Because that's your hypothesis.
That's with the [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah >> Have you seen the movie Spellbound?
>> Yes I have.
In fact that's why I did this study.
>> I know you did.
I was going to say it's such a good study of so many different, it's a documentary
about the spelling bee and it plays a Christopher Guest movie almost, but
it's a real that's a show but it was like a real documentary and it's amazing.
>> It's amazing.
And literally I watched that movie and then I called the National Spelling Bee
and I said can I study the spellers, and page with a former spelling bee
champion and still the President of the spelling, he said, sure.
That's how the study actually got started.
Yeah.
In that data on the spellers we counted up the number of hours from their logs of how
much time they spent being quizzed, how much time they spent doing
a little practice and then reading stuff for fun, so they could see new words.
And what we found is that really the most pronounced,
reliable prediction could be made from the hours of deliberate practice.
Especially when you control for everything else including other kinds of practice.
It's important I think to see that yeah being quizzed probably serves a function
but it might be by identifying the weaknesses like
I keep getting these kinds of words wrong.
I need to focus on that kind of word and then you go and deliberately practice it.
Be in quiz is actually super awesome for learning.
When you get to the end of this course and somebody else actually wants you to
get any kind of exam, quizzing yourself is really good for actually lots of reasons.
Among them, they identified witnesses that you don't know you've had.
One of the comments states that teenagers commit when they are studying, is that
they read their chapter again, and they highlight it, and then they read it again.
And actually what becomes familiar, they confuse for real understanding
because if you close the book, and you're like, don't look at the book.
Tell me, what were the two most important things to learn from the Civil War,
from the perspective of [INAUDIBLE] like, wait I just,
just saw, and then I need to look again.
And so that's being quizzed, but then they can go deliberately practice that weakness
that they didn't even know they had.
It's also important to do things that are fun, enjoy reading, so
yes reading time did not predict spelling in this competition, but
if you look at the mean scores of this kids.
My it was literally the same numerical score as how much they
enjoy eating food like ice cream.
Did it predict the, no but as a group this is a very high, they love words.
Why else would you sit around a dictionary for thousands of hours except for
you love words and word roots and so forth.
I want you to appreciate that what I was predicting here a variance in
your spelling performance based on either your ranking but
now that you understand that well okay that's only within this sample.
That doesn't there's a limitation on the external validity.
Among spellers in the National Spelling Bee who love words and
so enjoy reading and
forth, then reading doesn't maybe make a difference but outside of them.
When you go forth and you do your parts of psychology in the world,
just be mindful of the external validity.
In this group that makes sense but
I'm not saying for all humanity the gratitude exercise is going to work.
It may have certain preconditions.
And I think that's what we're finding it.
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Ph.D.Director, ImpactED
Angela Duckworth, Ph.D.Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology
