Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study • Hacker News Board

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#81

Post by pram » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #76

algo646464 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about: "Kids who grow up in households full of gym/sports equipments, grow up to be muscular/athletic". The quality of this research may indeed be poor, but the "tall pants" analogy seems disingenuous.

This is a closer analogy. It has the same "sounds right" appeal, while sharing the problem with confounding variables. But Yglesias' analogy does a much better job of illustrating the problem; it is purposefully absurd in a way that quickly leads to the desired explanation. I'm finding it interesting to consider all three scenarios together. What is the similarly between your analogy and the book study that makes the…

At a very basic level, it gives you experience. “Mileage” is important in mastery of subjects.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#82

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #72

Alex3917 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses. This study was done in response to the Scarborough and Dobrich paper that found that how much parents read to their children (generally) isn't correlated with children's future reading ability, but how many books are in their household is a positive predictor of future reading ability. It's one of the most f…

That's the whole point - there is research supporting the point that "how many books are in their household is a positive predictor" not only of future reading ability but also a bunch of other things, but there seems to be no research supporting that "Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind". These are very, very, very different things. In essence, a very likely explanation for…

> - there is research supporting the point that "how many books are in their household is a positive predictor" not only of future reading ability but also a bunch of other things, but there seems to be no research supporting that "Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind".

This is self-contradictory. Research that supports “X is a predictor of Y” which does not inherently refute “X is a cause of Y”, in and of itself, is research supporting “X could be a cause of Y”.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#83

Post by innocentoldguy » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

cimmanom wrote: post #30

How much of this is simply attributable to parents who love to read inculcating their kids with a love of reading -- as opposed to the presence of the books themselves?

I would say it is entirely parents inculcating a love of reading in their children. Kids could live in a library, but if they never read they wouldn't receive any benefit from their environment. That was the issue I had with the article. The author wrote it in a way that suggested the mere presence of books produced an effect. I believe the presence of books offers no benefit whatsoever unless kids read them.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#84

Post by innocentoldguy » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #39

wedge14 wrote: post #4

How would growing up in a household with only ebooks, or a household with only physical books make a difference? (Assuming an equal number of both)

At an early age it is important to have contact with physical objects. (And no, an iPad wouldn't cut it.)

I think it is important at any age. I've been reading on a Kindle or iPad for years. My daughter recently bought a physical book for me and I had a hard time reading it. I've never had a difficult time diving into a book, but reading a physical book after using a kindle for so long made immersing my mind into the book quite challenging for some reason. I bought some other physical books the other day to see if the issue was just the story I was reading or if there is indeed an aspect of reading physical books that has atrophied in my brain after using electronic books for so long. If the latter, that would be quite concerning to me.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#85

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #52

drb91 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s lit…

>The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. Fyi... in the abstract of the actual paper that the article is based on, the authors used less hedging and suggested more of a cause & effect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...

It also indicates that the conclusion is based on controlling for the major social confounding factors that are typically also viewed as key intermediary mechanisms by which genetic factors influence the outcomes of interest, including both own occupation and educational attainment and parental educational attainment.

Even if the underlying reality is that growing up around books is an effect of a shared hidden (genetic or otherwise) cause, the fact that it is a predictor even after for controlling for the identified alternative factors is quite a significant result.

(Though, as other comments point out, self-reporting may be a problem, though “people that are more successful than expected for their occupation, education, and parental education tend to overreport the number of books they grew up with compared to less successful individuals” would be an interesting result in its own way.)

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#86

Post by TallGuyShort » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

fhood wrote: post #2

I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.

>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy

I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm aware, that's always been the case on my standardized tests, and I wasn't surprised because the questions seemed ludicrous to me (I nodded vigorously while reading [1]). I primarily read non-fiction and have wondered if I just don't grok fiction. What are other people's experience on that?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/...

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#87

Post by kurlberg » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

bobcostas55 wrote: post #16

I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.

Already Freakonomics noted/claimed that reading to kids makes little difference to educational outcome, whereas having lots books at home matters. The following explanation (taken from https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1633286&page=1) was given:

"Well, no," he continued. "Much more likely is that any family that has 100 children's books in the home is likely to be pretty highly educated to begin with, is starting out with a pretty high IQ, and values or treasures or rewards education to begin with."

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#88

Post by sandov » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

My house didn't have that many books (less than 100), but I didn't have a computer (I'm from a developing country), so when I got extremely bored I just picked up whatever book I could to keep myself entertained for a couple of hours. This is how I fell in love with Asimov's stories and eventually got into programming.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#89

Post by austinheap » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

When I would get in trouble as a kid my mom would ground me for a certain number of books. As I got older/wiser/in-more-trouble the requirement moved from # of books to # of pages and she'd test me on random sections of the readings. A++ productive way of dealing with a difficult child!

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#90

Post by hobs » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #86

fhood wrote: post #2

I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.

>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm…

I always found that the reading comprehension part of the test as the easiest by far, and would generally score at the highest level the test could predict.