The Report Card: Christina Brown and Heather Schofield on Cognitive Endurance

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Christina Brown and Heather Schofield, two of the authors of Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. Nat, Christina, and Heather discuss what cognitive endurance is and why it’s important, PISA, an elaborate field experiment in India, disparities in American schools, shortening standardized tests, students in Pakistan, mazes and tangrams, what schools can do differently to build cognitive endurance in students, AP exams, long medical shifts, whether an extra year of schooling makes a difference for cognitive endurance, the ideal age to build cognitive endurance, and more.

Christina Brown is a development economist who will be joining the University of Chicago’s Economics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2023, and Heather Schofield is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton School. Their coauthors on Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital are Supreet Kaur and Geeta Kingdon.