of the city, the school and the students were not revealed, so this reporter attempted a very small and unscientific version of the Delay Choice Task at Swanson. Of the 10 eighth-graders approached during their lunch period, eight chose to forgo $1 right away in exchange for $2 in a week. The mothers of Zoe and Brad, who both declined the $1 offer, said they were not surprised by their children's decisions and thought the correlation of self-discipline with academic success made sense.

"I remember when Zoe was in the second grade, they had to do this poster of what they would do with $1 million," recalled her mother, Arlene Vigoda-Bellars, a former journalist. Her daughter said she would use it to go to Harvard. In preparation for that college competition, Zoe is taking intensified algebra and second-year Spanish, has a voice scholarship at a music school and plays first flute in Swanson's symphonic band.

Bertra McGann, a technical writer married to a Foreign Service officer, said that when Brad was 4, the family lived in Kenya and he was put in a class with older students. "He would come home from school and hand me the flashcards and work on his sight reading -- an extraordinary amount of self-discipline for a 4-year-old," she said. Now 13, Brad plays clarinet and basketball and earned his black belt in tae kwon do by practicing two hours a day, six days a week for two years.

Some experts expressed doubt about the Delay Choice Task. "I'd assume it was some kind of scam, take the buck and run," said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a nonprofit group that is critical of over-reliance on testing in U.S. schools. Zoe refused to take the $2 at the end of the experiment. "I think it is rude to take money from strangers," she said. Zoe always does her homework the minute she gets home from school at 2:30 p.m. Her friends, however, are not so diligent. During a telephone interview, Zoe noted that several of her friends' "away messages" -- put up on their online instant-messaging systems to explain why they aren't responding -- said they were doing their homework. "It's Sunday night," she said. "I finished mine Friday."

Some educators said schools can teach self-discipline. Rafe Esquith, an award-winning Los Angeles teacher, often tells his low-income fifth-graders about a study that showed that hungry 4-year-olds willing to wait for two marshmallows were more successful years later than those who gobbled up one marshmallow immediately. Ryan Hill, director of the TEAM Academy Charter School in Newark, N.J., said students at his school, a Knowledge Is Power Program middle school in a low-income neighborhood, are required to stay at school until their homework is done if TV interfered with study the night before. "Over time, they learn to just do their homework before watching TV, delaying gratification, which becomes a habit of self-discipline," Hill said.

Educational psychologist Gerald W. Bracey noted the power of self-discipline in sports, citing tennis star Chris Evert, who triumphed over more talented players because she practiced more. Martha McCarthy, an education professor at Indiana University, said such habits could be taught in early grades, with methods such as "giving students time to visit with their friends if they have been attentive during a lesson."

Will there be a Self-Discipline Test, the SDT, to replace the SAT? Most experts don't think so. Clever but lazy college applicants could "pretty easily figure out what the right answers would be to appear self-disciplined," said University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham. Bruce Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said self-discipline was good but not necessarily the only key to success. Albert Einstein, Poch said, "wasn't the most self-disciplined kid, at least according to his math grades through school."

That hasn't stopped Duckworth, who has two small daughters, from using her findings at home. Her eldest daughter, Amanda, 4, gets only one piece of saved Halloween candy each night after dinner. Asked why, Amanda says slowly and carefully, "It is de-LAY of gra-ti-fi-ca-tion."

Source





"INVESTIGATING" AN EGREGIOUS LIAR: WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE

Post lifted from Pirate Ballerina

Does CU honestly believe it has convened a "fair and balanced" investigating committee? After being caught slipping pro-Churchill ringers into the process, does CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) actually believe it has put together an impartial and informed panel?

First of all, the current composition of the Ward Churchill Investigating Committee (formed of three CU professors and two outside academics by SCRM) is sadly but unsurprisingly comprised of the same proportion of leftists as academia itself-at least one of the panel may be a Marxist; at least three are radical leftists. This hardly seems impartial.

More importantly, however-and apparently overlooked in the selection process-is the fact that with one exception, none of the five committee members knows diddly-squat (a technical term meaning zippo, nada, zilch) about Indian history or Indian law. CU's SCRM apparently decided Indian scholarship was inconsequential to one of the most important allegations: Whether Churchill bent (or simply made up) history to support his argument.

Here's the current membership of SCRM's Churchill Investigating Committee:




Missing from the qualifications of these professors is any hint of knowlege or even casual awareness of Indian history (with the aforementioned exception of Professor Clinton, whose expertise in Indian law theoretically, at least, requires a knowlege of Indian history). The allegations against Churchill are serious and require of the panelists a serious knowlege of academic plagiarism and/or Indian history to properly discharge their duty. Is it that hard to find an academic who A) has a scholarly expertise in one of the areas pertaining to the allegations against Churchill, and B) hasn't come out in a very public manner as pro-Churchill? 

It's not as though no such experts exist. We've found a solid list of academics and experts who, while some (or all) of whom may share academia's leftist tilt, at least bring to the investigation some expertise in Indian history (we'll look at plagiarism experts at a later date). In no particular order:



  • Charles Wilkinson, University of Colorado - Boulder. Professor Wilkinson has published extensively on Indian sovereignty and law.

  • Joseph McGeshick, Fort Peck Community College. Fort Peck is the tribal college for the Assiniboin tribe, who were greatly affected by the 1837 smallpox epidemic. Professor McGeshick has the added cache of being an enrolled Chippewa, and is an expert on the history of the local Plains Indians.

  • Shepard Krech, Brown University. Professor Krech is the author of a book on the ecological aspects of Indian life.

  • Elizabeth Fenn, Duke University. Professor Fenn has published an award-winning book on American Indian smallpox epidemics, as well as an award-winning article on biological warfare in American history (including deliberate smallpox infection).

  • C. Adrian Heidenreich, Professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University-Billings. Professor Heidenreich is an expert on Plains Indians history.

  • Michael K. Trimble, Ph.D. Dr. Trimble is the chief curator for the Army Corps of Engineers; he served as the lead forensic archeologist on the team that investigated the mass graves found in northern Iraq. He also happens to have written his dissertation on the Mandan smallpox epidemic of 1837.

  • Michael O'Brien, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Professor O'Brien led the excavation of Fort Clark, the site of the 1837 smallpox outbreak among the Mandans. He also supervised the above-mentioned Michael Trimble's dissertation on the 1837 epidemic.

  • W. Raymond Wood, University of Missouri-Columbia. Professor Wood is an expert on Plains Indians.

  • Barton H. Barbour, Boise State University. Professor Barbour is the author of Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade, in which he examines the Mandan smallpox epidemic.
Surely at least one of the above-noted experts in Indian history has some free time to examine the scholarship of Ward Churchill. With all this expertise out there (and if we can find nine experts, there must be hundreds, if not thousands), it makes one wonder what SCRM is thinking when it stacked the deck with a Mexican folklorist, a feminist lawyer, a British history expert, a death penalty opponent, and a single Indian law expert. Did they just use a dart board?

Or-since from the panel's lack of expertise it seems obvious that investigating charges of plagiarism and fabrication of Indian history are not truly the mandate of the panel-did SCRM have some other outcome in mind?

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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