First, my obligatory bash of I.Q. (IMO, the emphasis on "intelligence" as displayed in IQ rather than the skills mentioned below has ruined a great many lives, and that, apart from its shaky foundations, is why I execrate I.Q.).
Ms. Tippett: I think, was it Vygotsky who maintained that a child's ability to play creatively with other children is a better indicator of future academic success than IQ? And you've also said that discipline is a better indicator than IQ.
Ms. Diamond: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: Which, when I was growing up in the 1960s, '70s, you know, everybody got IQ tests, but I remember being aware even then that they didn't know what to do with it. Right? And that they would …
Ms. Diamond: Oh, you see, when I was growing up in the 1970s, they segregated us by IQ. So they had the intellectually gifted classes whose children had scored higher in IQ. And if you had a super high IQ and you were a girl in New York City, you could go to Hunter High School.
Ms. Tippett: OK.
Ms. Diamond: So IQ meant a lot in terms of tracking back then. But it turns out, the work of Angela Duckworth and Marty Seligman shows that even in college discipline — being able to exercise discipline and keep at it and practice and study and finish your assignments and start your assignments when you need to — is much more important than IQ. Which is kind of hopeful because then you don't have to worry, you know, gee, I wasn't born with this high IQ so I can't achieve. And the evidence is that that's not so.
Second: executive functions:
Ms. Tippett: The early childhood educational method that Adele Diamond has evaluated is called "Tools of the Mind." It incorporates the kind of role-playing mouth-ear exercise she just described as well as structured or formal dramatic play. This approach is based on new understanding of what is called executive function. Executive function describes the brain's capacity to coordinate the many kinds of mental activity that are involved in any human experience and certainly in learning, from how we focus to how we feel. Executive function enables us to take charge of our responses and actions. It is different from innate intelligence but Adele Diamond and others in this field say that more directly than intelligence, this determines how well we learn, how much we achieve, and how we apply what we learn in real life. Executive function is, in part, about what Adele Diamond describes as inhibitory control.
Ms. Diamond: You need inhibitory control to stay on task when you're bored or when you meet initial failure. You need inhibitory control to focus in on something in the environment so that you're not overwhelmed by all the other things around. You need inhibitory control — for example, let's say you see an old friend that you haven't seen in years. And your first reaction on seeing your old friend is, "My god, how much weight you've gained." But you don't say that. Instead you exercise inhibitory control and you instead say something to make your friend feel good.
And if you think about it more in terms of the things the Dalai Lama talks about, the Dalai Lama talks about how easy it is when you get hurt to react by hurting the next person. But if you exercise inhibitory control, you can say, "Wait a minute."
Another aspect of executive function is working memory. It's holding information in mind and playing with it, and you need working memory for anything that unfolds over time. You also need working memory for creativity because the essence of creativity is holding things in mind and disassembling them and putting them together in new ways. That's where you need working memory.
And the last executive function is cognitive flexibility. It's being able to switch your perspective or switching the way you're thinking about things, being able to think outside the box. And of course, that's also an aspect of creativity.
So those are the basic aspects of executive function, and out of that, more sophisticated executive functions like planning and problem solving get built up.
A very simple example:
Ms. Diamond: The having to do it when your first inclination isn't to do it. An example in a math context is a lot of children will do mirror writing. Like, they'll write a six reversed.Some of the components of executive function would contribute to I.Q.; but I doubt inhibitory control is part of it. Classical cultures value inhibitory control greatly; you see the mention of the Dalai Lama already. But it goes much beyond that. E.g., one of the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita is to master the ability to do what you have to do ignoring your likes and dislikes. The path to liberation requires a well developed inhibitory function.
Ms. Tippett: Right.
Ms. Diamond: Now, that's very normal, but a lot of teachers will pull their hair about this, so they might have the child write 6 a thousand times. It doesn't help, but they'll try whatever they can to try to get the child not to do it. And Elena Bodrova has a very simple way and after an afternoon or an evening, the mirror writing is gone. What she says is when you go home tonight and you do your math homework, every time you're supposed to write a 6, put down your pencil and pick up a red pencil. That's all she says. That's the whole instruction. None of this "you're a bad kid." No. And the reason it works is because the child has an automaticity to do this mirror writing, and what the child really needs to do is take a moment and think and do what you really know you should do but is not your first inclination. But if you ask a child this young to wait it doesn't help.
Ms. Tippett: That is really interesting.
Ms. Diamond: So it gives the child some way to wait, which is the time it takes to put down the pencil and pick up the red pencil.
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PS: a blog post on Duckworth and Seligman.
