For 25 years Social Thinking has been bringing books, curricula, conferences and on-line training to the social learning community -- parents, educators, and interventionists. They provide frameworks, tools, skills and a shared language to improve social competencies.
Social Thinking is generously offering many of their materials to families and educators for free right now. I encourage you to check them out and, if you wish, to share with your child. There is something here for everybody. Social Thinking - free stuff
(Perhaps you have heard your child talking about Zones of Regulation, Body in the Group, the Group Plan, Expected or unexpected behaviors, Whole Body Listening, Rock Brain, Super-Flex? These are concepts from Social Thinking.)
These are the same strategies that we teach our students when we're in class together. Daniel Siegel, MD, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. If you're interested in learning more, go to his website at drdansielgel.com
As essential as they are, we aren’t born with the skills that enable us to control impulses, make plans, and stay focused. We are born with the potential to develop these capacities—or not—depending on our experiences during infancy, throughout childhood, and into adolescence. Our genes provide the blueprint, but the early environments in which children live leave a lasting signature on those genes.
This signature influences how or whether that genetic potential is expressed in the brain circuits that underlie the executive function capacities children will rely on throughout their lives. These skills develop through practice and are strengthened by the experiences through which they are applied and honed. Providing the support that children need to build these skills at home, in child care and preschool programs, and in other settings they experience regularly is one of society’s most important responsibilities.
Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive function.
More Information on Executive Function
Guide: A Guide to Executive Function Learn more about the basics of building executive function skills, and learn strategies that can help build them.
This refers to a group of skills that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, monitor errors, make decisions in light of available information, revise plans as necessary, and resist the urge to let frustration lead to hasty actions. Acquiring the early building blocks of these skills is one of the most important and challenging tasks of the early childhood years, and the opportunity to build further on these rudimentary capacities is critical to healthy development through middle childhood and adolescence. Just as we rely on our well-developed personal “air traffic control system” to make it through our complex days without stumbling, young children depend on their emerging executive function skills to help them as they learn to read and write, remember the steps in performing an arithmetic problem, take part in class discussions or group projects, and enter into and sustain play with other children. The increasingly competent executive functioning of childhood and adolescence enable children to plan and act in a way that makes them good students, classroom citizens, and friends.
Children who do not have opportunities to use and strengthen these skills, and, therefore, fail to become proficient—or children who lack the capacity for proficiency because of disabilities or, for that matter, adults who lose it due to brain injury or old age—have a very hard time managing the routine tasks of daily life. Studying, sustaining friendships, holding down a job, or managing a crisis pose even bigger challenges.
Correcting Popular Misconceptions of Science
The fact that young children have a difficult time with self-control, planning, ignoring distractions, and adjusting to new demands is hardly news to the adults who care for them. It is not widely recognized, however, that these capacities do not automatically develop with maturity over time. Furthermore, it is even less well known that the developing brain circuitry related to these kinds of skills follows an extended timetable that begins in early childhood and continues past adolescence and that it provides the common foundation on which early learning and social skills are built. Based on this new understanding, the following common misconceptions about the development of executive function skills can be laid to rest.
Contrary to popular belief, learning to control impulses, pay attention, and retain information actively in one’s memory does not happen automatically as children mature, and young children who have problems with these skills will not necessarily outgrow them. The evidence is clear that, by 12 months of age, a child’s experiences are helping to lay the foundation for the ongoing development of executive function skills. These early abilities to focus attention, control impulses, and hold information “on-line” in working memory appear to be easily disrupted by highly adverse early experiences or biological disruptions. Evidence also shows that early interventions aimed at improving these capacities before a child enters school can have beneficial impacts across a broad array of important outcomes.
Contrary to popular belief, young children who do not stay on task, lose control of their emotions, or are easily distracted are not “bad kids” who are being intentionally uncooperative and belligerent. Young children with compromised or delayed executive function skills can display very challenging behaviors for which they are often blamed. In most circumstances, however, it is the protracted development of the prefrontal cortex that is to “blame.” Efforts to help affected children develop better executive function skills and adjustments of the demands placed upon them to avoid overtaxing their capabilities are much more helpful than punishment for difficult behavior. Particularly when adverse experiences or environments elicit a toxic stress response, it can be very difficult for even the most competent children to enlist whatever executive function skills they have. In these circumstances, the provision of a safe and predictable environment offers the sense of security needed for successful behavior change to occur.
Contrary to the theory that guides some early education programs that focus solely on teaching letters and numbers, explicit efforts to foster executive functioning have positive influences on instilling early literacy and numeracy skills. Early evidence from randomized trials of interventions designed to foster the cluster of executive function skills (working memory, attention, inhibitory control, etc.) indicates benefits in early literacy and math skills compared with children who experience “regular” classroom activities. Indeed, there is also evidence that emerging executive function skills contribute to early reading and math achievement during the pre-kindergarten years and into kindergarten. This is not surprising insofar as the acquisition of traditional academic skills depends on a child’s capacity to follow and remember classroom rules, control emotions, focus attention, sit still, and learn on demand through listening and watching. Neuroscientists are also beginning to relate specific aspects of executive functioning, notably attentional skills, to specific steps involved in learning to read and to work with numbers. It is important to emphasize that this research is in its infancy, and much remains to be learned. Not only do we need to understand the effectiveness factors that account for the emerging impacts on school readiness from interventions designed to focus on executive function skills, but we also need to examine whether effective early education programs that focus directly on social, numeracy, and language skills also have positive impacts on executive functioning. Thus, the highly interrelated nature of these capacities makes it difficult to label any single intervention as focused explicitly (or not) on the critical domains of executive functioning.
One of the two commitments in our district is Commitment A: Promoting a safe, healthful, and respectful school culture, free of bias and harassment. To that end, we actively teach social and emotional skills to our students through our Responsive Classroom model and also through Second Step targeted lessons taught each week by school counselors in the classroom.
If you would like to learn more about social-emotional learning, check out this short video from Committee for Children, the creators of Second Step.
If you didn't catch the CBS 60 Minutes report on the effects of screens on children, you should watch it here. National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers are looking at the effects of screens on children's brains and are already seeing changes. With the study taking up to ten years, we are in the midst of a live, ongoing experiment of the effects of screen time on children's health. CBS News - 60 Minutes
Stuart Brown is the founder of the National Institute for Play. "Play is the gateway to vitality. By its nature it is uniquely and intrinsically rewarding. It generates optimism, seeks out novelty, makes perseverance fun, leads to mastery, gives the immune system a bounce, fosters empathy and promotes a sense of belonging and community." (National Institute of Play - The Opportunities) This TED talk from Stuart Brown is a gem worth a listen.
It may be one of the most painful things to hear your child say: “I’m dumb” or “I’m stupid.” Your immediate reaction might be “No you’re not!” But is that a helpful way to respond? How you react can have a positive impact on your child’s self-esteem and his motivation to keep working on his challenges.
Here, five experts weigh in on what to do if your child says he’s dumb.
What’s the most helpful way to react?
Mark Griffin: It’s critical to acknowledge that your child feels like he’s not measuring up. You don’t want to just brush his concerns away or simply tell him that you think he’s
In this episode of School’s In, Obradović joined GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about how early experiences shape children’s sensitivity and how those who are especially sensitive to stress and negative experiences can become more resilient.
Playful activities can teach kids how to manage their emotions and behaviors, she said, which is key to building the capacity to recover from stress. “We often want kids to behave in a certain way in the context of them acting out, showing anger or whatnot,” she said. “But there are a lot of ways to learn self-regulation in a positive way.”
Listen from the link below, and find more episodes of School's In at the Stanford Radio main page. The show airs Saturdays on SiriusXM Insight Channel 121.
Many parents have asked for more information about the Zones of Regulation, a framework that we use at Mitchell School to foster self-regulation and emotional control.
LIFE IS 10% WHAT HAPPENS TO US AND 90% HOW WE REACT TO IT. -CHARLES SWINDOLL
Self-regulation is something everyone continually works on whether or not we are cognizant of it. We all encounter trying circumstances that test our limits from time to time. If we are able to recognize when we are becoming less regulated, we are able to do something about it to manage our feelings and get ourselves to a healthy place. This comes naturally for some, but for others it is a skill that needs to be taught and practiced. This is the goal of The Zones of Regulation (or Zones for short).
WHAT ARE THE ZONES?
The Zones is a systematic, cognitive behavioral approach used to teach self-regulation by categorizing all the different ways we feel and states of alertness we experience into four concrete colored zones. The Zones framework provides strategies to teach students to become more aware of and independent in controlling their emotions and impulses, manage their sensory needs, and improve their ability to problem solve conflicts.
By addressing underlying deficits in emotional and sensory regulation, executive functioning, and social cognition, the framework is designed to help move students toward independent regulation. The Zones of Regulation incorporates Social Thinking® (www.socialthinking.com) concepts and numerous visuals to teach students to identify their feelings/level of alertness, understand how their behavior impacts those around them, and learn what tools they can use to manage their feelings and states.
THE FOUR ZONES: OUR FEELINGS & STATES DETERMINE OUR ZONE
TheRed Zoneis used to describe extremely heightened states of alertness and intense emotions. A person may be elated or experiencing anger, rage, explosive behavior, devastation, or terror when in the Red Zone.
TheYellow Zone is also used to describe a heightened state of alertness and elevated emotions, however one has more control when they are in the Yellow Zone. A person may be experiencing stress, frustration, anxiety, excitement, silliness, the wiggles, or nervousness when in the Yellow Zone.
TheGreen Zoneis used to describe a calm state of alertness. A person may be described as happy, focused, content, or ready to learn when in the Green Zone. This is the zone where optimal learning occurs.
TheBlue Zone is used to describe low states of alertness and down feelings such as when one feels sad, tired, sick, or bored.
The Zones can be compared to traffic signs. When given a green light or in the Green Zone, one is “good to go”. A yellow sign means be aware or take caution, which applies to the Yellow Zone. A red light or stop sign means stop, and when one is the Red Zone this often is the case. The Blue Zone can be compared to the rest area signs where one goes to rest or re-energize. All of the zones are natural to experience, but the framework focuses on teaching students how to recognize and manage their Zone based on the environment and its demands and the people around them. For example, when playing on the playground or in an active/competitive game, students are often experiencing a heightened internal state such as silliness or excitement and are in the Yellow Zone, but it may not need to be managed. However, if the environment is changed to the library where there are different expectations than the playground, students may still be in the Yellow Zone but have to manage it differently so their behavior meets the expectations of the library setting.
THE STORY BEHIND THE ZONES
As an occupational therapist and autism resource specialist working in public schools for six years, I frequently had students on my caseload who were struggling not just with sensory-regulation but also emotional regulation. Too often the time spent with their non-disabled peers was being limited due to my students' frequent outbursts and inability to cope effectively. Adopting Ross Greene’s mantra, “Kids do well if they can” (The Explosive Child, 2006), students were frequently being punished for disruptive behaviors rather than being taught skills to control their behavior. While taking graduate coursework on Autism Spectrum Disorders and Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder, I had the idea to create the concept of The Zones of Regulation to teach students to self-regulate their sensory needs as well as their emotions and impulses in order to meet the demands of the environment and be successful academically and socially. After successfully piloting and expanding on my concept with the students I worked with over a few years, I was encouraged by my colleagues to create a curriculum to support my concept. The Zones of Regulation concept was influenced by the work of Williams and Shellenberger’s The Alert Program® (1994) and Kari Dunn Buron and Mitzi Curtis’ The Incredible 5 Point Scale(2003). As I was designing the curriculum, I integrated best practices in the field of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) into the curriculum and conducted extensive background research in the area of self-regulation, including sensory regulation, emotional regulation, and executive functioning. I also researched how these processes relate to children with ASD and ADHDs’ learning styles. By integrating principles of Simon Baron Cohen’s Systemizing Theory, The Zones provides a system to classify states of arousal, feelings, and emotions into four easily identifiable distinct color-coded Zones. Creating a system such as The Zones to categorize all the complex feelings students experience eases their ability to recognize and communicate how they are feeling, as well as tap into strategies to aid them in self-regulation. While designing the curriculum, I incorporated Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking® concepts to help students become more aware of how others are perceiving them when they are regulated versus in less regulated states. By tying in Social Thinking concepts, the lessons on self-regulation become more meaningful to the students’ lives as they gain a deeper understanding of the impact their behavior has on their relationships. Learning activities entail the use of cognitive behavior management strategies to reinforce the use of The Zones of Regulation throughout the student’s day. By using cognitive behavior management, the students learn how to self-monitor and reflect on the effectiveness of their regulation strategies. This method allows students to move away from staff prompts to regulate and to assume personal responsibility in self-regulation.
CLICK HERE TO READ AN ARTICLE BY SOCIAL THINKING THAT FURTHER DISCUSSES THE JOURNEY OF THE ZONES.
Welcome back to school. Transition times like these are great opportunities to help our children (and ourselves!) form or change habits. Charles Duhigg wrote The Power of Habit in 2012 and it became a national best seller. Duhigg comments,"At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work." http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/ What better time than a back-to-school transition to bring awareness to the the habits we're teaching our children so that they can grow into healthy, self-directed, and transformative young people. Take a moment to learn from Charles Duhigg at TEDx Teachers College
We continue to focus on teaching students social and emotional skills, also known as soft skills. The staff at Mitchell School works hard to create a healthy school culture by helping students develop skills to manage their emotions, resolve conflicts, and make responsible decisions. You can learn more about the research on social emotional learning at https://www.edutopia.org/sel-research-learning-outcomes
Why Social and Emotional Skills Are Vital to Keep At-Risk Students on Track
By Lynne Shallcross
Academic learning is usually in the spotlight at school, but teaching elementary-age students “soft” skills like self-control and social skills might help in keeping at-risk kids out of criminal trouble in the future, a study finds.
Duke University researchers looked at a program called Fast Track, which was started in the early 1990s for children who were identified by their teachers and parents to be at high risk for developing aggressive behavioral problems.
The students were randomized into two groups; half took part in the intervention, which included a teacher-led curriculum, parent training groups, academic tutoring and lessons in self-control and social skills. The program, which lasted from first grade through 10th grade, reduced delinquency, arrests and use of health and mental health services as the students aged through adolescence and young adulthood, as researchers explained in a separate study published earlier this year.
In the latest study, researchers looked at the “why” behind those earlier findings. In looking at the data from nearly 900 students, the researchers found that about a third of the impact on future crime outcomes was due to the social and self-regulation skills the students learned from ages 6 to 11.
The academic skills that were taught as part of Fast Track turned out to have less of an impact on crime and delinquency rates than soft skills, which are associated with emotional intelligence. Soft skills might include teaching kids to work cooperatively in a group or teaching them how to think about the long-term consequences when they make a decision, whereas teaching physics is an example of a hard skill.
“The conclusion that we would make is that these [soft] skills should be emphasized even more in our education system and in our system of socializing children,” says Kenneth Dodge, a professor of public policy and of psychology and neuroscience at Duke who was a principal investigator in this study as well as in the original Fast Track project. Parents should do all they can to promote these skills with their children, Dodge says, as should education policymakers.
“To the extent we can improve those skills, we can improve outcomes in delinquency and juvenile crime,” says Dodge, who is also director of Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy. The study was published Wednesday in the journal Child Development.
To Neil Bernstein, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in child and adolescent behavior disorders, the researchers’ findings seem consistent with he’s seen on the ground in working with children for more than 30 years. And while he says agrees with the importance of teaching self-control and social skills, he would add empathy to the list, too.
“Empathy is what makes us aware of the feelings of others and when you’re empathic, you’re much less likely to hurt someone else’s feelings,” says Bernstein, who serves on the advisory board for the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and is the author of multiple books, including How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble and What to Do if You Can’t.
Being in tune with how someone else feels might also make adolescents steer clear of bullying and other “behaviors of concern,” Bernstein says.
Empathy was not one of the skills that were directly measured in this study, according to Lucy Sorensen, a Ph.D. student at Duke and lead author of the study. But there were several measures of “prosocial behavior,” Sorensen says, defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit others.
While Bernstein thinks the study’s findings are meaningful and could potentially serve as a model for schools, he says that collectively getting a school system, teachers, parents and students all motivated enough to take part in an intervention like Fast Track is challenging.
Several parts of the Fast Track study have been picked up successfully in other school settings, Sorensen says, such as a social-emotional learning curriculum called Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies, or PATHS. Programs like Fast Track need buy-in from school systems, teachers and parents, she says, and that can be a tough sell. But she adds that it’s a strength of Fast Track that the students get support both at school and at home.
“There’s a growing and new understanding of what it takes to be successful as an adolescent and an adult,” Dodge says. “It used to be that what we thought all it took was academic skills. Reading and math are very important for tasks that require reading and math. Self-control is important for life tasks that require self-control – that’s what avoiding arrest and violent crime is all about.”
Link to article at - https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/12/17/why-emotional-intelligence-is-vital-to-keep-students-on-track/
The first unit of Second Step lessons that we teach at Mitchell School is entitled "Skills for Learning." The homelinks that you do with your children help them explain to you and then practice the skills of focusing attention, listening, using self-talk, and being assertive. We stress during our lessons that their ability to "boss their own brains and their own bodies" is crucial to their success in life. First graders saw the two video clips -- the Mischel marshmallow test and the Sesame Street version featuring Cookie Monster. To see the videos and to let your children see the videos again please scroll down.
It all started when psychology professor Walter Mischel was watching his four closely-spaced daughters growing up. He realized he had no idea what was going on in their brains that made it possible for a child who at one moment had no impulse control and just a few months later could inhibit her emotions, wait for things and have conversations. He became curious about how children develop these skills, which led to the famous marshmallow experiment conducted at the Bing Nursery School on Stanford’s campus, where Mischel was a professor.
That study has become famous over the last 50 years, leading to many hilarious YouTube videos (none of which are the original test subjects) and a lifetime’s work examining how various strategies can help both adults and children learn to delay gratification.
In the original marshmallow study, researchers spent time building up trust and rapport with their 4-year-old subjects before starting the experiment. The researcher then told the child that she was going to leave him in the room with a treat (cookie, pretzel or marshmallow) and if he waited to eat it until she returned, she would give him two marshmallows. Alternatively, the child could put an end to his misery by ringing the bell, at which point the researcher would return, but the child would get only the one treat. Mischel and his colleagues followed the test subjects over the next 50 years and found that those who were able to wait fared better on a variety of indices, including higher SAT scores, better ability to cope with stress and a lower body mass index.
“One of the biggest determinators of choices of that kind is trust,” Mischel said at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston.
He is now a psychology professor at Columbia University. Critics of his work often point out that children living in low-income communities, many of whom have experienced discrimination or disrespect from society, have no reason to trust those in positions of authority. Those kids might scarf down the marshmallow, not because they have no self-control but because they have no reason to believe the researcher is telling the truth about a second marshmallow.
Mischel agrees that the importance of a trusting relationship between the adult and child is often overlooked in reporting about his research. He began studying that aspect at the very beginning of this work.
“To even want to delay gratification requires a trust expectation that’s often not there for kids for whom self-control and delayed gratification is most difficult,” Mischel said. For children whose worlds are unstable and unpredictable, the marshmallow test may be testing belief in authority as much as self-control.
But aside from the specifics of the marshmallow test, lots of research has shown the value of self-control to positive life outcomes. That’s why Mischel is trying to focus the conversation on strategies educators and parents can use to help kids build self-control.
“The value of self-control has been measured in lots of longitudinal studies,” said Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University who studies self-control and helped debunk an earlier theory that self-esteem was the foundation of academic success.
Self-control is the ability to override thoughts, impulses and emotions, and people who have it tend to do better in school and work. Baumeister said studies have shown people with high levels of self-control have better relationships, are happier, have less stress, are in better physical health, have better mental health and live longer.
Baumeister’s work has also helped demonstrate that self-control is like a muscle — it can be strengthened with exercise, but it also tires. “You have one resource, willpower, and you can expend it on different things,” Baumeister said at a Learning and the Brain conference.
So if a child uses up all his willpower controlling his emotions, he may be too depleted to show a lot of self-control at performing tasks. Additionally, making decisions and compromising use the same reserves of willpower. When people are depleted, they are more likely to default to old behaviors, less likely to compromise, more likely to follow impulses and less likely to trust others.
Knowing how important self-control is for positive outcomes, but recognizing that many children are experiencing several demands for their self-control at all times, how can educators help students build up their self-control muscles so they don’t tire as quickly? STRATEGIES TO DELAY GRATIFICATION
Mischel says that his studies of tactics used by 4- and 5-year-olds hold true for older people as well. One of the biggest ones is self-distraction. During the marshmallow test, kids sit in that room by themselves with the coveted marshmallow in front of them, and they sing to themselves or imagine they are somewhere else.
“It’s purposeful self-distraction with executive function,” Mischel said. “They have the goal in mind. They are actively inhibiting the responses. They are preventing hands from reaching out to take it.”
Another common strategy kids use is self-distancing. Mischel described one boy who picked up the bell he would use to call the researcher back into the room and slowly, very carefully, moved it to the edge of the table as far from him as possible. Other kids pretended the marshmallow was a picture, instead of real food, making it seem less attractive. Mischel even worked with “Sesame Street” on a Cookie Monster skit that would show young kids that it pays to wait.
While the original marshmallow test has come under fire for its small size and homogenous makeup (all the kids were either children of Stanford faculty or graduate students), Mischel has continued delayed gratification studies with students in the South Bronx with similar results. He said the keys are to keep the goal in mind, to suppress responses and to monitor progress toward the goal.
All humans have what Mischel calls a “hot system” and a “cool system,” both of which are crucially important. The hot system is where the fight-or-flight syndrome comes from. It is emotional, simple, stress-induced, reflexive, fast, centered in the amygdala and draws on the limbic system. It’s fundamental to survival and it develops early. When the hot system goes up, the cool system goes down. Mischel said most kids living in difficult situations are forced into using their “hot system” most of the time.
The cool system is cognitive, complex, reflective and slow. It is based in the frontal lobe and hippocampus and develops later. It is attenuated by stress and is crucial to self-control. The two systems work at opposite purposes, but both are important to survival and success.
When it comes to helping students delay gratification and thus work on self-control, Mischel said his experiments show “you have to cool the now and heat the later.” In other words, things that are immediate stimulate the hot system, but delayed gratification requires the cool system. So, when trying to get a student to see the benefit of working hard all the way through school so he or she can get into college, educators have to help students see that delayed reward as “hot.”
“The critical thing is to make delayed consequences more visible, more complete, more consequential and to make the immediate rewards less hot,” Mischel said. When kids are stressed out, it’s much more difficult for them to keep long-term goals in mind because they are constantly activating their “hot” or stress-induced system.
Mischel has personal experience with the strategies he recommends. He used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and often a pipe at night. He knew that smoking was bad for him, but that wasn’t enough to make the consequences feel real. One day he saw a man in the Stanford hospital getting ready for radiation. “That image is what allowed me to make the delayed consequences hot,” Mischel said. “Every time I reached for the cigarette, I remembered that image.” And he was able to quit smoking using that very personal image to help him delay gratification.
Mischel suggests that to help students develop self-control, educators could spend a little time helping kids identify their own hot spots and developing strategies to mediate them. For example, if a student knows that texts from friends distract him from homework, then he’ll turn off his phone when he’s trying to focus. It’s a pre-determined “if/then” plan based on specific trigger points. But to make that plan, students have to know what the “if” is.
“The research makes it very clear that the human brain is far more educable than previously thought,” Mischel said. He sees this kind of individual mapping as a key to developing emotional intelligence and ultimately as a route to much more freedom, choice and agency. Rather than having instinct drive decisions, kids can learn to make the decisions they believe will benefit them in the long term.
“We don’t want to train our children to be without hot emotionality, we just want them to be in control,” Mischel said.
Young people are actually getting better at delaying gratification and self-control, Mischel said. He points out that just as intelligence has been increasing over the past 60 years, so, too, have these other characteristics. He attributes the change to technology, and is particularly excited about video games, which he says require setting a goal, inhibiting interfering responses and using attention-control mechanisms to reach that goal.
“It may be a distraction from doing their arithmetic, but the games themselves can be enormously useful tools in enhancing executive function,” Mischel said.
Ultimately, he believes if educators can find productive ways to use his research in classrooms, they will also improve student motivation, which can’t be detached from the idea of student efficacy in meeting goals.
