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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:45PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:45PM (#521459)

    Sometimes (many times?) failure rates in courses like Calc II are intentional to "thin the herd" heading into majors that require higher maths. Unfortunately, the way these weed-out courses are executed often has little correlation to actual ability in the topic. Sure, people who are less mathematically inclined will drop at higher rates, but my Calc II experience was a giant pile of memorization work - very similar to some pre-med courses.

    I don't think it "hurts" anyone to learn that integrals can be performed analytically instead of always doing them via summation methods. I've actually used analytic methods at least three, maybe four times since I graduated (in 1989).

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