One strategy for thinking about interventions to boost kids success in school is to conduct the following sort of study. Step one: measure lots of factors early in life, i.e., before kids start school. Step two: measure academic success after kids have been in school awhile (say, fourth grade). Then see which factors you measured early in life are associated with school success measured later.
Some factors are well-known, e.g., socio-economic status of the parents, and so you’d statistically remove those “usual suspects” first. In 2007 Duncan and colleagues introduced a new method of analyzing this type of data, and they applied it to six sizable international data sets that followed kids from as early as birth to 3rd grade, focusing especially on reading and math achievement. They concluded that early measures of math and reading, and measures of attention were significant predictors of later math and reading skills, but early social skills were not. Curiously, early math scores predicted later reading scores as well as early reading scores did. Their conclusions, while not startling, attracted a lot of attention because the new method was deemed quite useful, and because it was applied meticulously to several large-scale datasets. In 2010, another article was published using the same methodology, but with a startling result. David Grissmer and his colleagues noted that three of the data sets had early measures of fine motor skills. They found that, after they statistically accounted for all of the factors that Duncan et al had examined, fine motor skills was and additional, strong predictor of student achievement. I have to note that what the tests called “fine motor skills” strikes me as a bit odd. Cognitive psychologists think of that as being tasks like buttoning a button, or picking something up with tweezers—i.e., requiring precise movements, usually of the fingers. But in these data sets it was tested with tasks like copying simple designs, or drawing a human figure. These are not solely motor tasks. The fuzziness of exactly what the tasks mean may cloud the interpretation, but it doesn’t cloud the size of the effect—these tasks are a robust predictor of later math and reading achievement. There’s plenty of speculation as to why this effect might work. Perhaps the measure of “fine motor skills” is really another way of measuring some aspect of attention. Perhaps it’s another way of measuring how well kids can understand and use space. Or the effect may be more direct; it’s commonly thought that the motor and cognitive domains are intertwined, and so practicing motor tasks may aid cognition. The big question: does this mean that practice of fine motor skills will boost academic achievement? Those studies are ongoing, and I hope to report on the results here before long. Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C.,Klebanov, P., . . . Japel, C. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1428–1446. Grissmer, D., Grimm, K., J., Aiyer, S. M., Murrah, W. M., & Steele, J. S. (2010). Fine Motor Skills and Attention: Primary Developmental Predictors of Later Achievement. Developmental Psychology, 46, 1008-1017. An article in yesterday’s New York Times covered some recent research on the increasing education achievement gap between rich and poor. It’s worth a read, but it misses a couple of important points.
Regarding reasons for the gap, the article dwells on one hypothesis, commonly called the investment theory: richer families have more money to invest in their kids. (The article might have mentioned that richer families not only have more financial capital, but more human capital and social capital.) The article does not mention at all another major theory of the economics of educational achievement; stress theory. Kids (and parents) who live in poverty live under systemic stress. A great deal of research in the last ten years has shown that this stress has direct cognitive consequences for kids, and also affects how parents treat their kids. (Any parent knows that you’re not at your best when you’re stressed.) An open-access review article on this research can be found here. Another important point the article misses concerns what might be done. It ends with a gloomy quote from an expert: “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.” I think there is more reason for optimism, because other countries are doing a better job with this problem than we are. The OECD analyzes the PISA results by reported family SES. In virtually every country, high SES kids outperform low SES kids. But in some countries, the gap is smaller, and that’s it’s not just countries that have smaller income gaps. Economic inequality within a country is often measured with a statistic called the Gini coefficient which varies from 0 (everyone has the same net worth) to 1 (one person has all the money, and the other has nothing). Rich children score better than poor children in countries with large Gini coefficients (like the US) and the rich outscore the poor in countries with lower Gini coefficients (like Norway). Being poor predicts lower scores everywhere, but the disparity of wealth means more in the US than it does in other countries. What’s significant is that the relationship between income and test performance is stronger in the US than it is in most countries. (The US has the 3rd strongest relationship between income and student performance in Science and 10th highest for math, in the 2006 PISA results). Some countries, (e.g., Hong Kong), despite an enormous disparity between rich and poor, manage to even the playing field when the kids are at school. The US does a particularly poor job at this task; wealthy kids enjoy a huge advantage over poor kids. People generally argue that the US is different than Hong Kong, we’re a large, heteroogenous country, and so forth. All true, but the defeatist attitude won’t get us anywhere. We need more systematic study of how those countries solve the problem. It's a funny thing about the use of new technologies in schools: it's not only seen as inevitable, it's often described as necessary because today's students are digital natives.
But for at least some technologies, the evidence supporting that contention is weak. An article in Computers & Education by Woody, Daniel, & Baker (2010) replicated other studies in showing that college students preferred studying from traditional textbooks rather than etextbooks, and also reported no correlation between previous experience with ebooks and how much students liked etextbooks. Some technology boosters have suggested that previous findings of student indifference to etextbooks is due to their novelty--once students get used to them, the argument goes, they will like them. Woody et al. suggest that their finding casts doubt on this explanation. Woody, W. D., Daniel, D. B. & Baker, C. A. (2010). E-books or textbooks: Students prefer textbooks. Computers & Education, 55, 945-948. Maybe.
My purpose will be to highlight scientific findings that I think ought to receive more attention. So posts will generally be brief. I'll link to full articles when I can but the new stuff will often be behind a paywall. If there's a good summary on the web I'll link to that. |
PurposeThe goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention. Archives
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