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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-send-'em-down-the-mines dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:30PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:30PM (#521399)
    • "[Citation]" is a lazy man's retort; here [blogspot.com], specifically here [pewtrusts.org]:

      Individuals with higher test scores in adolescence are more likely to move out of the bottom quintile, and test scores can explain virtually the entire black-white mobility gap. Figure 13 plots the transition rates against percentiles of the AFQT test score distribution. The upward-sloping lines indicate that, as might be expected, individuals with higher test scores are much more likely to leave the bottom income quintile. For example, for whites, moving from the first percentile of the AFQT distribution to the median roughly doubles the likelihood from 42 percent to 81 percent. The comparable increase for blacks is even more dramatic, rising from 33 percent to 78 percent. Perhaps the most stunning finding is that once one accounts for the AFQT score, the entire racial gap in mobility is eliminated for a broad portion of the distribution. At the very bottom and in the top half of the distribution a small gap remains, but it is not statistically significant. The differences in the top half of the AFQT distribution are particularly misleading because there are very few blacks in the NLSY with AFQT scores this high.

    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:36PM (#521406)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:44PM (#521415)

      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)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:37PM (#521407)

    > 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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:48PM (#521420)

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:49PM (#521421)

      First, get the term right. It's hackles, not heckles.

      http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hackles [dictionary.com]