Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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Yep, School Makes You Smarter

10/24/2012

 
Does going to school actually make you smarter (at least, as measured by standard cognitive ability tests)? Answering this question is harder than it would first appear because schooling is confounded with many other variables.

Yes, kids cognitive abilities improve the longer they have been in school, but it's certainly plausible that better cognitive abilities make it more probable that you'll stay in school longer. And schooling is also confounded with age--kids who have been in school longer are also older and therefore have had more life experiences, and perhaps those have prompted the increases in intelligence.

One strategy is to test everyone on their birthday. That way, everyone should have had the same opportunity for life experiences, but the student with a birthday in May has had four months more schooling than the child with the January birthday.

That solves some problems, but it entails other assumptions. For example, older children within a grade might experience fewer social problems, for example.
Picture
Schooling
A new paper (Carlsson, Dahl, & Rooth, 2012) takes a different approach to addressing this difficult problem.

The authors capitalized on the fact that every male in Sweden must take a battery of cognitive tests for military service. The testing occurs near his 18th birthday, but the precise date is assigned more or less randomly (constrained by logistical factors for the military testers). So the authors could statistically control for the time-of-year effect of the birthday and in addition investigate the effects of just a few days more (or less) of schooling. The researchers were able to access a database of all the males tested between 1980 and 1994.

Students took four tests. Two tests (one of word meanings and one of reading technical prose) tap crystallized intelligence (i.e. what you know). Two others (spatial reasoning, and logic) tap fluid intelligence (i.e., reasoning that is not dependent on particular knowledge).

The authors found that older students scored better on all four tests--no surprise there. What about students who were the same age, but who, because of the vagaries of the testing, happened to have had a few days more or fewer of schooling?

More schooling was associated with better performance, but only on the crystallized intelligence tests: an extra 10 days in school improved by about 1% of a standard deviation. Extra non-school days had no effect.

There was no measurable effect of school days on the fluid intelligence tests. This result might mean that these cognitive skills are unaffected by schooling, but it might also mean that the "dose" of schooling was too small to have an impact, or that the measure was insensitive to the effect that schooling has on fluid intelligence.


Reference
Carlsson, M. Dahl, G. B. & Rooth, D-O. (2012). The Effect of Schooling on Cognitive Skills. NBER Working Paper No. 18484 October 2012

Early elementary education includes almost no science

3/2/2012

 
I want to highlight two incredibly valuable papers, although they are increasingly dated.

One paper reports on an enormous project in which observers went into a large sample of US first grade classrooms (827 of them in 295 districts) and simply recorded what was happening. The other paper reported on a comparable project for third grade classrooms (780 students in 250 districts)

Both papers are a treasure trove of information, but I want to highlight one striking datum: the percentage of time spent on science.

In first grade classrooms it was 4%.
In third grade classrooms it was 5%.

There are a few oddities that might make you wonder about these figures. In the 1st grade paper, the observations typically took place in the morning, so perhaps teachers tend to focus on ELA in the morning and save science for the afternoon. But the third grade project sampled throughout the day.

And although there's always some chance that there's something odd about the method, the estimates accord with estimates using other measures, such as teachers' estimates. (See data from an NSF project here.)

And before you blame NCLB for crowding science out of the classroom, note that the data for these studies were collected before NCLB. (1st grade, mostly '97-98; 3rd grade, mostly '00-'01). I don't think there's much reason to suspect that the time spent on science instruction has increased, and smaller scale studies indicate it hasn't.

The fact that so little time is spent on science is, to me, shocking.

It's even more surprising when paired with the observation that US kids fare pretty well in international comparisons of science achievement.

In 2003, when more or less the same cohort of kids took the TIMMS US kids ranked 6th in science. (They ranked 5th in 2008.)

How are US kids doing fairly well in science in the absence of science instruction?

Possibly US schools are terribly efficient in science instruction and get a lot done in minimum time. Possibly other countries are doing even less. Possibly US culture offers good support for informal opportunities to learn science.

It remains a puzzle.

There is a lot of talk about STEM instruction these days. In most districts, science doesn't get serious until middle school. US schools could be doing a whole lot more with more time devoted to science instruction.

I'll have more to say about time in elementary classrooms next week.

NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2002). The relation of global first-grade classroom environment to structural classroom features and teacher and student behaviors. The Elementary School Journal, 102, 367-387.

NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2005). A day in third grade: A large-scale study of classroom quality and teacher and student behavior.
The Elementary School Journal, 105, 305-323.

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    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

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