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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

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Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#131

Post by plehoux »

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

Many comments here are anecdotal. Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment). Globe and Mail on the subject:

> But there’s also good news. Canada’s declining performance in math isn’t equally distributed across the country. When results are broken down by province, there are shocking differences. And at the top of the class is Quebec.

> While the math scores in most provinces were sliding over the past decade, Quebec’s already strong results held steady. Students in Quebec outperform their rest-of-Canada peers in every mathematical category. Quebec students ranked sixth in the world, tied with Japan and Macao, and ahead of the Netherlands.

> There is no single, silver-bullet solution to solving the problem of declining math scores in the rest of the country, but Quebec is clearly doing something right. Exactly what is more than a matter of opinion. The OECD’s assessment teases out what appears to be working in those countries that perform best in the PISA survey. Quebec’s education system has a lot in common with them.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#132

Post by lotharbot »

foobarqux wrote: post #104
runeks wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check. That's exactly what rayiner is saying: they don't understand what they're doing, they're just applying some formula, because they've been told to apply that formula.

I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.

If you really understand the concept, the sanity check should be almost subconscious. You should see the nonsense answer and be uncomfortable with it, even if you're not explicitly going through a "compare with an estimate" step.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#133

Post by swalsh »

VLM wrote: post #125

The funniest part of the story is the article got the formula for average wrong. The article listed all this "add them all up and divide by how many" but thats totally wrong. The real way averages are calculated is you write a script for an actor wearing a lab coat to sell more toothpaste, and some liberal arts grad picks a number that rolls off the tongue and sounds good. Sometimes politicians use "average" as a ver…

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=psychologists+near+me

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#134

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

edias wrote: post #93
jordigh wrote: post #36

As a McGill math grad, I must say that it was a running joke in the math department how the Education students didn't really need to know any math (some B. Ed. students shared classes with us during the first year or two). The B. Ed. students freely accepted this joke and were quite self-deprecating about their mathematical skills. Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, i…

I just spoke to a family member who's also a McGill grad and was told the education program is "the worst by a mile". It seems a little disingenuous to lump the education program in with the rest of McGill.

It demonstrates how little the administration cares to maintain an acceptable standard of education in one department. Where else are they dropping the ball?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#135

Post by VanillaCafe »

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

> They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests.

That's not necessarily true at all. It's a function of the difficultly of each question. Possibly it could be generalized to the difficulty of each test -- where perhaps the questions on the 50-question test were twice as difficult as the questions on the 100-question test.

The best way to resolve your concern is to never assign a percentage per test -- just assigned points to each question based on difficulty. Then accumulate points and take an average only at the very end. But, short of that, taking a weighted average of the two tests is not necessarily any more correct than just taking the average of the percentages.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#137

Post by growlix »

danielweber wrote: post #78
akgerber wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Finnish teacher at midcareer appears to make pretty much the average wage in Finland: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teachers-salaries_tea... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_a... That said, 'Finland's teachers have high status, professional support, and good pay'[0], teaching 4 hours a day for 190 days a year. One can also presumably make that wage pretty much anywhere in the coun…

Earnest: how hard are they to fire?

Does making teachers easier to fire draw better candidates into the profession?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#138

Post by cbgb »

Retric wrote: post #97
cbgb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, calculating an average is something every teacher should have to do many times throughout their career (at the very least for calculating how well individual students performed on a test relative to their peers). Calculating an average is the statistical equivalent of 2 + 2. Who could respect a teacher who had to look up the algorithm for 2 + 2 every time they were asked to compute it?

I would hope most teachers stopped calculating averages by hand a long time ago.

Similar to another comment, how can you evaluate the correctness of the computed value if you don't know how the computation is done?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#139

Post by danielweber »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #127
danielweber wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was screaming about how I hadn't learned anything in math between grade 4 and 8. Nothing. Think about that. We did fraction math for four and a half years I ended up being taught the same thing many times in math classes, but I noticed that my classmates -- even in honors classes -- had completely forgotten the last time we had learned this. They insisted they had never seen it before. The teachers had been through…

I think a surprising number of people simply can't math. This seems incredible if you're one of the people who can math. But really, I've known otherwise bright people whose brains fall apart at the first hint of abstraction. Basic arithmetic is fine, but you can forget about trying to teach them anything more complicated. Simple equations? Trig? Basic stats? They just can't do them, no matter how many times you repe…

There are two theses I have, not sure which is right:

1. Those people biologically can't math. (Alternatively, we are the mutants who can math.)

2. Culture has given them math anxiety, which causes panic when being asked to do math.

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