Standing Still Predicts School Success Better Than IQ

Especially as they talk about young children, any faults lie with their parents--the same generations who think they were tougher when they were kids, are creating problems by never saying no to their own offspring. And, schools don't ever want to keep students back, so the curriculum is designed so that anybody who shows up to class can pass. Required daily homework and classwork that might represent 50% of one's grade, instead of a couple of tests that define 80% of one's grade, teaches kids to focus on submitting paperwork instead of actually putting in thought nor allowing them to figure out how to do the learning they might need to do.

This process works to ignore incompetency in basic abilities year after year in students, as long as they have good grades, the fact which allows educators to say that college opportunities their kids have available to them are also good, and therefore, that they did their job. Not to mention that schooling our students one month longer, and for 2 years longer, than other countries do, in the same "conditions" described, furthers work towards decreasing independent thought and leaves many kids unprepared for real life.

Sometimes I wonder if that when people think our education system does our kids justice because our students are better at sports (that are mostly only played in the US), have more options of after-school activities, and have the chance (based on parent income) to utilize many different types of expensive private educational tools, tutors, "theories", consultants, certifications, and textbooks, if they're not missing that...

...the huge factor that explains why our students end up being more entrepreneurial or have the potential to get paid a lot of money when they finally do grow up, is that the US is incredibly wealthy--and at the same time cannot keep track of money any better than its average citizen--than that we're good at educating our students remotely close to what we should be given the money the government budgets for education.

I don't think we would hinder our country's strength in either entrepreneurship or Football, Baseball, Lacrosse, and Softball programs if we were to increase our understanding of math and science in this country; nor would it hurt to have a law that would require mandatory monthly teacher to parent education on what is expected of their student and ways the parent can help the student actually succeed at learning the material rather than submitting enough homework assignments to pass. Of course, having more educated people instead of "consumers" could affect our economy "negatively" as well as positively, but there are already many ways our economy is being pulled in both directions, so I don't think that teaching arithmetic and the scientific method to everyone would be a crazy thing to do.

One of multiple exercises in a 1940s test of 'self-regulation' involved standing still. Children in 2001 don't obediently stand still as well. Separately, the article notes (without referencing source) that "good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ".

The custom headline going from 'standing' to 'school success' is tenuous extrapolation that, if the reporter had put it directly in their article, would not have survived editing and fact-checking.

Bad headlines waste readers' time and send discussion off in tangential directions based on skewed understandings.

OTOH, I love the article -- good info on how self-management, in individual children (or even groups) might be best encouraged, and how toys/things might be just the wrong thing. (What would that mean for the OLPC?)

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different.

"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad."