Self-Regulation and the marshmallow test

One treat now—or two if I wait.











That’s the choice Ms. Kerrigan's students were able to make when they took the Marshmallow Test today. This is a famous measure of how well children can delay gratification.

All students chose to wait. After 15 minutes they were given a second. 

"The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. The children could eat the treat, the researchers said, but if they waited for fifteen minutes without giving in to the temptation, they would be rewarded with a second treat." Marshmallow Experiment