Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

stuartspencestuff.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 278 posts

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#221

Post by geophile »

mililani wrote: post #211
geophile wrote: post #192

I met some education majors in the 70s, when I was in college and grad school, (at McGill, coincidentally). It was clear, even then, that many of them were aiming to become grade school teachers because they could not do math beyond the grade school level . My encounters with my kids' teachers over the years have only reinforced that impression. Two examples: 1) A 4th grade teacher who gave assignments in which prese…

I think your point 2) is unjustifiably harsh. It may have been misinterpreted. I think it's an honest mistake.

I talked to the teacher, and she was definitely confused. If not by the math concepts, then by the common English phrases used in talking about probability.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#222

Post by Negitivefrags »

tshaddox wrote: post #197
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…

I've got a slightly subtler but similar story. I had a math teacher in high school who would curve her test scores to the lowest top score from any one class. In other words, if she taught three identical 10th grade Trig classes in a semester, for each test she would take the three top scores (one from each class), and curve the test to the lowest of those three scores. It's a reasonable enough idea, I suppose, since…

Here is a story of something that happened to a friend of mine. This is from New Zealand.

He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single student.

He scored 95% in the final exam. In NZ the end of year standardized tests are scaled to fit a curve across the entire country. He was scaled down to 43%. A failing grade.

Obviously in this case the only students that would bother taking Latin all the way up to 7th form are going to people who care enough about it to learn it well. The standard scaling method used doesn't make sense at all with this group of students.

He wrote a letter to the education minister of NZ complaining about this issue. Months later he got back a form letter explaining why test scores are scaled with no regard to the special circumstances.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#223

Post by ptaipale »

bduerst wrote: post #92
growlix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland both pays and respects its teachers. This is not so much the case in the US, where teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting. Also, prestige/symbolic capital is a powerful motivator. It seems to me that in the US, wealth is a major contributor to prestige, so they're often not dissociated in professional attainment.

>teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting. I think it's also an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which parents think that just because they have kids, it makes them experts at education. This is ultimately harmful because it makes parents feel superior to educators in their respective field.

Many people also think they are experts in education, even if they don't have kids, but they've been to school.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#224

Post by [deleted] »

crucini wrote: post #220
japhyr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often underestimate the bitterness that these experiences create in smart people. It's not a petty thing, either - it's life changing in many situations. We need smart people to take control of schools.

The road of life is bumpy. I would not seek to smooth out the few remaining bumps in school. We are already in danger of creating fragile people who shatter at the first bump. All this, even if the teacher's idea were quite wrong - but it's not. By "clipping" the score, the teacher created a hybrid between curved and uncurved grades. If curved and uncurved are acceptable, why not the hybrid?

[deleted]

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#225

Post by ptaipale »

cs702 wrote: post #4

In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland. Depressing. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

I think that your [1] Smithsonian mag is painting a bit too rosy picture. I live close to the place, Kirkkojärvi, where the interviewed teachers work, and not everyone is quite as happy as that. I know someone who moved away from the area to another school district just because he said he wanted his kids to learn Finnish at school, instead of teaching schoolmates to speak and write.

The Smithsonian piece was published after Finland scored high in the 2009 PISA rankings. In 2012 rankings, Finland had dropped quite a lot: 12th place in maths, 5th in science, 6th in reading. That's not very bad either, but it's far from the top, now occupied by Shanghai, China.

Did the quality of Finnish teachers drop in three years so much that the academic achievement of pupils fell sharply? Of course not. It's the same teachers, largely similar population, achieving similar results, but the PISA ranking was weighted slightly differently, and the results changed immediately.

This shows how things are perhaps more sensitive to how you measure them, not how they actually change.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#226

Post by poppet_ »

olssy wrote: post #129

It is worth noting that McGill has over 60% of students coming from outside of Quebec so this doesn't have much to do with Quebec's education system. http://www.mcgill.ca/about/quickfacts/students

But the article is about creating good educators, the problem is't the students coming in, it's the ones coming out of that education program, who will eventually become teachers. The problem is the program.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#227

Post by recursive »

Yhippa wrote: post #196
worklogin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it unfair? The AP courses are more challenging, and therefore get more weight. Isn't the valedictorian (theoretically) the smartest kid in the school?

> and as few regular classes as possible I enjoyed band so I took it and they didn't have an honors or AP version. So for me to maximize my GPA would mean that I would have to forgo band all four years of my high school existence in order to min-max for GPA.

How is this min-max? Isn't this just straight maximization?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#228

Post by jordigh »

lotharbot wrote: post #173
jordigh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "America isn't the US". Depends whom I'm talking to. When I talk to you and others like you, I'll be careful to note that unqualified "America" to you almost always means "the United States". It never meant that to me growing up, nor to a bunch of other people. However, due to the global influence of the US, most of the world considers "America" to be the "US". It's not really about context or anything that could b…

> "It's not really about context ... [it] means different things to different people." The identities of the speaker and audience are part of context. As you correctly inferred, if I'm speaking, an unqualified "America" probably means "the United States". If you're speaking, it probably means "the largest landmass in the western hemisphere". If we're quoting Obama speaking to the Senate, or Morelos during the revolut…

> The identities of the speaker and audience are part of context.

I cannot in general assume that information on the internet.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#229

Post by baddox »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #222
tshaddox wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a slightly subtler but similar story. I had a math teacher in high school who would curve her test scores to the lowest top score from any one class. In other words, if she taught three identical 10th grade Trig classes in a semester, for each test she would take the three top scores (one from each class), and curve the test to the lowest of those three scores. It's a reasonable enough idea, I suppose, since…

Here is a story of something that happened to a friend of mine. This is from New Zealand. He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single…

Can you clarify what you mean? How does a curve cause a 95% to get scaled down to a 43% failing grade?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#230

Post by baddox »

crucini wrote: post #220
japhyr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often underestimate the bitterness that these experiences create in smart people. It's not a petty thing, either - it's life changing in many situations. We need smart people to take control of schools.

The road of life is bumpy. I would not seek to smooth out the few remaining bumps in school. We are already in danger of creating fragile people who shatter at the first bump. All this, even if the teacher's idea were quite wrong - but it's not. By "clipping" the score, the teacher created a hybrid between curved and uncurved grades. If curved and uncurved are acceptable, why not the hybrid?

Neither curved nor uncurved grades remove points that a student earned from the student's score. Uncurved grades obviously just give you what you earned, and traditional curved grades give you more than what you earned. This "hybrid" gave me *fewer( points than what I earned.
Post reply on HN