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

#131

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #120

dang wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to…

I usually love your moderation, dang, and agree with you 99.99% of the time. But I think the parent here's criticism of the article does add something - the idea of genetics as a powerful confounding variable. He could have expanded on it, but it didn't add nothing.

"Accounting for genetic confounds" is extremely difficult--so difficult that no one in the world knows how to do it reliably--for basically any aspect of human behavior.

So the dismissal reads like "there's no excuse for not doing an extremely difficult thing that no one knows how to do reliably." I don't find that to be a useful or informative comment, so I agree with dang's approach here.

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

#132

Post by chiefalchemist » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

This feels like another version of nature vs nurture. That is, if your parents had books, lots of books, there's probably a reason(s) for that.

I would think, the ultimate study would be of adopted and/or children who do not share DNA with their parents, or other siblings. Is the environment an equalizer, so to speak?

This is certainly interesting, but it's more correlation than cause.

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

#133

Post by sudosteph » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

I never had much of a home library my formative years (would estimate One thing I noticed, and a reason that I depended on my local public library so much more than the school ones, is that the selection for libraries in schools before high school is way too age restricted. I once tried to donate a few of my favorite paperbacks (Stephen King novels) for future students, but the librarian told me the school system would just end up transferring those to a high school library.

Anyhow, my point is, I would be interested to know if living within walking distance of a public library is similarly correlated with better outcomes.

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

#134

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #120

dang wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to…

I usually love your moderation, dang, and agree with you 99.99% of the time. But I think the parent here's criticism of the article does add something - the idea of genetics as a powerful confounding variable. He could have expanded on it, but it didn't add nothing.

Criticizing something that could be wrong with the methodology of a study is always 100% inappropriate. Either you've read the study and understand what it was trying to show and the methodology the authors used, in which case by all means demonstrate that and then state your criticism, or else you haven't and shouldn't comment.

But trying to get others to not read someone else's work or take it seriously based on something you dreamt up that could be wrong with the study design is a completely inappropriate.

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

#135

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #129

snowwrestler wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile. But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school. Details do matter for reading comprehensi…

And yet standardized test writers seem to think they understand those choices better than the authors themselves.

Critics have an opportunity to understand those choices better than the authors themselves because critics have the opportunity to look at the work from a different perspective.

Just because every bit of writing is a choice, that doesn't mean the author him- or herself fully understood why they made that choice. We're all shaped by our own life experiences, our family, the time in which we grew up, etc. Often, it's easier for a third party to connect those dots. That's why coaching and therapy works, for instance.

That said, when we're talking about standardized tests, they tend to (and should be) sticking to pretty well-understood and obvious examples of this sort of thing.

And of course, sometimes they're just not well done. Standardized test writers face the same challenges as every other writer, and I think we can guess that the very best writers probably do not end up in that job...

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

#136

Post by 2snakes » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #94

xvector wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it makes sense to blame yourself. It is absolutely the job of parents to encourage their kids to read from a young age. To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. How much I miss the combination of childhood imagination and fantastic stories!

> To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. So important and always ignored. My mom read to us often, and I and my brothers hated reading. Later I encountered an Animorphs book and that was my gateway. One of my brothers, several years after that, discovered Redwall, and that did it for him.

Redwall and Salamandastron were great stories. Go Matthias.

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

#137

Post by heyitsguay » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 10:00 PM UTC

sna1l wrote: post #9

I am unable to read the actual study (paywall) and this article doesn't really talk about the methodology, but did they account for socioeconomic factors? I would assume on average that the more books your family could afford, the more money they have.

The relevant bit from the paper, emphasis mine:

> Cross-sectional data with retrospective indicators of scholarly culture are affected by measurement error and indicators could reflect unmeasured influence of other confounding variables which may lead to over-optimistic estimates (de Vries and de Graaf, 2008). However, prior research using longitudinal data from Australia with corrections for measurement error showed that a substantial impact of home library size on adult education existed net of the effects of academic ability (IQ) of adults or their father's scholarly habits (i.e. employment in occupations where use of books is common) as well as family income or wealth (Evans et al., 2010). Although we have no means of correcting for these potential biases in ways available in longitudinal data, we argue that even somewhat optimistic estimates are of value as an initial step in proposing and assessing hypotheses for future, more stringent tests. To limit the potential for confounding adolescent and adult literacy-enhancing activities, we control for adult out-of-work activities related to literacy, numeracy and ICT skills that might correlate with scholarly culture experienced in adolescence but are indicators of adult scholarly culture.

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

#138

Post by Jach » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #126

ip26 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd as…

I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile. But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school. Details do matter for reading comprehensi…

The color thing maybe is an indirect test to see if you're actually imagining the scene vividly, instead of thinking of it as some abstract "sledding" activity. It's not really memorization... Though literal imagining of things is something not everyone can do, so it also seems out of place on a reading comprehension test.

Personally I don't really appreciate any comprehension tests that can be answered somewhat easily by computers, which the "shirt color" thing could be. And tests that are hacked by simple human algorithms are boring. In elementary school I got really far ahead in extra credit reading packets by realizing I could skip the reading and just go straight to the questions, skim for the answer, repeat. Somehow I think that certain peers in high school never mastered this trick since they were complaining about lack of time on the ACT... The better test of comprehension was to read something and then write about it, but the writing section of the ACT was separated and made optional.

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

#139

Post by drb91 » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

ldiracdelta wrote: post #121

drb91 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe.... natural predilection is no replacement for experience, though, and reading is a type of experience. Arguably a high quality one. Also, there are obviously countless examples of seemingly intelligent people having kids which aren’t.

Yes. Genetics is messy and non-exact, but on the _average_ IQ is highly heritable.

On the average, IQ is 100. That is quite heritable. I’m not sure that’s meaningful genetically.

Even correlated high IQ across generations can easily be a nuture over nature deal—see the above article for one hypothesis.

Finally, even if high IQ is genetically heritable, it may still require cultural or experiential “activation” to nuture intrinsic ability.

There are simply too many variables to casually state any causal relation.

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

#140

Post by kirsebaer » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #3

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.

I think that last part is especially true. Due to school and forced reading assingments, reading gets associated too often with work or boring assignments.

School assignments should always be voluntary.