What is “the raisin test” and its importance?

Before you get too excited based on the heading and introduction to this article, unfortunately this story is not about a raisin named Brian with unexpected linguistic capacities who, under the influence of certain vapours, can enter a trance and see what will happen in your future. It is however, about raisins having predictive powers of a sort. Of course, predicting the future is a fraught business, especially when people are involved because if we know anything about the human condition it is that we are capable of change. Nevertheless it is still possible to observe things about us that are pointers as to where we may be headed and that has been done in a new study which found that how a toddler performs on a simple “raisin test” can predict how they will perform academically in the future.

In the study 558 children born at somewhere between 25 and 41 weeks of gestation were given a test involving a raisin when they were 20 months old. The test simply involved a raisin being placed under an opaque cup within easy reach. After three training runs the toddlers were asked to wait (for 60 seconds) until they were told that they could touch and eat the raisin. This test is designed to measure self-control.

This test is designed to measure self-control.

It was found that children born between 25-38 weeks were more likely to take the raisin before the allotted time than the children born between 38 and 41 weeks. So some children, those born between 25-38 weeks, were less likely to be able to inhibit their own actions.

Then, some years later the children were given academic tests to measure their abilities in maths, reading, and spelling/writing. It emerged that those who showed less capacity to inhibit impulses when they were a toddler via the raisin test did worse on the academic tests at age 8. This might reflect poor attention skills according to the researchers.

Importantly, you should not give the raisin test to your child and then panic if they don’t do well. All the raisin test shows is some tendencies present in the child but attention is something that can be cultivated. The future is for you to shape, it is not cast in stone waiting to be predicted; even by a perspicacious raisin named Brian.