Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement • Hacker News Board

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#51

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #24

I'd just hazard to say that the current school system is not very functional. It puts kids through a lot of unpleasant experiences, requiring to exert a lot of effort and spend a lot of time. The problem is that not so much of that effort, discomfort, and time is due to learning new and useful stuff. Instead, some kids waste time bored when they are ahead of the class, some waste time clueless when they are way behin…

I always feel like my most valuable lessons from school was about how to live and interact with people of different types. I learned academic stuff outside of school... it was learning to deal with dumb people, bullies, smart jerks, dumb teachers, stupid rules, etc that were the lessons most important to my life.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#52

Post by kick » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #39

hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

I have a life story similar to you up through middle-school - second pick for G&T, bullied heavily, repeated physical abuse from peers, ended up hanging out with losers who were into drugs both in middle & high school. After that it diverges though - I switched to a charter school for high school, went to a top liberal arts college, then worked at a couple startups and had a pretty prestigious position at Google. I'v…

I'm currently not in a position to be able to look up this stuff (making dinner), but Duke has done a lot of research on this stuff under their TIP program that basically everyone in this thread might be interested in: it validates your experiences in numbers as the default for gifted children/adolescents/teenagers when not helped structurally, and provides a reasonable amount of information and resources to try and offset some of their suffering.

There's nothing to really help people who've already experienced it, but seeing the numbers somehow really helped to put it in perspective for me.

It's kind of an epidemic at this point.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#53

Post by itsdrewmiller » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

dguido wrote: post #8

Here's the opposite perspective: https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2012-02-06-bs-ed... > But as the facts now show, smart kids don't always stay smart, and when they are bored or bullied or ridiculed or neglected, some turn off and some drop out. Thirty-plus years of experience and research into how these students learn has taught us that the academically able can and must be challenged and engaged, inspire…

The only stats in the opposite perspective are "30%-50% of 90th percentile students regress" which seems like regression to the mean, and smaller gains for minorities and low income students at high achievement levels. That's not a super compelling counterpoint.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#54

Post by borski » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

seamyb88 wrote: post #42

hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

Sounds like you have some real problems in your society for that bad experience at school. Surely if you're the gifted individual you claim you are, you'll want to change society rather than seclude yourself from it as much as you can get away with. The non-gifted kids, whatever the fuck that means, don't deserve to bullied/abused either.

The non-gifted kids (to use your terminology) weren't bullied or abused. They were friends. They played sports together. I played sports too, just not with them, because I wasn't invited to. I wasn't 'cool.' I 'tried too hard.' I 'cared too much about learning.'

Not sure what you're going for here?

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#55

Post by ZhuanXia » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #48

dguido wrote: post #8

Here's the opposite perspective: https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2012-02-06-bs-ed... > But as the facts now show, smart kids don't always stay smart, and when they are bored or bullied or ridiculed or neglected, some turn off and some drop out. Thirty-plus years of experience and research into how these students learn has taught us that the academically able can and must be challenged and engaged, inspire…

Right, so it raises the question: What is the relative importance of helping the best students verse helping the worst students? Even if we solve the talent identification problem, SOME kids are going to be the lower achievers.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction?

>.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction?

It is so strange reading this comment, as I know how Americans are primed to respond to it, and how precisely opposite my response is.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#56

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

xhkkffbf wrote: post #10

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough. The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Ev…

Your experience is as the parent of a high achiever, it sounds like. This article is talking about the achievements of the entire class, which includes both high and low achievers.

It might be true that the higher achievers do better separated, but that the reduction in performance for the lower achievers more than offsets that. This makes sense, because the high achievers are probably going to do pretty well either way, and as you get to the higher test scores (on which performance is measured for these studies), there is less room to improve for the top students.

Of course, this is a complicated question. What is the relative importance of helping lower performing students verse maximizing the top performing students? This is not a question that can be answered with raw data alone, because it is a values question.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#57

Post by kick » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

dcbadacd wrote: post #46

xhkkffbf wrote: post #10

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough. The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Ev…

The sage-on-a-stage also comes with socializing both during and after lessons, that can't be replaced with computers. If anything, I think it'd cause a lot more sadness than the current system.

Socializing generally isn't productive for gifted children past a certain point; when they're too far ahead of their peers, there's not much value that comes from it.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#58

Post by notadoc » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

dguido wrote: post #8

Here's the opposite perspective: https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2012-02-06-bs-ed... > But as the facts now show, smart kids don't always stay smart, and when they are bored or bullied or ridiculed or neglected, some turn off and some drop out. Thirty-plus years of experience and research into how these students learn has taught us that the academically able can and must be challenged and engaged, inspire…

Keep in mind the original post is an opinion piece with a political agenda, it is not evidence based.

There is no shortage of bad opinion pieces with all sorts of terrible politically driven opinions out there. This is one of them.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#59

Post by catalogia » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #50

catalogia wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be the case that the gifted kids are helping slower kids score better, but not actually learn better. At least, that's what it was like when I was a kid. Teachers would constantly pair up smart kids with dumb kids for group assignments or study, and the smart kids would end up doing all the work. This benefits the teachers when they're evaluated by how well students are scoring.

They usually use test results to measure achievement, though, and the smart kids can't do that for the other kids (at least assuming they aren't cheating)

Whenever teachers realize they're being evaluated based on some metric, they almost immediately begin gaming that metric and with that it ceases to be a good metric. I had teachers give a lot of "group tests", walk out of the classroom during tests, etc.

Standardized testing aims to correct this, but I think it's now considered by many teachers to be a joke. Even when exams are administered by independent proctors, teachers can still game the metric by "teaching the test" instead of imparting meaningful understanding of the material.

I think this is a subject that will continue to defy rigorous objective scientific analysis.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#60

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Nov 05, 2019, 12:33 AM UTC

How do we help those kids that are in 'gen pop', though? Simply pulling the smarter kids out, helping them, and ignoring the rest doesn't seem like a good answer, either.

I feel like HN is not the best place for this sort of discussion, since everyone is coming at the problem from the perspective of the high achiever. The low achievers deserve help, too.