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Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

nytimes.com

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Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#41

Post by Consultant32452 »

AlanYx wrote: post #28
nopinsight wrote: post #3

Chart of PISA results of all participating countries from the source: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png A quote from the Economist article on PISA results (which the NYT article is also based on): “In these parts of China the average pupil’s maths score is 591, compared with an OECD average of 489, suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average.” Note that the total popu…

"...suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average." I don't find this all that surprising. I've done casual comparisons of Chinese curricular materials for math vs. Canadian (Ontario) materials, and there is about a 3 year difference in content level being presented to the students at equivalent age levels. Of course, there could be other elements like selection bias, etc. playing into…

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. You noticed a grade differential in raw math concepts. Is it possible to notice things like creativity, communication, and imagination as applied to mathematics?

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/11/more-on-chinese-an...

>In many cases, the teachers would like to take a lesson from American schools and concentrate more on imagination and resourcefulness. They say it is the parents who want to keep the focus on objective assignments, drills, and tests to prepare students for exams.

>Any understanding of Chinese culture has to begin with how a "repeat after me" education focused entirely on objective tests affects communication skills, analytic thinking, teamwork, creativity, imagination and initiative.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#42

Post by ikeyany »

mumblemumble wrote: post #26
ansible wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is all crazy what we've been doing to the educational system for the last 30 years, and if we can produce functioning adults from it, it will occur despite the emphasis on test scores, rather than because of it. We had one of the finest education systems in the world, and we're taking all the wrong lessons from other developed nations on how to "improve" it. And in the mean time, we're causing severe bur…

Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she comment…

I was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#43

Post by fatnoah »

ryaniscool wrote: post #38

As a parent, I find there is a lot of armchair quarterbacking and opinions from people who don't have school age children or have never had children. The obsession over competing with other countries' test scores seems to assume that first, these other countries are reporting test scores accurately and second, these test scores represent an accurate measurement of the quality of education. I would call into question…

>I have a master's degree in engineering and I found some of those word problems to be ambiguous.

I faced a similar problem when my son was in 3rd grade (I also have an M.S. in Engineering). All of the work seemed to be geared to helping kids develop an intuitive understanding of math and numbers, which is a great goal, but the way it was taught was to teach the same "intuitive" methods to all kids. We all intuit things differently and my humble opinion is that parents and teachers aren't fully prepared to understand and teach math this way. Attempts to promote intuition simply become methods that are different than the ones we learned.

I was able to work around those things and help my son, and he was able to develop a fairly good intuitive understanding of numbers. Where the approach falls down (again, in my opinion) is where structured approaches are required, such as in long division. By the time 5th and 6th grade came around, my son didn't have the reps at doing it and had some struggles.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#44

Post by Kaiyou »

shantly wrote: post #34
hereme888 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it would cost a lot more. I would think it would cost way less, unless you're referring to "tracking" them in everything they do. I believe older children and teenagers have the ability to choose material that comfortably challenges their own ability better than any software or person. Students aren't lazy by default. They're just lazy and unmotivated when forced to focus on what their brains conside…

Higher cost mostly because you need better teachers, and probably more of them (20+ kids per teacher makes it hard to give all of them what they need). Tracking would help contain the costs because it's easier to teach 20 kids roughly on the same "level" in a topic than 20 kids some of whom are operating about three grade levels behind, and others three grade levels ahead.

You need zero teachers if kids are motivated and have access to the Internet. All teachers have done in my schoollife could easily be replaced by playing back a video.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#45

Post by [deleted] »

ikeyany wrote: post #42
mumblemumble wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she comment…

I was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).

[deleted]

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#46

Post by mumblemumble »

ikeyany wrote: post #42
mumblemumble wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she comment…

I was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).

My best guess about why that idea has so much staying power is that it's useful for consoling oneself after having been failed by mainstream language education.

The people I know of who've successfully learned a second language that way are invariably characters on TV shows. Having spent much of the past few years of my life helping two small children learn their first language, I have my doubts about whether the "immersion is magic" approach is really even the most efficient way to pick up language number one.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#47

Post by Kaiyou »

ikeyany wrote: post #42
mumblemumble wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she comment…

I was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).

No, that is a movie lie. You can learn stuff during total immersion, but you can also learn nothing while being totally immersed. It doesn't affect your learning.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#48

Post by Kaiyou »

reubenswartz wrote: post #39
mumblemumble wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she comment…

Well don't leave us hanging-- what's the secret sauce? ;-)

I learned English in about a year after having failed to make any progress in ten odd years of learning the language formally through school. The secret sauce is (1) completely ignore grammar, (2) never have your mistakes corrected and (3) just look up every word you don't know.

Of course, the most important thing is to have a motivation for reading English text in the first place and wanting to understand it. If you don't have that motivation you won't have any lasting success.

Though, I know of methods that allow you to learn any language in six weeks, but it involves talking to a native speaker.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#49

Post by nyxtom »

shantly wrote: post #22
hereme888 wrote: post #21

Maybe the issue has more to do with things such as: - The boredom of being imprisoned all day long - The slavery of feeling forced to do uninteresting homework - Lack of free time after school to pursue your own interests or learn your own material - The toxic culture in school, and being forced to be around people you hate all day long. - Lack of sleep, etc... ...all to regurgitate a bunch of short-term memory into…

Making better use the huge amount of time we stick kids in school would probably require a whole lot more money (mostly for more and better teachers) and, to bring the costs anywhere near the realm of feasibility and achieve maximum benefit, "tracking" (grouping by ability) for at least much of the day, if not all of it. I don't think either of those are likely to happen.

Less emphasis on testing, more emphasis on functioning through life, conflict management, more democratic driven schools where students can participate in the process of formulating goals.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#50

Post by randcraw »

First of all, do we know why other countries are outperforming us? Especially countries with similar socioeconomic and cultural norms, like Canada?

Second, why do we insist that a single number is going to usefully assess the many skills being learned? Or that any single metric, however informative, should be applied across all the many subgroups that make up a large population like the US? Why the hell don't we stratify students and policies and regions and then compare only across pairs across strata? Only in that way can you learn what works and what don't.

We should be breaking down these numbers by student socioeconomic group, by state, by county, by school district, by education policy, by gender, so that we can compare results within the US to see how different policies on similar student groups turns out, and similar policies on different student groups.

What works and what doesn't? After 70(?) years of standard tests, it seems we still have no idea. We're never going to learn anything useful from any kind of testing if we don't 1) partition the parameter space better, and 2) ask simple (actionable) questions of the results.

Likewise, we need to break ourselves of the insistence that a single education policy is best for all students everywhere in the US. Geez. Let different states propose their own experimental design and then assess the results of their different strokes. Supposedly that's what governance at the state level was for, ever since 1789.

Comparing the US to other countries using a single metric sounds like the least useful way to improve US students.

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