Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Overview Video: Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century

Published on March 28, 2010 in Ideas and News. 0 Comments

From MacArthur

Girls and Math – Part One

Published on March 26, 2010 in Ideas and News. 0 Comments

From Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today

When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because – as I realize in hindsight – he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys – in her opinion – were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.

I don’t think you can really blame them for making such inferences, although there is an obvious problem with such behavior: It is a problem of self-perpetuating stereotypes in which teachers think girls are worse at math, girls get away with lesser effort in their math classes, which reduces average math scores for girls, which makes teachers think that girls are worse in math, and so on…
Sometimes, poor science, or even pseudo-scientific data add to the anecdotal observations, such as when George Roman announced in 1887 “that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics attributable to brain size” (not quite the statistician, he seemed to have neglected the fact that brain size correlates with women’s average smaller body size and lesser weight…), or when Eleanor Maccoby concluded in 1974 that “gender differences in mathematics performance were scientifically well established” when she showed data that “boys and girls acquire early number concelts similarly in the preschool years, [...] and that their performance throughout elementary school was similar, (thus apparently indicating similar early math socialization) but that then “boys’ skills in mathematics increased faster than girls’ beginning around 12 or 13 years of age, creating a significant gender gap in performance by high school”.

To read more…

The Genius in All of Us: A New Book Persuasively Argues that Extraordinary Intelligence and Talent are Not Genetic Gifts

Published on March 24, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From Laura Miller in Salon

David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.

Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today’s popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it’s profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn’t caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they’re discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.

To read more…

Building a Better Teacher

Published on March 22, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From Elizabeth Green, in the New York Times

On a winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

To read more…