Marshmallow 2.0! Can Students Resist the Internet?

The famed Stanford Marshmallow Test was one of the many things which inspired me to enter into the realm of Childhood Psychology. 

Stanford Psychologist Walter Mischel brought hundreds of preschoolers into a blank room with nothing but a table, chair, plate, and on the plate was a marshmallow. Mischel informed the children that they had two choices, either they eat the marshmallow now, or they could wait and eat two at the end of the wait period. The kids were left alone for fifteen minutes; just them and the marshmallow.

Over 15 years later, when Mischel looked back at these students after the end of their high school careers, he found a STRONG correlation between those who succeeded in waiting and those who scored well on the SATs. The same was true in reverse for those who failed the Marshmallow test.

This test opened a whole new field in the study of 'self-control' and its benefits.

In today's society, our own students are facing a sort of "Marshmallow Test" on a daily basis. "Do I do my homework now, and then enjoy Youtube/Instagram/Facebook/Nintendo all afternoon free of worry; or do I just do those now and have a heart attack over homework later?"

So, in some sense, a new marshmallow test has been published by psychologists out of Penn and Notre Dame, according to an article I recently looked at. The test offers students to do as many math problems as possible, while also offering a chance to scroll the internet. 

The results are much wider than the straight up [pass/fail] of the test's predecessor. Some students may work diligently at the math, others will do none of it. Most will do all the math they can personally handle, then take a break before returning to the math. The latter is by far the healthiest option, but also the one that entails the most struggle. How does one manage either not doing too much math, or breaking for too long.

Personally, I fall prey to that question far to often.