Chet Raymo, who for years wrote very enjoyable science columns for the Boston Globe, has a blog called Science Musings that is well worth checking out. He posts today about an article in the Atlantic, derived in turn from this report, that compares the mathematical performance of U.S. students to those in various Asian countries.
(I wonder if the Australian scores were collected before or after Mark got there?) Now, self-confidence is a good thing, all else being equal. But being educated well is also a good thing. It’s no secret that we don’t train our teachers well, provide schools with proper resources, or challenge our students enough in the classroom. Maybe there’s something we can learn from what’s going on in Asia.
54 thoughts on “But We Feel Good About Ourselves”
Comments are closed.
We learn that taking a lot of hard exams makes you humble.
I wonder how the teenage suicide rate compares in those countries.
Unskilled and unaware of it, huh…
The wonderful thing about that top graph is that the differences among the countries would appear negligible if we only rescaled the vertical axis to start at 0.
How much of this is related to kids seeing math and science as a “road to nowhere”?
Many freshman students have deicided they don’t want to go into science/engineering for the reason that there’s not many jobs, and they hear all kinds of stories of hi-tech companies firing many engineering/tech types on a regular basis. With all the stories of hi-tech companies firing tech workers regularly, along with stories of older laid-off tech workers not being able to find another job doing similar tech work, I would certainly be reluctant to be majoring in science/engineering if I was a freshman college student these days.
It looks like the U.S. and Australia are anomalies, here… this is more evident in my crudely generated scatterplot. The other five countries seem to obey a roughly linear relationship between performance and self-confidence.
Singapore has an almopst 10% lead, hardly negligible. Without more detailed knowledge of the tests used that absolute scale is rather meaningless anyways though.
JC: Regardless of how college freshman feel, I’m not sure that 8th grade students are very aware of the sociology of the tech industry.
I, for one, think this is good news for the U.S. Self-confidence is what drives people to decide for themselves what they ought to study. Most people find something they want to study. Students here are generally more demanding (self-confident) with respect to their education. They seem less likely to embrace the standard curriculum and more likely to resist coercion by their superiors. Yes, we end up with a population that scores poorly on some standardized test, but who gives a shit?
As a physics grad student, I’ve found American students are far more likely to challenge their professors and their ideas. These are the people who have to arrogance needed to actually contribute something original to science. Isn’t that what we really want as the end product of an education? An original and independent thinker?
In general, I think we need to challenge the (poor test scores) = (american idiocracy) conventional wisdom.
That article in the Atlantic says something which bothers me. They lead into the story in the following way:
Isn’t this a textbook example of confusing correlation with causation?
Dr Hubisz/NC State (physics prof) has been going public on the issue of poor science textbooks. The CNN article here mentions the issue of America VS other countries.
I saw the CNN report on TV, & the MSU statistics prof made the point (not incl in the above article) that the Japanese texts were “really thin, compact” whereas the US text was a humongous pig. Hubisz exclaimed “..this is too much!”. I liken the whole thing to “American is a junk food society”..incl textbooks. A USA Today article by Hubisz here.
This parallels an experience R. Feynman had with middle-school textbooks, see here
What’s more interesting to me is the fact that Singapore is the real anomaly of the lot : the country who kick ass in maths and knows it.
The others are either overestimating or underestimating themselves.
Warren’s assessment struck me as dead-on: a culture of learning that encourages humility, sometimes through rather humiliating or abusive means.
There’s also the problem of many teachers teaching science at the jr. high or high school level, who know very little about the “science” they are teaching.
One science teacher I had in jr. high, turned out to be some guy who majored in phys ed in college. He knew very little about what he was teaching to us. It was very obvious that he had a hard time answering questions about the subject, if the answer was not verbatim from the textbook.
Some physics teacher I had would get angry at us whenever we asked questions like whether microscopic particles also had wavelike properties. He would tell us to shut the fuck up all the time. It was obvious he didn’t have a background in physics, and seemed to really hate the subject with a passion. Years later I found out this guy also majored in phys ed when he was in college, and only took a “physics for poets” general ed course when he was a freshman.
I don’t think I had many teachers in jr. high or high school, who actually majored in science or engineering in college. The only teacher I can think of, was maybe one math teacher who happened to major in chemistry in college. He was good at answering hard questions from out of left field.
How do they teach people real science in middle school, anyway? Until you know some real math or at least enough to understand “s = vt + .5at^2”, science education is just a lot of words and descriptions that don’t mean very much.
http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2003/hiebert052203.html
Doug S.,
The most “quantitative” science stuff we were taught in jr. high, was velocity in 1-dimension or simple 2-dim cases (ie. with right triangles). They also covered simple cases of “work done” = force x distance. Only other “quantitative” stuff was basic statistics like calculating averages of data sets. Towards the end of jr. high they covered stuff like cocave/convex mirrors and ray diagrams, calculations involving specific heat capacity and latent-heats of fusion/vaporization, and even some basic chemistry stuff like balancing chemical and nuclear reaction equations.
Basically this is stuff which can be done with basic algebra from the 7th grade.
Surprisingly the teacher I had for these science classes in jr. high was that guy who majored in phys ed in college, who knew very little about the “science” he was teaching.
I think that children should be taught maths from grade 1 onwards. We now wait till they are 12 years old. Children of 6 years old are capable of understanding basic logic and there is no reason why they can’t be taught algebra.
When I was in school I had the feeling that I wasn’t learning anything useful. I had to do the same type of sums over and over again. So, I decided to learn math from books myself. By age 16, I could solve complicated integrals using contour integration.
Most children would not be able to study maths from books like I did, not because they are too stupid, but because they are not interested. If you make it interesting, then they’ll pick it up.
The vast majority of the population has no need for science or math. And it’s not like this is something that is changing in a way that requires a better educated workforce. My grandparents were educated in useful things like the hand extraction of square roots, a skill few scientists know today.
Here it is 2006 and still no need for the guys who pour concrete to understand calculus. Who’d a thunk it. In places where someone once might have needed to know the area of a triangle, now a CAD package computes far more complicated areas at the push of a button.
Let’s see, what’s in the news these days that could save the American student. String theory is in trouble. Maybe they’ll finally ashcan the subject and let all those physicists get new jobs teaching high school. Or maybe having a job that required them to work 40 hours a week would dampen some of their enthusiasm for the subject.
It’s well known that American education is far below that of many other industrialized countries. So it really is not surprising that our 8th grade science scores are 5-10% lower than those countries. America simply doesn’t put enough into our children’s education. Self confidence, on the other hand, is something that can propel a mildly intelligent individual to great heights. I think I can mentality displays a will and drive to do more, to become a “better”, more valuable member of society. Our children may not spend 5 hours every day studying, but with self-worth, they have potential to achieve in this world. Most adults cannot pass a 6 question 8th grade science “exam”. If it doesn’t interest you, why would you stay on top of it?
There seems to be a disconnect between American kids doing poorly in math + science, and the fact that America is relatively advanced technologically.
If Americans were genuinely “stupid” and/or “lazy”, then I would expect the society to resemble something like “Mad Max” and not a technologically advanced society.
Maybe people are getting their “education” through other means such as: on the job training, going to college later in life, MBA school, trade school, etc … and not as much via the “traditional” academic school setting. I can understand kids being bored in the traditional academic school setting, and largely not giving a damn about anything. Those same kids may take things more seriously later in life, and get their “education” through other means.
Take a look at those graphs. The variations in self-esteem look pretty big: 56% of US students have “high self-confidence in learning science” (whatever that means), while only 20% of South Korean and Japanese students do.
The variations in test scores look pretty big – until you see that the graphs misleadingly start at 500 out of 800 possible points. You can make any difference look big that way! The differences are not really so big: the Singaporean students get 578/800 = 72% of all possible points, while the US and Australian students get 527/800 = 66% of all possible points. Is this really worth worrying about?
It would be interesting to see how they measured “high self-confidence in learning science”. I think Americans are raised to talk in ways that sound more self-confident (or showoffy, or arrogant) while Asians are conditioned to talk in ways that sound more timid (or modest, or polite). This became pretty clear to me after I spent a summer in Hong Kong and a summer in Shanghai. I had to adjust my behavior to avoid seeming like a jerk.
So, cross-cultural comparisons of “self-confidence in learning science” don’t mean much except on a background of more general cross-cultural differences in expressing “self-confidence”.
Carl Brannen – I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at, but one thing stuck out. Why do you think taking a job working 30% or so fewer hours would dampen someone’s spirits?
I think this whole issue of American kids being relatively poor in math skills in comparison to Asian countries is somewhat overhyped. The higher up one goes in the educational chain [i.e. especially in college-level studies and beyond], the more it matters what you understand vs. how fast you can solve a simple arithmetic or algebra problem; there, I’m afraid it matters little if your average score in 8th grade math exam was a few marks below a Singaporean or Taiwanese student. What really matters is the knowledge and expertise you gain; and here more than in any other part of one’s educational experience America stands as de facto number one!
Jay
Carl:
The vast majority has no need for learning history either. What about geography? Does it really matter if you don’t know that the capital of Denmark is Kopenhagen? Why do we teach literature to children? Does it really matter if you haven’t read Shakespeare?
The reason why we do teach history, geography, literature etc. to children is because we consider these things are part of our culture.
I think that we should also consider science as part of our culture. Shakespeare’s works are no more important than Newton’s Principia.
Correct spelling isn’t very important either, considering that you can randomly permute all the letters inside words while keeping the first and last letter fixed and still end up with a text that is readable: