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An interesting article about the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) program and their findings.
Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study's ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.
With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence. Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth—which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams.Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.
[...] Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status. The research emphasizes the importance of nurturing precocious children, at a time when the prevailing focus in the United States and other countries is on improving the performance of struggling students. At the same time, the work to identify and support academically talented students has raised troubling questions about the risks of labelling children, and the shortfalls of talent searches and standardized tests as a means of identifying high-potential students, especially in poor and rural districts.
[...] Although gifted-education specialists herald the expansion of talent-development options in the United States, the benefits have mostly been limited so far to students who are at the top of both the talent and socio-economic curves.
[Also covered by]: NATURE
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @05:19PM
Damn that cruel world and its shallow motivations!
It's not just in education that we see this
But how would peoples' motivations ever improve, if gatekeepers like you kept them away?
How will people's motivations ever improve if people's idiotic demand for job training at colleges and universities is granted by those same institutions? That is true for most of them. Only a few schools are actually good.
Plus, by having some emphasis on skills that apply in the real world, there's a chance you won't become just another useless idiot.
Having a high quality general education means that you will have skills (or will be able to quickly acquire them) to function in the real world. You'll not only understand the theory, but you'll be able to apply it in practice as well. If you cannot, you are not very educated.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 09 2016, @06:57PM
How will people's motivations ever improve if people's idiotic demand for job training at colleges and universities is granted by those same institutions? That is true for most of them. Only a few schools are actually good.
The answer to this should be obvious. It's a carrot to encourage people to learn. And it results in more productive and wealthier graduates which is good for the college.
Having a high quality general education means that you will have skills (or will be able to quickly acquire them) to function in the real world. You'll not only understand the theory, but you'll be able to apply it in practice as well. If you cannot, you are not very educated./quote> Unless, of course, that is bullshit. Then it won't be. That's the trouble with unfounded assertions. For example, you couldn't be bothered to reason through my first paragraph above for yourself. So if you really did received a high quality general education and it does help with skills needed to function in the real world, it apparently has some trouble sticking in this thread.
I find the crowd who rants about the vocational aspect of college as if it were a terrible thing to be a parody of the worst ignorance and excesses of academia. But seriously, where is a better place to learn such things than a place of learning? On the job training helps mostly with the tools and approaches used by that particular employer. You won't get a more balanced review of other approaches, technologies, or techniques, because they either don't know them or find them irrelevant to their particular situation.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:38PM
It's a bit late, but let me throw out one example.
College is a terrible place to train a welder.
Yet, college is a decent place to train a welding engineer.
Likewise,
College is a terrible place to train an automobile mechanic.
Yet, college is a decent place to train an automotive/mechanical engineer.
I've seen many job postings advertising the need for electrical/mechanical/industrial/system engineers and provides those titles, but in actuality all is needed is a technician of that discipline. There's no need of the weld rounded education, the deep math foundation, and the deep engineering aspect. All the employer needs is somebody skilled with the base theory, knowledgeable of basic engineering practices, and can pass college English composition class and maybe technical writing. My European colleagues learned these skills as interns to local businesses while still in high school. I had to join the military after high school to get this training--community colleges are the other alternative. But my point--my colleagues are skilled and regarded as skilled by the time they finish high school while in the US, you have 2-4 more years after high school before the industry accepts you as competent. (1) US high schools can prepare students better and (2) industry can do a better acknowledging the skills of high school graduates.
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