SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The New York Times reports:
As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons [...]. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape's geometric characteristics.
But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.
The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.
"Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough," said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that's more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed."
U.S. News published a related piece recently arguing for more attention to preschool curricula and specific content, in addition to other measures of preschool programs. In contrast, a story in the Atlantic last year pointed out new "academic" approaches to preschool may actually be doing more harm than good. And any immediate gains (as cited in the new study) frequently turn out to be temporary. One oft-cited alternative is Finland's approach, which delays formal schooling until age 7, after a year of relatively unstructured government-mandated kindergarten.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:33PM (18 children)
There is a selection bias (i.e. only rich kids with smart parents go to kindergarten). They may attempt to subtract it, I only skimmed the paper. Nonetheless I see no estimate in the paper of systematic uncertainty/bias. They report statistical uncertainties only. I don't believe the systematic uncertainty is negligible.
Also, again lightly skimming the paper, I only saw comparison with "whole population" and "no preschool"; not a comparison with "not rigorous preschool".
It seems hellish to try to estimate the systematic bias or uncertainty due to these sorts of effects, which to me casts the whole social sciences field into doubt. E.g. there are many highly correlated factors which affect the outcome of preschool education.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:47PM (15 children)
I read just the other day that if you take poor black kids and poor white kids with the same IQ score, then they have the same longitudinal probability of climbing out of poverty; the only thing that seems to matter is a person's intelligence.
The following is becoming hard to deny: It's not the case that rich people are more likely to end up as higher-quality people, but rather that higher-quality people are more likely to end up rich; high-quality people produce biologically high-quality children, who are then put into high-quality learning environments (because that's what high-quality people would think is a good idea)—however, it's not the learning environment that makes the difference with respect to the general population, but rather the innate qualities of the child himself, and that is not something that you can replicate for every child.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:57PM (6 children)
I don't think this is related to GP - a bit trollish.
It might be true; however, IQ is correlated to how good the education i.e. the argument is circular. Also, citation needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:30PM (5 children)
"[Citation]" is a lazy man's retort; here [blogspot.com], specifically here [pewtrusts.org]:
It's completely related to the OP's point!
Being rich doesn't make a difference; being white doesn't make a difference. The data indicates fairly strongly 2 things: What matters is IQ, and it's becoming clear that IQ is largely heritable.
It's not the case that your IQ becomes decent because you've completed a good education; rather, you can complete a good education because you've got a decent IQ.
This is borne out by the data; educating people provides only a small and temporary improvement in tested IQ, which fades with time and becomes negligible in adulthood.
Need a citation? Look it up yourself this time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)
In fact, let's just stop educating people all together and implement a hereditary caste system. I'm sure that's never been tried before and will work out well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:44PM
Successful people mate with successful people and produce fairly successful people; people fall from the heights, others rise up, but one basic overriding aspect remains the same: Successful people mingle with each other, and there are various strata of successful people.
What you and many people seem to be suggesting is that people in higher strata be forced to mingle with people of the lower strata. Not only is this coercion abusive, but it's not even going to improve the situation; hanging around higher-quality people doesn't really seem to improve lower-quality people. IT JUST DOES NOT WORK.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:37PM (2 children)
> It's completely related to the OP's point!
I would have chosen a less controversial example than race. Black vs white tends to get peoples' heckles up. Hence comment that the post is a bit trollish.
Resisting the urge to look up what a heckle actually is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:48PM
A troll is someone who says silly things, especially things the troll knows are wrong, in order to provoke outrage rather than to foster discussion.
Just because a statement raises the heckles of someone somewhere in the world does not make that statement "trollish"; it's impossible to make progress if people must always censor even legitimate discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:49PM
First, get the term right. It's hackles, not heckles.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hackles [dictionary.com]
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:04PM (1 child)
Wasn't the comment saying that the problem is a lack of discussion in the original document about some of the potential bias? The mention of rich kids or whatever was to illustrate the value what wasn't being commented on. It's possible I am missing something here, I don't see how your point relates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:32PM
See here. Right here. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:03PM (4 children)
You have a good point, but just as every time it has been made before you attach it to a false premise: that intelligence is an "innate qualit[y] of the child". It's not. IQ is not assigned at birth by genetics, unless you want to claim that the typical 18th century peasant would have the same IQ as a contemporary public-schooled pov. IQ, and therefore chance of being successful, depends also on the child's environment.
That environment starts at conception. Prenatal (and postnatal) health care impacts the child's starting health, which in turn impacts how much attention the child can pay towards learning instead of surviving. The first year of life exposes the child to the ways of the world, which could be anything from a a stable, loving family to a chaotic mess. From then on, each moment in life builds upon the last. And you only get one chance at a lot of these things, because nobody is going to go back and relearn baby skills with baby toys and baby language. Neither are they going to go back to preschool and relearn skills relevant to relating to others, regulating emotions, recognizing and working within boundaries, or exploring self-expression.
Yes, there is probably some objective intelligence which determines a child's ability to succeed. But never make the mistake of believing that more successful demographics are therefore worth more or deserve their success. There is no biological imperative behind class segregation. There is a reinforcing social structure which can and should be changed to provide everyone with the tools needed to be successful.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:13PM (3 children)
Please. PLEASE. Read modern research on the matter; there is very clear evidence that genetics plays a humongous role in determining IQ.
Obviously, you can hurt a person's IQ in the same way that you can stunt a person's height. However, you cannot make any random person taller by feeding that person more food; that person's maximum height is largely determined by genes (and the genes for very tall modern humans seem to be a relatively recent genetic development, as a point of interest).
The cited study [soylentnews.org] clearly indicates that there is, in fact, no appreciable "reinforcing social structure" that determines "segregation"—the sole determining factor in the ability to escape poverty seems to be IQ—and as already pointed out, IQ is quite basically heritable (poor people in the U.S. are not starving to the point that height is being stunted, for example; neither are they starving to the point that IQ would drop dramatically).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:06PM (2 children)
I find it quite curious that the argument linking intelligence to social success seems always to be made next to the argument that intelligence is genetically predetermined. This treads very dangerous ground, because "genetically predetermined" is just one mental leap away from "racially predetermined". It's troubling that the people making these arguments are never very careful to clear up this easy misunderstanding.
Your citations speak of "kids escaping bottom quintile childhoods". It doesn't try very hard to make a point about kids that started in advantageous backgrounds versus those that did not. And that's the thing: it's not that surprising that similarly impoverished groups of white kids and black kids are similar in terms of what gives them more opportunities. We're not comparing rich kids to poor kids here; we're comparing poor kids to poor kids and finding that they quite similar regardless of race.
And furthermore, that economic success is determined mainly by measurements of intelligence does nothing to prove that the less successful are less intelligent. What it does prove is that they are measured as less intelligent. Of course a D student is not going to be as successful as an A student. The A student has more opportunities, but even more importantly the A student has a positive reinforcement loop around getting smarter.
What if our measurements are just wrong? What if black kids look less intelligent for societal reasons, and because they are predetermined to be less intelligent they experience negative rather than reinforcement - leading more frequently to dropping out of the system which undervalues them rather than taking part in it? Maybe the "non-shared" components of success are really the cause of it, and a child's measured intelligence is simply correlated to society's ability to provide the environment that child needs to thrive.
We need to be careful attributing success to racially-determined factors for the same reason we need to be careful attributing stellar phenomena to aliens: it shuts down further avenues of research. Sure, it could be that white people are more successful because they are just superior, just like pulsars could have seemingly unnatural regularity because they were built by intelligent extra terrestrial life. But if we accept that answer (and many people will prematurely accept the former answer because it confirms their existing biases), we miss the chance to discover deeper truths.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:52PM (1 child)
Not everything is "cultural construct". Sorry.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:53PM
Whatever happened to the relatively insightful AC I was responding to? Your comment is profoundly anti-knowledge and anti-science, as well as destructive to an ongoing conversation.
The word "fact" is used a bit too judiciously, I think, when non-scientists talk science. The only "facts" are simple, objective observations, such as that apples fall toward the ground when they become detached from trees. Even well-accepted ideas, such as that something called "gravity" is pulling the apple toward the Earth because of its huge mass, are still not "facts" even when we use our thorough understanding of them to launch satellites into orbit.
When talking sociology, the "facts" are buried deep in the statistics. We have survey results that represent mostly factual responses to specific questions (though always prone to some transcription error), but that does not translate into facts about whom we are (it says at least as much about whom we would like to be seen to be). We have factual test results, but that does not translate into facts about the test subjects (beyond that subject X answered Y to question Z) because the test may be invalid or fail to reflect what we think it reflects.
So what "argument" do you think is actually a "fact"? Do you think you live in a world in which complicated biological processes are routinely proven as robustly as that 0.999... = 1 [wikipedia.org]? Not everything is an objective truth. Sorry.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:25PM
It doesn't actually follow. The fact is neither white or black kids are likely to climb very far out of poverty. Likewise, no matter how low their IQ, rich kids are not all that likely to find themselves poor later in life. Having parents able to give them a "small million dollar loan" has a lot to do with that.
All of that suggests that the real problem for society is a lack of class mobility in general. We should be as concerned for the poor white kid as the poor black kid (that should be obvious).
The racial component is simply that for historical reasons, a black kid is more likely to be born poor than a white kid.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:54PM
Social science is an oxymoron.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday June 06 2017, @09:46PM
Day care in Australia is usually longer, even up to 6am to 6pm.
Pre-school is meant (in the year before school) to be 600 hours in the year, roughly 9 to 3 for three day a week, or 8:30 to 4 for two days per week.
Pre-schools expect children to be toilet trained, and usually 4 or 5 years old (funding for 3 year olds was cut a few years ago)
Day care centres accept children as young as 8 weeks.
Day care centres have staff with two or four years training. (Guess which are cheaper)
Pre-schools have teachers with four years training.
Not surprisingly, even day care centres with "preschool programs" aren't going to have quite the same educational outcomes.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/preschools-better-for-children-than-day-care-20130810-2roqx.html [smh.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex