Category Archives: Parents

One key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t

Great article from Quartz Daily News – qz.com                   [Read the whole article here.]

“I’m just not a math person.”

We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Here are some summary points:

For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence.

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

  1. Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
  2. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
  3. The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
  4. The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The idea that math ability is mostly genetic is one dark facet of a larger fallacy that intelligence is mostly genetic. Academic psychology journals are well stocked with papers studying the world view that lies behind the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy we just described.

Convincing students that they could make themselves smarter by hard work led them to work harder and get higher grades. The intervention had the biggest effect for students who started out believing intelligence was genetic. (A control group, who were taught how memory works, showed no such gains.)

But improving grades was not the most dramatic effect, “Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.” It is no picnic going through life believing you were born dumb—and are doomed to stay that way.

While American fourth and eighth graders score quite well in international math comparisons—beating countries like Germany, the UK and Sweden—our high-schoolers  underperform those countries by a wide margin. This suggests that Americans’ native ability is just as good as anyone’s, but that we fail to capitalize on that ability through hard work. In response to the lackluster high school math performance, some influential voices in American education policy have suggested simply teaching less math—for example, Andrew Hacker has called for algebra to no longer be a requirement. The subtext, of course, is that large numbers of American kids are simply not born with the ability to solve for x.

One way to help Americans excel at math is to copy the approach of the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans.  In Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett describes how the educational systems of East Asian countries focus more on hard work than on inborn talent:

1. “Children in Japan go to school about 240 days a year, whereas children in the United States go to school about 180 days a year.”

2. “Japanese high school students of the 1980s studied 3 ½ hours a day, and that number is likely to be, if anything, higher today.”
3. “[The inhabitants of Japan and Korea] do not need to read this book to find out that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment are highly malleable. Confucius set that matter straight twenty-five hundred years ago.”
4. “When they do badly at something, [Japanese, Koreans, etc.] respond by working harder at it.”
5. “Persistence in the face of failure is very much part of the Asian tradition of self-improvement. And [people in those countries] are accustomed to criticism in the service of self-improvement in situations where Westerners avoid it or resent it.”

Besides cribbing a few tricks from the Japanese, we also have at least one American-style idea for making kids smarter: treat people who work hard at learning as heroes and role models. We already venerate sports heroes who make up for lack of talent through persistence and grit; why should our educational culture be any different?

Math education, we believe, is just the most glaring area of a slow and worrying shift. We see our country moving away from a culture of hard work toward a culture of belief in genetic determinism. In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined. We want to bring it back, and we think that math is the best place to start.

Read the whole article here.

Follow Miles on Twitter at @mileskimball. Follow Noah at @noahpinionWe welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

The Real Reasons Children Drop Out of School

A very insightful view of the challenges by Franklin Schargel, a Former Teacher, School Counselor and School Administrator, appeared in a recent Huffing Post. In it Schargel names and discusses 5 main reasons kids drop out of school:

  1. The students themselves
  2. The families they come from
  3. The community they come from
  4. The school they attend
  5. The teachers they have

Read the full article here.

 

 

Financial Education Paradox?

Great little article by economist David Laibson delves into, “Most Americans know they should save for retirement and pay off their debts. Yet they often don’t do those things. Why?”

And why it’s so difficult to consider and create effective “Financial Eduction” curricula and classes – and that’s frustrating because “finances” is such an integral part of everyone’s real-world experience!

His last couple of paragraphs, I believe, speaks volumes about what an effective education looks like:

What does this tell us about the best way to teach financial education? 

What this means is that you should get the financial education you need when you need it. If you enroll in a 401(k) plan today, you should take the 45-minute educational seminar on it during the enrollment process. The time to learn about credit cards, borrowing and compound interest is when students are 18 and starting adult life.

The human memory is so fallible. If I tell you something and expect you to remember it five years from now, that’s a big ask. So I would focus on teaching skills that translate immediately to practical application.

(My underlining – teach around ideas and stuff in a real-world-ish application context. Tie math and English and science into such things as, how do your folks buy and pay for your clothes, where in the world do they come from, what do your parents/guardians do for a living, how long do they have to work to pay for a pair of new shoes, why was a textbook written, by whom, how much does it cost, how much is that for the whole class, where does that money come from, …)

Read the whole article here.

Research on Grit and Self-Control Recognized in “Genius Grant”

JTF Grantee Awarded 2013 MacArthur Fellowship

As an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Angela Duckworth’s work focuses on studying competencies beyond general intelligence and opportunity that predict academic and professional achievement. She is perhaps best known for her work surrounding the concepts of self-control and grit, and how those personality traits are better indicators of success than factors such as IQ and socioeconomic opportunity.

Click here to see 5 videos of Dr. Duckworth answering these 5 questions about her work and findings:

What is grit?

Are there virtues that are precursors or closely associated with grit?

What role does humility play, if any, in cultivating grit?

How has your personal story been a window into your research on grit?

What advice would you give to a parent who wanted to cultivate grit in their children?

Two upcoming meetings of interest:

On Sept 11th, 2013, more than 9,000 participants from around the state joined in a telephone town hall to express their concerns and aspirations for New Mexico Public Education. Their responses show New Mexicans are ready for change. Here is a summary.

  • 65% of participants feel students undergo too much standardized testing
  • 68% of participants indicated a greater need for student support services at school
  • 71% of participants thought class sizes are too large
  • 94% of participants thought it was important that schools teach students how to problem solve
  • 80% of participants  feel they do not have a say in education policy.

It is Time to Change the Status Quo for New Mexico’s Public Education!

Click here to RSVP TODAY

Keep The Promise For New Mexico’s Future

in partnership with
New Mexico PBS and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
presents:

Central Region –  Keep The Promise Education Town Hall


on Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

This is the first of 4 town halls across the state and will be focused on developing a community based vision for education in New Mexico. These Town Halls are opportunities for parents, students and educators to share YOUR vision for public education.

Together we can create real community-driven solutions to ensure a great education for all of New Mexico’s children.

Central Region Town Hall:

Wed, Oct. 16 from 6-7pm at the

UNM Continuing Education Conference Center Auditorium
1634 University Blvd. NE
Albuquerque, NM

Click here to RSVP!

Back from the polls with interesting article

Whew! Sixteen hour election day poll work took a couple of days recovery time. Definitely not as young as I used to be.

Because this article on reverse engineering in healthcare seemed to have a number of interesting parallels with Education I thought I’d pass it on in the blog. Just substitute “education” for “healthcare” in the article. Here’s a summary:

Reverse innovation works because the different conditions in higher- and lower-income settings change the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that drive innovation.

What happens when you create health care solutions specifically for patients in low-income settings? It turns out that learning from and investing in these settings can be powerful ways to tackle problems at home that require out-of-the-box thinking. These differences include:

  1. Higher volume for lower price. Radical approaches are often needed to achieve acceptable performance at ultra-low price points.
  2. Less developed infrastructure allows rapid implementation of new solutions.
  3. Sustainability is important in resource-limited areas, favoring “green solutions.”
  4. Fewer regulations quicken the pace of innovation.
  5. Preferences are different, inspiring creative design.
  6. Overwhelming need increases the ‘purpose motive,’ fueling innovators who want to make a difference.

These six attributes make lower-income settings appealing places to create, test, and scale new ideas (In ABQ/BERNCO, think ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond).

So, just how do ideas move through a reverse innovation pipeline?

  1.  Identify a high priority problem shared between lower- and higher-income settings. For example, affordable, user-friendly diagnostics, or a mobile health information technology solution to a pressing health care issue.
  2. Innovators in lower-income settings must create a solution that spreads to the first 15% of the population, or the “early adopters.” This usually happens only if the idea is better, relevant, simple, easily tested, and visible to others. Endorsement by early adopters pushes an innovation past its tipping point, where it is then likely to spread to the population at large.
  3. The idea must cross-pollinate from lower- to a higher-income settings. Here the critical link is between lower-income early adopters and higher-income innovators. Whether these parties connect in-person or online, the quality of the interaction must facilitate sufficient trust to allow the idea to cross over. Building relationships over time helps create “spannable social distances,” such that the two parties find each other credible enough to take a risk on the other’s idea.
  4. The idea has to spread in the higher-income setting. Again the innovation must be better, relevant, simple, easily tested, and visible to others. It must also overcome the resistance of existing infrastructure and other established solutions. If the idea is clearly effective in lower-income settings, this can help lower the barrier to adoption.

The article provides three very interesting real-world examples in Diagnostics, Health IT, and Service Delivery.

In short, reverse innovation has tremendous potential to align incentives and disrupt existing systems and technologies. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg (or, as their African colleagues like to say, the ears of the hippopotamus – I just love that analogy).

Also … beware the resistance inherent in disrupting existing systems.

What can we do to increase the pace of reverse innovation? For starters, we can:

  • Identify high-priority problems that could potentially be solved in lower-income settings.
  • Empower lower-income innovators and early adopters through seed funding, competitive “innovation awards,” or other mechanisms.
  • Bring lower-income early adopters and higher-income innovators together through conferences or learning collaboratives (live or virtual).
  • Track reverse innovation activity globally, identifying and removing barriers to spread.

Many intractable problems in health care could be solved if we accelerated the spread of ideas through the reverse innovation pipeline. To do this, we will need to think differently, invest in reverse innovation, and work together to solve common problems.

Again, think of the work being done today by ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond.

Read the complete article here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

From a letter to Benjamin Franklin from Mr. Benjamin Vaughn, January 31, 1783

“School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course In life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!  Influence upon the private character, late in life, is not only an influence late in life, but a weak influence.  It is in youth that we plant our chief habits and prejudices; it is in youth that we take our party as to profession, pursuits, and matrimony.  In youth, therefore, the turn is given; in youth the education even of the next generation is given; in youth the private and public character is determined; and the term of life extending but from youth to age, life ought to begin well from youth, and more especially before we take our party as to our principal objects.  But your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man.  And why are weaker men to be deprived of such helps, when we see our race has been blundering on in the dark, almost without a guide in this particular from the farthest trace of time?  Show then sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; we invite all wise men to become like yourself, and other men to become wise when we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored.”

From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Vaughn was born in 1751, and studied medicine in Edinburgh and was elected to Parliament.