Favorite student stories

 My students at Granite State College in my online human development class have been fascinated with our current discussion about the "marshmallow test."  This was a test done in the 1960's by a Stanford University researcher named Walter Mischel and has since been replicated (repeated) many times.  What they did and what they found are fascinating.  They put four-year-olds in a room and put a marshmallow in front of them.  They told the children that they were going to come back in 15 (sometimes 20) minutes, and if they hadn't eaten the marshmallow, they would get TWO marshmallows.  Some of the children ate the marshmallow right away.  Others - though obviously tortured by the temptation - were able to delay the gratification of marshmallow-eating.  The videos of the children tugging at their hair, scrunching up their faces, even smelling the marshmallows are adorable.  One little girl actually managed to suck out the inside of the marshmallow, leaving the outside intact, so it looked like she hadn't eaten one.  (I don't know if she got extra points for cleverness.)

But here's the cool thing:  When they followed up on these kids 10 and 15 years later, they found that the kids who were able to resist the temptation - who seemed to have more self-control - were more likely to still be in school, had better grades, were better adjusted and dependable (according to questionnaires filled out by their teachers and parents) and those who couldn't resist the marshmallow were less likely to still be in school, more likely to be in trouble, etc.

Some students question whether this can really be an accurate measure of how successful a person will be in the future.  And who can really say how important self-control is when you're looking at whether or not you can be successful in life?  Do you think you could have resisted a marshmallow at 4?  Here's a Ted Talks video about it.  See what you think:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html