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.
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Jay, the more higher up you go in the educational chain the more Chinese people you see 🙂
John Baez wrote a little while ago:
Thank you! Even if the answer turns out to be “yes”, I highly doubt it could be deduced from this “data”. Other things in the original report are worth discussing, I think, but this particular graph has had too many trips to the graphic-design department.
I read this and immediately had the same thought as poster #27 — they have suppressed the origin on these plots, and the differences are at the 10% level.
Moreover “self confidence” seems very hard to quantify, and I am guessing that any self-reporting here has large cultural biases. All it seems to “prove” is that American and Australian kids have a pretty good opnion of themselves (and you don’t need to spend a lot of money to find *that* out).
For added fun, there’s the competence study.
In a series of studies, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed.
Sometimes, being spectacularly confident leads to complete blindness to one’s own incompetence and abilty to learn from mistakes.
I think American kids are sometimes raised with an “everyone gets a trophy” mentality, that one is awesome just for trying, so there’s no real difference between losers and winners. Everyone gets a prize just for showing up, just to not damage self-esteem.
Which reminds me of Jennifer Oullette’s post on The Tick. Spectacular incompetence, spectacular self-confidence. Bless Ben Edlund’s heart. He captured half of my graduating class, but they weren’t half as endearing.
Guys, the fact that the math-scores graph starts at 500 is of course completely irrelevant. The real question is whether the differences are statistically significant, which depends on the error bars on those scores, not their absolute differences. If the error is 1 point, those differences are huge! If its 100, not so much.
Sadly, one rarely sees error bars on graphs in non-technical papers.
The data were presented this report:
http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.pdf
If you look on page 19 you see a diagram of the percentage of students in 8-th grade achieving advanced math score. In Australia and the US this is 7%. Japan has the lowest score of the sampled Asian countries with a a score of 24% and Singapore has the highest score of 44%.
Good point, Allyson (#29). I can’t disagree with that. I just feel we ought hesitate before assuming poor test scores means we’re headed for disaster. There’s just so much more that leads a particular person to success than performing well in school. Self-confidence (coupled with curiosity) has to be an important part.
Also, I feel there’s a general confusion between academic achievement and actual achievement. Sure, winning a Rhodes Scholarship is nice, high test scores, and getting A’s are nice, but these only indicate the potential to do something real. Real achievement is writing a book, running a business, or making a scientific discovery. Yes, an education is an end in itself, but not an end that can be measured with such things as scholarships and grades.
A couple of posters have expressed the view that self confidence is a useful trait, perhaps more useful than being proficient at math and science, and therefore so what about the claims of this article.
My point of view is that we should strive for being the best in both categories. It seems a given that we are slipping behind, though to what degree is less clear but, I think we need to figure out how to get ahead right now.
As for science and math not being important to the vast majority of people in this country, I strongly disagree. Sure, most jobs don’t require specific use of differential equations or the application of GR theory, and I don’t claim that everyone should be required to reach those levels of education. But even if you don’t choose a career in science or math, learning the basics of these fields of study, and learning them well, gives you a huge variety of problem solving skills and concepts that you can apply to just about anything you can think of from home improvement projects to learning how to better ride a motorcycle. We are all part of a technological society and the more people that have a better understanding of all these technologies that surround us, the better off we will be as a whole and indvidually. No, we can’t all be experts, but we can be informed amateurs.
“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!”
Indeed.
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that the American work force is insufficiently educated in mathematics. If the rest of the world wants to be educated in a difficult subject that they will find that they do not need as an adult, then we should let them.
The underlying problem is that everyone wants their child to be a scientist, a doctor or a lawyer. So our educational system is designed to turn out 100% of these type of adults. Of course the jobs are not available; someone has to stock the supermarket shelves; someone has to drive the big trucks, etc.
A very high percentage of the public has sufficiently high math sckills to do their job. What more could one demand of the population? More mathematics than is needed, is clearly of less utility than more understanding of history, psychology, medicine and all that knowledge of the human species that could be taught instead of mathematics.
A similar article, Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth, on Scientific American’s web site discusses research that indicates “that artificially boosting self-esteem may lower subsequent academic performance.” Self-confidence that grows out of experience and learning seems valuable, as such people have the knowledge to evaluate their decisions and behavior based on their experience and learning. But as Allyson pointed out: “Sometimes, being spectacularly confident leads to complete blindness to one’s own incompetence and abilty to learn from mistakes.” The Sciam article supports that idea.
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Presumably a public that understood the science of evolution would not leave much space for Intelligent Designers.
Here is what Dr. Brian Marsden (Harvard/Center for Astrophysics) said in a 1988 article in Sky&Telescope:
The above is a real-life “experiment” from a Harvard astronomer, who samples the population of amateur submissions from all over the world. American amateurs (“as a whole”) sound like morons.
He is saying what a scientist friend of mine (also an amateur astronomer, UofArizona grad) says:
“The distribution curve of American amateurs is skewed over to the DOLT”
“We’re in the Dark Ages”
The last statement was also told to me by an adjunct astronomer (UofArizona, Steward Observatory), when we talked at the 2001 AAS meeting. I.e., the science-ignorance in USA is SO BAD due to poor education system, it’s like the Dark Ages. Just like what Carl Sagan said “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”. Pseudo-science is so prevalent, it’s fairly common to run into crackpots (like on airplanes, see recent thread “Pseudoscience in the Sky”)
The above scientist friend related a story (from U of Arizona physicist):
“You know, he’s really discusted with freshman physics class at UofA. They have had to setup remedial physics courses to deal with it”
I heard the same thing from a Cal Sate Long Beach astronomy instructor, he was apalled at the quality (“as a whole”) of his students. A classmate of mine (MIT PhD, U of Indiana economics prof) said the same thing for his undergrad students, “poor mathematical skills”.
“I consider this an EMBARASSMENT”
“I’m EMBARASSED to be an American”
With apologies to Sean, an ordinary person can ask whether the difference between 527 and 578 can be all that huge. We are, after all, discussing 8th graders, who have some ways to go before they become a functioning cog in our well-oiled society. Or not, as the case may be.
Well, the difference between 578 and 527 is 51. Is that huge or not? The relevant question is whether it is statistically significant. The correct measure of hugeness is 51/σ, where σ is the standard deviation of the measurement. Without knowing what σ is, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether the difference is huge or not.
Not trying to be clever here, that’s just the right way of looking at it. The amusing thing to me was not the disparity in scores, but the (inverse) correlation with satisfaction. Which is also not demonstrably significant, but nevertheless amusing.
The difference is much larger if you look at the percentage of students in 8-th grade who achieve advanced math score. See page 19 of this PDF file:
http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.pdf
Arun (#38)-I had an eighth-grade biology teacher who didn’t believe in evolution. He made a comment along the lines that evolution leading to humans was like monkeys at typewriters producing the Bible. I was appalled, and I wonder if things like that are more common now.
Carl:
I think that the average grown-up (in the US or anywhere else in the world), is not educated in mathematics at all. Just ask a random person on the street why -1 times -1 equals 1.
In school what they teach you year after year after year is arithmetic and some rules that you can use to manipulate equations, drawing graphs and drawing triangles etc. It’s like kindergarten for grown ups, an insult to our intellect.
The reason why you need people to drive trucks is similar to the reason why the Amish need people to drive their horse-drawn carts and why the indiginous people in the Amazon need people to make bows and arrows.
JC on Oct 5th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
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.
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JC,
Some of the contributing factors to this maybe the larger population of the USA – which compensates to some degree the percentage distribution of skills – and the contributions to the tech workforce from immigrants. Plus the post-WWII boom may have given the USA head start in establishing labs, etc.
Let us analyze things as a chemist might. Maybe what matters in determining the scientific prowess of a country is not the average proficiency of its students or the proportion of students who are greatly proficient, but the absolute number of students who are greatly proficient. Does anybody have numbers on that?
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Okay, this IS a complicated issue, but a blog can be for ranting, right? That’s the beauty in a way, part of the discussion. So, I am gonna say:
A big component of the USA’s dismal knowledge of and inappropriate self-confidence regarding science and engineering is HOLLYWOOD [aka Burbank and Culver City].
Or, if you want it a bit narrower, commercial TELEVISION.
Even a show that at least tries to have in its premise logical investigation, like “House,” always has to have the mystical, feel good, fuzzy folks WINNING, and House’s crumudgeonly but scientific (including the leaps of ideas) approach seen as, okay, problem-solving, but to no good end as it screws him up.
There are no scientists and engineerings producing or directing in Hollywood (I hope someone corrects me!). There are probably some folks writing, but these things never get on the screen, big or little, in the original form.
Well, I’m sure this is not an original rant and I have some work to do, but felt like weighing in. A similar rant re elected officials, especially in Congress, would also be appropriate!…
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Sara T., might as well ask why there aren’t more physicists in the NBA.