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Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

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Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#181

Post by gwern »

tmaly wrote: post #120

I have a 6 year old daughter who has been taking lessons with the 3rd graders this past year. I just had a conference with her teachers and they are ok to jump her a grade. They thought two grades would have been too much socially. But they did agree to give her advanced lessons. She is in a Montessori where grades 1-3 are together. I really believe all children have the potential for genius. Its all in how they are…

The Pygmalion effect is complete rubbish. If you look into it, you see that the original study was p-hacked garbage which relied on impossible gains like individual students gaining literally hundreds of IQ points (yes, really, they reported this with a straight face and built an entire literature on it, which immediately showed massive decline effects so now the meta-analyses argue over whether the actual effect, which is now like 100x smaller than originally claimed, is distinguishable from 0 or systematic biases).

Links: https://www.gwern.net/Replication#pygmalion-effect My opinionated summary of Rosenthal's oeuvre: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1798638457

We see the same thing for growth mindset, BTW, if you compare the original studies which made it famous with the most recent rigorous large-scale studies (and then extrapolate out the usual decline effect in long-term followups).

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#182

Post by gwern »

sverona wrote: post #64

Disclaimer: it's late and I don't feel like SciHubbing it so I haven't read past the abstract. My N=1 opinion is that being "highly gifted" may not cause social and emotional trauma, but it can certainly complicate unrelated trauma. I skipped so many grades when I was a kid that they started holding me back so I wouldn't get too "out of sync" (I did junior high twice.) I got along socially with relatively little bull…

Fulltext: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2020-bernstein.pdf

I keep a fulltext bibliography of SMPY-related papers at https://www.gwern.net/SMPY - this is just one of many papers establishing that various kinds of enrichment and acceleration are just fine, do no emotional damage, and do save a lot of their life from formal schooling, which has been a major premise of SMPY since Stanley founded it in the 1960s.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#183

Post by taneq »

DuskStar wrote: post #31
taneq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fund education sufficiently that "No Child Left Behind" doesn't turn into "No Child Allowed Ahead".

And why do you assume that this is the sort of problem that can be solved with funding? Maybe we'd be better off with average classes of 60 plus putting students with others matching their skill levels, or some other orthogonal move. If I'm remembering correctly, school performance by state is basically uncorrelated with spending.

I'm pretty sure outcomes are inversely correlated with class size. That's why people pay for individual tuition. Smaller class sizes necessarily cost more per student. It's not a huge leap to conclude that more money per student spent on reducing class sizes will improve outcomes across the board.

What happens, though, is that money is spent on small group or individual lessons for the special ed kids while any kid who's capable of doing so is left to fend for themselves.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#184

Post by musicale »

honkycat wrote: post #62
colechristensen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do th…

Yes. Exactly. Precisely the same thing for me. I was reading at an absurdly young age. School for me was a special sort of hell where I was able to read at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade, and yet a decade later was in class with people who could not yet read. I would stare at the clock and switch between sleeping and being insanely bored. I'm 31 years old now and I feel I have enough life experience to call it what…

> child jail

I think you have crystallized the essence of much of our educational system. A sort of daycare/prison that also selects winners and losers (usually somewhat capriciously or even maliciously), with large rewards and punishments.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#185

Post by mturmon »

beaner wrote: post #173
mturmon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claimed that "the data shows they work" and I was pushing back against that because it is false. Charters failed in LAUSD, the second-largest school system in the US. It was honestly tried here, with the backing of several successive mayors, and donations from several rich foundations and billionaires. It turned out the profit motive wasn't as helpful in this setting as abstract speculation had supposed. Speaking…

I'll read yours if you read mine! I think Charter Schools and their Enemies may contain some stuff on CA schools but I haven't gotten that far yet. It starts out talking about NYC schools. It literally contains tables of data. I know that neither of us can come to a well-rounded conclusion without putting in a good faith effort to listen to arguments from both sides. It would be nice to be able to come back after doi…

Like I said, I have already studied this question to my satisfaction.

Also, in general, I have lost patience with much good-faith argument regarding neoconservative initiatives. In retrospect, I think most of the money and power behind the charter schools initiative became focused on dismantling public schools, and (like Diane Ravitch) I regret ever arguing for the benefits of charters.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#186

Post by elicitous »

emteycz wrote: post #76
colechristensen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't go and say I am of just of average genetic predisposition for intelligence... but really a bigger part of it is the people raising me, parents and grandparents, they taught me to read before I went to school. I don't think a child has to be particularly exceptional to learn to be able to read at 4 or 5, somebody has to go and teach them though. And let me add to "child jail": not only was I sent somewhere…

If only not sleeping well and boredom were the only issues. Being born in a post communist country, teachers here have a really powerful position, work used to be scarce, parenting is... Different, and thus my parents placed way too big importance on school. School has ruined my childhood, robbed me of all joy for more than a decade, made it very hard to have (and trust) normal human relationships, made me seriously…

And who will teach your children so that they can stay out of school?

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#187

Post by TomMarius »

elicitous wrote: post #186
emteycz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only not sleeping well and boredom were the only issues. Being born in a post communist country, teachers here have a really powerful position, work used to be scarce, parenting is... Different, and thus my parents placed way too big importance on school. School has ruined my childhood, robbed me of all joy for more than a decade, made it very hard to have (and trust) normal human relationships, made me seriously…

And who will teach your children so that they can stay out of school?

Me and my girlfriend.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#189

Post by TomMarius »

elicitous wrote: post #188
TomMarius wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me and my girlfriend.

While both holding full time jobs?

Nah, we don't think we should have kids while we're holding full time jobs. We own a house and live in a cheap part of the world. As a developer for a foreign company I can support the family more than well enough on a single part time job, maybe not even that will be needed.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#190

Post by paulgrant999 »

I for one, lamented the (abysmally slow) pace at which schooling took place. When you are correcting your English teachers at 12 ("its a word; uh-huh, use a bigger dictionary"), arguing that the system of arithmetic/geometry/algebra/calculus being taught is wrong (no, no, that doesn't have to be so...here are some exceptions), and getting thrown out of art class for not "following the rules" of your art teacher...

luckily... I used to hang out with adults (who at the time, surpassed my abilities++). and discovered the public library (libraries, I used to tear through them like a hurricane+++).

... I used to think that the "next level" of school, would be were I got to meet the people like me... except of course, it never materialized.

it amuses me to think about it from time to time. and then, sometimes I regret, the waste.

but thats life, eh?

--

++ if nothing else, in resources. +++ ... and later, the Internet was born... and a million phones rang out at once... ;)

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