High school grades matter — a lot. For both those students who submitted their test results to their colleges and those who did not, high school grades were the best predictor of a student’s success in college. And kids who had low or modest test scores, but good high school grades, did better in college than those with good scores but modest grades.
Category: Education
Krueger and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy, “moderately selective” school. It turned out that such students had, on average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges. Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income “varied little, no matter which type of college they attended.” In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2004/10/education-easterbrook
Misidentifying Factors Underlying Singapore’s High Test Scores
- Singapore’s student population does not include the children of huge numbers of people who work the lower-paying jobs in Singapore.
- For Singaporean students, school is their job; other activities are absent or relegated to minor roles.
- Most Singaporean children get additional schooling beyond the school day through individual tutoring or classes. (One survey found 97% of Singaporean students get private Math tutoring)
- China scores only include children from Shanghai. (How about we only include students from Scarsdale in the USA TIMMS scores?)
- Singapore schools do not contain any children from working class families (Service workers commute to Singapore from Malaysia). Singapore GDP is 50% higher than the USA’s.
- American students are involved with a wide array of sports and activities. 22% of American students have after school jobs.
- The reality is that top performing students in affluent suburbs of America perform on par with top performing countries who do not have lower class students in their results.
The first thing Duckworth, et. al. discovered is that deliberate practice works. Those kids who spent more time in deliberate practice mode – this involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards – performed much better at the competition than those children who were quizzed by others or engaged in leisure reading. The bad news is that deliberate practice isn’t fun and was consistently rated as the least enjoyable form of self-improvement. Nevertheless, as spellers gain experience, they devote increasing amounts of time to deliberate practice. This suggests that even twelve year olds realize that this is what makes them better, that success isn’t easy.
Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit)
Algorithmic Hiring
What’s 12 x 11? Um, Let Me Google That
What’s 12 x 11? Um, Let Me Google That
- My classroom experience proves otherwise. Once students have memorized a given set of vocabulary and grammar rules, they are able to apply their knowledge to more difficult concepts and activities. Having the fundamentals at the ready gives them both skill and confidence, two attributes that make learning effective and enjoyable. If they skipped the memory work on the grounds that the information can easily be found online, they would drown in a sea of URLs as they struggled to find the basic information necessary to answer the deeper questions.
- I shudder at what might have happened to the Apollo 13 flight crew if its NASA team had to spend precious minutes looking up multiplication tables, or what will happen if our government’s national-security advisers needed to consult Wikipedia to shape their foreign policy decisions.
- But once John Dewey’s educational theories were adopted in public schools beginning in the 1940s, they fell out of vogue, ridiculed and rejected by education professionals across the country as detrimental to learning. In schools of education such techniques are derisively labeled “drill and kill” and “chalk and talk.” Instead, these experts preach “child-centered” learning activities that make the teacher the “facilitator” in education, which is understood as a natural process of self-discovery.
- Of course, all good teachers want their students to acquire not just basic knowledge, but a deeper, conceptual understanding that is manifested through critical thinking and analysis—skills that educational fads and initiatives rightly extol. But such thinking is impossible without first acquiring rock-solid knowledge of the foundational elements upon which the pyramid of cognition rests.
I wanted to examine the correlation between a student’s performance in Algebra 2 and his subsequent performance in Trigonometry. This provides an opportunity to see if our past course recommendations were sound. (In this case, the decision to place a student from Algebra 2 into either Trig or a more remedial Math course) I felt this data might be useful in determining a cut-off score for promotion into the next course. ie: Is there a grade threshold in the 1st course that is associated with failure in the 2nd course?
Results: It’s a small sample size (n=25), but the 3 students who scored under 75 (overall) in Algebra 2 ended up failing Trigonometry. The r-squared was .24, which can be interpreted as saying that 49% of the variation in the Trig grades were explained by the Algebra 2 grades.
- …while seeming to prize the high-paying out-of-state students who are so attractive during times of a growing budget gap.
- …questioned why a student who … had only a 3.5 G.P.A. should rank so highly. Could it be because he was a nonresident and had wealthy parents?
- Income, an optional item on the application, would appear on the very first screen we saw, along with applicant name, address and family information.
- In personal statements, we had been told to read for the “authentic” voice over students whose writing bragged of volunteer trips to exotic places or anything that “smacks of privilege.”
- Many essays lucidly expressed a sense of self and character — no small task in a sea of applicants. Less happily, many betrayed the handiwork of pricey application packagers, whose cloying, pompous style was instantly detectable, as were canny attempts to catch some sympathy with a personal story of generalized misery. The torrent of woe could make a reader numb: not another student suffering from parents’ divorce, a learning difference, a rare disease, even dandruff!
Confessions of an Application Reader
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley
- In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.
- Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.
- As the (sales) rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
- “Why did you listen to her?” I asked. “She had only a fraction of your experience.”
All the nurse could think to say was “She was nice.”
SLOW IDEAS
Math Skills Placement Test Practice
Here is a Math Placement test a student of mine was recently given by her prospective college. Take a look at the questions, then notice the directions; they were not allowed to use any sort of calculator. 40 mins. / 40 questions. This is a good example of where over-reliance on calculators for basic k-7 math can backfire.
Also, the AP Calculus exam has entire sections that do not allow the use of any type of calculator.
Measuring College Prestige vs. Cost of Enrollment
…. found that equally smart students had about the same earnings whether or not they went to top-tier colleges. The big difference, their studies found, came from minority and low-income students who went to top-tier colleges: They did better later on.

- Formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions.
- Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests
Grouping Students by Ability
Raising Successful Children
- Praising children’s talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one’s status as “smart” and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes.
- The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality.
- Hanging back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting.
- To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.
- If pushing, direction, motivation and reward always come from the outside, the child never has the opportunity to craft an inside.
The Touch-Screen Generation
- Before hiding Piglet, the researcher effectively engaged the children in a form of media training. She asked them questions about their siblings, pets, and toys. She played Simon Says with them and invited them to sing popular songs with her. She told them to look for a sticker under a chair in their room. She gave them the distinct impression that she—this person on the screen—could interact with them, and that what she had to say was relevant to the world they lived in.
The Case For Repeating Algebra
Helicopter Parents May Breed Depression and Incompetence in Their Children
- “Parents are sending an unintentional message to their children that they are not competent,”
- “When adult children don’t get to practice problem-solving skills, they can’t solve these problems in the future.”
- Helicopter parenting decreased adult children’s feelings of autonomy, competence and connection.