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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: 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?