The real learning predictor

They're all watching us: The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today. All have recently published articles examining U.S. education -- from kindergarten to college. And together they have identified two major trends. Apparently, American students are falling behind international students in math and science. And among Americans, boys are falling behind girls.

Last Sunday, the Inquirer documented the local gender gap. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, boys are nearly twice as likely to be classified as "special-education" students and are more apt to drop out and skip college. Nationally, boys aren't doing any better. In the U.S., girls earn higher grades in all major subjects from the time they're in elementary school through their time in college.

And that's just in this country.

Internationally, American boys and girls both get low marks. "U.S. 12th graders recently tested below the international average for 21 countries in mathematics and science," the USA Today wrote.

What's behind these two disparities?

Pundits would have you believe it's the state of our schools. They would tell you that today's classrooms are underfunded, today's teachers are under-trained and today's curricula favor girls. And to a degree, the pundits are right.

Indeed, the No Child Left Behind Act has been underfunded. One recent report estimated that 80 percent of U.S. school districts incur costs associated with the law that aren't covered by federal funding.

And our teachers aren't tops. In a 1999 survey, 59 percent of eighth graders had math teachers who didn't specialize in math. The international average was 29 percent, said USA Today.

Additionally, recent curriculum changes favor girls, said Robert Lerner, a former commissioner at the Department of Education, in The Washington Times. History classes now teach as much social history as they do military history, a shift that plays to girls' interests. And writing classes emphasize the expression of emotion instead of argumentation.

But there has to be something else going on here. After all, if American classrooms are geared toward girls, why do our girls still lag behind the rest of the world's? And if U.S. girls are learning more than boys, why do boys reportedly score higher on the SAT, ACT and AP exams?

Penn Psychology professor Martin Seligman and Psychology graduate student Angela Duckworth spent the last few years trying to answer such questions. They studied hundreds of eighth graders' homework habits, GPAs and high school admissions decisions.

And last December, they released a study suggesting that one reason students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not underfunding or insufficient instruction but students' own "failure to exercise self-discipline."

Seligman and Duckworth found that self-discipline predicts academic performance better than most indicators. In fact, self-discipline accounts for more than twice as much variance as IQ scores in final grades and high school admissions.

Or, in more basic terms, a student's decision to finish his homework before watching television at night will impact his GPA to a greater degree than his intelligence will. And this rule applies to older students, too. A 1995 study found self-discipline to be the only measured personality trait that predicts college GPAs better than the SATs.

And here's the key to the gender and nation gaps: Studies have shown that girls are more self-disciplined than boys and that international students are more self-disciplined than Americans.

"There have been cross-cultural studies," said Duckworth, who used to be a high school teacher. "I do know of one that looked at impulsivity and they looked at 4 year olds. Even at that age in China, a 4 year old is ahead of an American in terms of impulse control."

Two months ago, Seligman and Duckworth released another report demonstrating that self-discipline can have a minimal effect on standardized exams -- perhaps because everyone is automatically allotted the same amount of time. That would account for girls' lower scores on the SATs.

So America, the land of TiVo and the Starbucks, has to deal with a self-discipline problem. Not that we should start fretting. Researchers estimate that only 50 percent of self-discipline is inherited genetically. Compare that to IQ, which is 70 percent inherited, and you realize we have a relatively negotiable problem.

How to negotiate the problem is another matter entirely. Duckworth has conducted two experiments in which she tried to inculcate students with a sense of discipline, but both failed. And that makes me think we're going about this the wrong way.

In the last two decades, many school districts have eliminated recess to meet test-score standards for funding. Yet a recent Georgia State University study shows that less recess makes students more fidgety -- and less disciplined. No recess makes boys especially inattentive.

And so I wonder whether in an era of non-stop testing, we've overlooked the ultimate irony -- less learning may actually be more.

Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.