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U.S. Students Struggle With Reasoning Skills
sciencehabit writes "The first-ever use of interactive computer tasks on a national science assessment suggests that most U.S. students struggle with the reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results. The results (PDF) are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress that was given in 2009 to a representative sample of students in grades four, eight, and 12. What the vast majority of students can do, the data show, is make straightforward analyses. More than three-quarters of fourth grade students, for example, could determine which plants were sun-loving and which preferred the shade when using a simulated greenhouse to determine the ideal amount of sunlight for the growth of mystery plants. When asked about the ideal fertilizer levels for plant growth, however, only one-third of the students were able to perform the required experiment, which featured nine possible fertilizer levels and only six trays. Fewer than half the students were able to use supporting evidence to write an accurate explanation of the results. Similar patterns emerged for students in grades 8 and 12."
US adults struggle with reasoning skills too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Do too!
The headline implies that US students have more difficulty with reasoning skills than other students as a whole, or that this difficulty is unique to students from the US. I could easily imagine that these skills are lacking for students around the globe...
game developers are to blame for making games too easy and mentally unchallenging.
-- instead of teaching them how to actually think.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
After billions of dollars we have produced an education system churning out children that cannot think for themselves.
bashing commence.
Critical reasoning skills = critical thinking skills. Parents are just as vital in the equation here as teachers. Yes, teachers have a job to do there, but, in my opinion, this shows a failure of the culture, rather than education.
From early on, we're conditioned to be mindless little consumers. Why think about problems when you can take a pill and make them all go away? Why consider alternates to problem solving when you can just spend the problem away.
You want mindless drones, you get mindless drones.
How to counteract this? Get rid of those freaking standardized tests, for one. Invest heavily in the arts in primary grades, and cross-teach the arts/sciences. Bring connections between drawing and engineering, math and music. And finally, take the politics out of my classroom. I don't need you to tell me how to teach. I take P.D. courses every year, have two advanced degrees, and years of experience telling me that I can generally figure out what's best for each. and. every. individual. student.
But this is all just my opinion.
Multiple choice, standardized tests don't promote reasoning, just memorization. It's time we revamp the education system and our testing methods. Let's focus on students completing lengthy projects and being graded on their success.
I'd probably suck at that test too.
When I was going to American public schools prior to my college career, I found that my teachers all taught only the content that would appear on standardized tests, in an effort to fund themselves and the school more.
In fact, when my cohorts and I would refuse to take the portions of said tests or would write satire about how we hated the tests on the essay portions, the teachers would forcibly make us redo them according to the directions. Interesting, considering these tests were not recorded on my "permanent record," nor were they beneficial to me in any way. All the teachers cared about was getting a high overall score to get the school funded and increase their own paychecks.
As a result, only a few of the teachers who actually cared about the students ended up teaching anything of true value or usefulness for our futures. While some of that overlaps the content that was within the standardized tests, I can't help but think that taking those 2 weeks at the end of every year to take the practice tests and such would've been used better in other ways.
Really, classes need to be focused after grade 6 or 7 on being useful for future pursuits of specialized interest, focusing on practicality rather than general theory like they are now. I don't use the majority of what I had to learn in grade school or even college for my daily work (coincidentally, I work at a college).
My three kids are capable of reasoning, but they have a lower tolerance for the amount of time it takes to arrive at an answer through logic. They expect correct answers to be displayed, not deduced. They do play chess, but angry birds as well.
Gently reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_for_Children
Philosophy can be integrated into the curriculum as early as Elementary school, and has wonderful effects that extend beyond developing reasoning skills.
Although humans are called the "rational animal," I think it is, at best, only correct to call us an animal capable of reason. Logical reasoning isn't necessarily innate: it's something that takes teaching and practice. And even then, as we all know, people who are otherwise very good at reasoning things out can be downright dimwitted about applying that logic to other situations.
Most of the students actually did fine. But Slow Steve screwed them all again.
DAMN YOU SLOW STEVE!!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Self esteem, though!
reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results
Those skills are all anti-american. You're supposed to follow the herd and believe whatever the preacher and TV say. Anything else isn't cool.
They need questions like:
1) Sally takes three plants and puts one in the dark, one in the shade, one in open sunlight. What is the most likely thing to happen next:
a) The DEA agents find the plant in the dark and bust her
b) The DEA agents find the plant in the shade and bust her
c) The DEA agents find the plant in open sunlight and bust her
d) Sally switches into the far more lucrative prostitution trade and dies of a half dozen STDs.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No one wants us to be able to think for ourselves. Not the corporations, nor the Government. People that are able to reason, and think for themselves, see the bullshit that is going on, and will call it out. Unfortunately, the bullshit runs this country and the corporations.
Or you're like me, able to reason and so tired of how stupid most everyone else is, that you gave up and just going to watch the world go to hell.
Be seeing you...
One of the biggest reason failures I see going around involves the overloading of the word 'fact'. There is 'fact' as in the opposite of fiction, and then there is 'fact' as in the opposite of opinion.
What we see is 'reasoning' that goes like this...
1+1=37. This is a fiction, and thus isn't a fact. It is the opposite of a fact, so that makes it an opinion. Opinions are by definition not wrong, so 1+1=37 isn't wrong. since it isn't wrong, it must be right. Since it is right it must be true. Since it is true, it is a fact.
Eureka! 1+1=37 !!!
Noted sci-fi author John Barnes recently wrote something about this in his blog: http://thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2012/06/hobo-queen-of-sciences.html
tl;dr version (though its quite a good read, as his books that I have read so far): Girl in her class tried using angry pounding shouting as a debate tactic, and when asked about it, she declared it was "logic." "I was totally logical. I pointed things out real loud and told people they were dumb if they didn't believe it, and I yelled so they'd get the point."
Yeah. Back in my day "Logic" was a little bird tweeting in the meadow, nowadays its "agrees with me."
Kids live in a world even more arbitrary and capricious than that of adults. This is especially true in primary and secondary school. Why, then, would they develop reasoning skills? Those that do end up challenging authority and getting arbitrarily slapped down, so there's negative incentives as well as a lack of positive ones.
I wonder if a case could be made that cognitive dissonance experienced at a young age has prevented the development of proper reasoning skills. If you're told repeatedly that something is true that you can see is false, (or vice-versa) or told at a young age that something did not happen when you have direct experience that it did, the experience does strange things to your brain.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah yeah. Go fuck yourself.
9 levels and only 6 trays... well that's impossible to figure out! what's the answer?
I'm coming around to the opinion that we've got to teach logic at a very young age, as was done in classical education. Ultimately it's the foundation to all of math and the scientific method. If the first time you study basic logic is in college, then your entire education is built on shifting sand.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Perhaps it has a little something to do with the fact that we're doing anything but teaching our children how to read. I'm sure they can tell you all about the first homosexual trans-gender american Indian activist farmer and how/why he/she is so important to our country. And when asked "why do we have to teach our children this hippy bullshit instead of hard math, English and science?" You'll get a vapid, nebulous answer like "It's for the good of the American people you insensitive jerk!". And then I'm expected to twist my perspective to think that learning to read isn't as important as teaching tolerance, acceptance and eventually pride in the people that our parents would have found morally repugnant. So to hell with reading! We need to know more about how the evil Europeans made so-much-worse the lives of the nomadic, cannibalistic, tribal war having, no wheel inventing, no medical, no road having, no written language having American Indians.
K-12 should be about learning how to become a scientist. Everything else can flow though that. Right now we're turning out complete idiots that can't read or write, have no critical thinking skills, no idea what the scientific method is or how to balance a check book. But I'm sure they can all tell you who MLK Jr. is. We need to get our priorities straight by kicking out the 1984 style political brain washers in the school. School is not there so you can train a wave of brainless leftists to vote for your party in the next election cycle! And I would be just as upset if the rightists were doing the same thing.
Survey after survey has shown that the self confidence of US students are high and they rate themselves at top of the scales. If they are struggling with reasoning skills they would not have this level of confidence. The more accurate description would be, "the US students have poor reasoning skills, but they don't even know that, and they assume their own faulty analysis is world class."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The reasons for this are numerous. ... there are more but you get the point.
1) No child left behind.
2) Not allowing kids to fail
3) Lack of good teachers
4) Tenure preventing the removal of bad teachers
5) Standardized testing used as a measure of school success resulting in the practice of "Teaching to the Test"
6) Teachers generally get an education degree to teach and do not have the depth of knowledge to actually teach.
7) People with degrees generally can make twice what teachers can in "the real world"
8) Wasted funding on programs that until the last 20 or 30 years were the responsibility of the families.
Additionally these programs are generally useless and only serve to further marginalize the students in them
9) Lack of efficiency due to "Institutional Stupidity"
Everyone hear on slashdot probably worked for an employer who utilized these and quality went down everytime where job performance was measured. Every MBA and even undergrad taking business management courses knows that quality always sufers when metrics are used inappropriately as game theory dictates that everyone's goal is to keep ones' job. Not help the company out. So if someone figures out a way to reduce inventory to save costs the VP of manufactoring has a hissy fit as his metrics suffer on amount of units he stores and he gets a write up etc.
Worse, studies show in business management courses like "Good to Great" that when companies do this it is because their employees suck. Putting in new management metrics makes it suck more, not make bad employees turn into good employees.
Some moron thought it was a great idea since the private sector uses these and included it in education. There are so many reasons why these tests should not used as metrics. It is insulting to the teachers too (my ex was a teacher) as they do not even set the cirriculumn used. Basically they are handed down a copy of the test in points and decimals increments how they test per objective. 12.3 "Student shows adaquite code switching in communication, by utilizing a,b, and c etc". So on October 19th at percisely 10am - 10:53 they are handed worksheets and drilled over and over again.
Code switching is a fancy teaching term in comprehending a concept through verbal steps given and those terms are in by academic elitist in the teaching system (yes they are in teaching too and not just in computer science).
What they need to do is track per student tests year after year (OMG high tax payer costs!!)so teachers who teach inner city schools or those who teach all Mexicans (common where my wife taught in Southern California) do not become penalized. Also special ed teachers are getting a bad rap for poor test scores and many are being showed the door before tenure. The bad teachers who are tenured are unfirable in contrast to the good teachers. They also need to bust the teacher unions so they can fire bad teachers but teachers are not judged whether on language scores where they have only 2 native speaking english students per classroom like in Texas, Arizona, and California. Also kicking out the bad bottom 10% of students and forcing them to work minimium wage jobs would be a great thing too! They do not want to be there and they just irritate and disrespect teachers and hurt other students who want to learn. In China if you act like that and yell in class, make fun of the teacher, and cut class they will take you out in 8th grade and make you work in a factory. That is why their test scores are so damn high.
Compulsive education, no per student test scores, and test metrics as the only measurement sound like very poor management techniques.
http://saveie6.com/
everywhere
talk to people from other countries and almost everyone has to take a series of exams in their senior year of high school where the score determines which college you go to, if you go to college at all. and unlike the US where a former illegal immigrant and fruit picker can go to harvard medical school and become one of the top neurosurgeons in the country, once you screw up your youth you screw up your life. no going to a good college later on
After watching the Republican primary debates, I certainly NEVER would have guessed that Americans had poor reasoning abilities.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Similarly, since I am not US, I must not have reasoning problems too.
Societies have to act as a whole to have good educational institutions.
I think Wisconsin is a great example of this. The state has put teachers under attack because the Republican part of the state (including many outside interests) have their own agenda.
The Scandinavian countries have worked to make teaching a profession that has good pay and benefits and they have the results to show for it. There is care for society as a whole. Here in the U.S., however, we are going through the most selfish period of our history so far. No one (especially those with money) wants to spend a dollar that doesn't personally help them.
Why else would they reelect GWB?
Here's a link to the actual interactive test used. You can compare your scores to that of American kids. http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2009/
I'll be 44 in a couple of weeks.
Another name for this is "job security".
This is evil.
Seastead this.
The results mirror my impressions after teaching a summer school course in Anatomy and Physiology for nurses. The state of our health care is in peril (and that has nothing to do with Obamacare (which, by the way, was needed)). Half the class missed a simple question regarding blood groups, and it's not that f...ing hard. There are basically only 4 blood groups (I am aware of subgroups), and only 3 combinations of blood group antibodies (and they don't occur randomly, there is a pattern). Throw in rh, and it's still not that complicated. DON'T get sick. These nurses will be taking care of you.
The US school system is designed to turn people into mindless worker drones.
Kids are taught not to reason, but to leave reasoning up to their superiors.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
highly aggressive and combative
In a modern US school, this is not your problem. You aren't allowed to deal with it yourself, but you can call the cops. Do it. Assault and battery is illegal. He's older than 7, so yes he can be put on trial. He's nearly old enough for a ruthless prosecuter to ask for him to be tried as an adult. If nothing else, each day he is gone is a day the other students can learn.
It is possible to think for yourself, and go to school. I'm a wonderful example of that.
As a human, you can create a business of your own, or even grow your own food and build your own housing. Of course, you'll need to buy land, but that's getting into other things.
Yes, bad things happened in the past, and will continue to happen. We're lessening our bad things by the century, though.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2009/
I just have to ask, is it really reasonable to assume that everyone should have great analytical skills? The study says that about one third of the students had the necessary reasoning skills. This sounds about right to me. Most people are not very analytical. This is why professions that require good analytical skills (medicine, engineering, law, etc.) tend to pay good wages.
Anyway, this study would be more interesting if we could compare current results with results from the past, or results in other countries. As it is, it's about as interesting as saying, "One third of students were over five feet tall." Without some sort of context to put that in, we can only speculate on its significance.
Proverbs 21:19
Most people are not going to become scientists. At the elementary school level, people are not yet pre-selected for thinking roles; you're looking at basically a more or less random sample of the population.
Out of a thousand elementary school kids, how many will become scientists, engineers, etc?
Now if, say, third year engineering students across the USA are were found to be struggling with reasoning skills, oops, that would be troubling news.
Unfortunately for those kids who are struggling with reasoning, though, a lot of the kinds of jobs that they might have easily gone into after high school fifty years ago are now overseas.
But if you don't spin it that way, then you can't crap on Americans. Which is often the point; facts be damned.
We will see the kids that did well on the fertilizer test on the next episode of "Weed Wars".
You know indentured servants are different then slaves, at least in the historical period of the time. Such as actually having a term period, children not taking up the parents contract. Servitude may be considered slavery now, but there is a distinction there, and is historically inaccurate to call them slaves. And settlers versus thieves? Please, the hyperbole is palpable. The more accurate term is spatial relocationists.
Hey, my ancestors were Irish. Does that mean I can consider myself a disadvantaged minority? My wife is Chinese and Chinese people were victimized in the US as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act). Do you think any of this will help my Irish-Chinese children get into Harvard? Come on, there must be a "plus factor" in there somewhere, right?
This is what you get when the school system relies heavily on grading using the "multiple choice" method.
Yes, it's much easier to check the results and removes any subjective bias from the evaluation, but it also completely kills the cognitive development, as the kids must only remember which answer seems more plausible. Instead of concept development, we have memory training.
Of course, the "multiple choice" type of testing is nowadays quite popular outside US, so I guess that the lack of reasoning skill is not US-bound.
The way I interpreted it is that they only tested U.S. students, so it'd be premature to assume the results extrapolate to students elsewhere. If you have a bunch of green and red apples, and you try a few of the green ones and they taste bad, the correct declarative statement would be "The green apples taste bad." It implies nothing about the red apples - they could taste good or bad, they could even taste worse. Generalizing it to "The apples taste bad" would be premature, and throwing away one of the distinguishing characteristics of your data set (you ate only the green ones).
A big problem I see among people getting caught up in flame wars and internet debates (especially political) is that when they read a statement with multiple possible interpretations, they tend to pick the interpretation which most offends them. I dunno if this is learned or innate, or is self-selection bias (those who are offended tend to speak up more). I think I notice it more because I usually assume most people are nice folks, and thus the least offensive interpretation is what the author intended.
Otherwise why would they pay attention to humdreds of millions of dollar ads to vote for GOP (and other) candidates who are going to do things that will hurt them, personally?
For example, none of you slashdotters *ever* want to have sex except to reproduce legally, right?
mark
Anyone who thinks American students are bad with reasoning obviously hasn't spent much time outside the country. Those people haven't seen anything, especially Asia. And the problem isn't just reasoning skills, it's simply entertaining your own opinion as opposed to trying to please a superior. I've been in situations where an employee was asked what they thought about something and they'd sheepishly avoid the answer. Even when pressed they seemed unable to come up with a response. Lack of creative and independent thinking continues to be a problem, even in Japan.
That said, I think America is moving too far in the opposite direction. Sometimes rote memorization essential. And you need standardized tests to glean some sort of progress. They might not be perfect, but there's no better alternative.
The fact of the matter is that you need the fundamentals before you can progress. It's similar to artistic technique. Too many people hide behind the label of modern art to excuse their lack of talent. In order to have flexibility you need underlying ability. It's essentially the same principle here. And the fact is that kids don't necessarily have the knack for reasoning that people acquire with age. So why waste excessive amounts of energy trying to drill that into them?
But certainly, Americans have the ability to think independently and creatively. And I find them to generally be better informed and less prone to falling for myths, urban legends and other such nonsense. I'll concede, it could be the part of the country where I live. But overseas and amongst immigrants I've found that the consensus is that the US has the best educational system in the world.
If you want to get money from Uncle Sam, you are going to have to do what the feds want to do.
So you have two options:
1) make the tests really comprehensive so "teaching to the test" means teaching everything
2) stop accepting federal money
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Kids don't have any reason to learn how to use their brains or learn any skills. What would they need them for? We've managed to offshore just about every profession requiring either.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'll take a former college law teacher with three senate terms over a guy who's got nothing more than a single term as state governor.
The Irish in the 1600s were not slaves. Slaves are property which involves upkeep and devaluation while "indentured servants" are more like serfs in that they have no actual owner and therefore LESS value than slaves do. Their indentured status could be thought of as a form of bondage but it NOT slavery. Ownership is of the debt not of the one who has the debt. This is a BIG difference.
Wearing out your slave is like abusing YOUR car while wearing out your serf is like abusing a rental car you bought insurance on (no cost to you if you beat the hell out of it.)
-
Post WW2 it would seem our direction was being engineered towards mindless worker/consumer drones with the upper class being the leadership in an idealistic social darwin type system (with heavy contradictions.) Now we are achieving the ideal plans of extremists of that era the place for factory worker drones is slowly being eliminated by technology. This is leaving us with a whole lot of drones without work and unable to compete with societies who were not so foolishly engineered into a dead end.
I think; therefore, I am dangerous.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
To anyone who's ever read reddit.
hurts, dont it?
As an American (born and bred from the 3rd oldest Colonial town) I'd like to take a crack at this.
9 levels and 6 fertilizers. i'm guessing the solution here is to use 5 trays for levels 1,3,5,7, and 9, figure out which two of those five had the best performance and use the remaining tray for the middle value to see if that was the superior level? (i.e if levels 3 and 5 had best output, then measure level 4 to confirm, leading to sampling: 1x345x7x9
Or, switching it around, perhaps measure levels 2,4,6 and 8 then measure the two empty spots between values with the best performance, then you get a readout of a contiguous 5 levels of presumably the best levels. (i.e. x23456x8x) If it's level 2 or 8 that's initially ideal, then you could only measure a contiguous 4, of course. (1234x6x8x)
Thoughts?
Education works in Scandinavian countries because the population is heterogeneous.
I know that's true, because a racist told me.
It is no wonder that we have a lack of reasoning skills when we have a popular religion that instructs us NOT to reason, and to simply accept things the way they are without question.
Having children who can properly think and reason leads to uncomfortable questions like : "why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?" or "how can the entire earth flood in only a few days?" or "where did Noah store all that food?"
In other words, The US is full of stupid people, because their religion tells them to be stupid
I'll take 2 please. The school systems were originally meant to be funded and controlled by the locales in which they reside. So much for freedom.
Group results by race and you get an entirely different picture. Hispanic and African American test scores have been pulling down scoring in every state in the country. When you lump large groups of stupid children with smart ones, the stupid ones dramatically taint the results.
Athletes are taught to do...not to think or reason. Basketball is so typical - if a player gets trapped, coach calls a timeout, come here and let me tell you what to do. Every play in the NFL has a coach telling the players what to do. Baseball is the same. It's all quite sad really
http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2009/
But that's not an issue; they all will become managers and investors as all the "low level" jobs will be done overseas. Isn't this what globalization is about?
Why think when you've been taught to just "believe" everything that's told to you. No need for reasoning when everything a teacher tells you must be true.
Religion, meet education, education meet religion
Look at abortion. It's either OK or not ok. If you think it's ok, then you think it's an embryo. If you think it's not ok then you believe it's a baby.
However, you will find that so many people think that abortion is not ok except in the case of incest or rape. I guess they conclude that if the woman was raped, then it's an embryo, but if she was not raped, then it's a baby. This was the basis for abortion being legalized 40 years ago. If you try to reason with these people (towards either view), you will find they usually just change the subject.
I wonder how many people who fail high school can then go to medical school. Probably not many, unless they have insanely rich parents - which rules out the illegal immigrants and fruit pickers.
At grades 4 and 8, White students had higher average scores than other racial/ethnic groups, and Asian/Pacific Islander students scored higher than Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native students (table A). At grade 12, there was no significant difference in scores for White and Asian/Pacific Islander students, and both groups scored higher on average than other racial/ethnic groups.
Race/ethnicity | Grade 4 | Grade 8 | Grade 12
White | 163 | 162 | 159
Black | 127 | 126 | 125
Hispanic | 131 | 132 | 134
Asian/Pacific Islander | 160 | 160 | 164
The writing sounds bias to me. It said that at grade 4 & 8, White kids have the highest score. Then at grade 12, there is no significant difference. To me, these two parts give different meaning -- when white kids are better, praise them but when they are lower generalize them to be equal. Instead of emphasizing that the white kids have the highest score, why can't they simply said at all grades (4, 8, and 12), there is no significant difference between both White and Asian kids? Not that I think this is racist, but I don't feel comfortable with a science report which contains hidden message or bias. It is not scientific to me.
At least it says "U.S. Students Struggle With Reasoning Skills" not "U.S. Students Gave Up On Reasoning"
About sharing and self esteem as they all failed. School hasn't been about thinking or ability for decades. It's about feeling good about mediocrity.
So only 1/3 of fourth graders were able to find the experimental setup to find the best fertilizer level out of nine, when you are only allowed to try six out of them.
The correct strategy consists in going in two steps, first trying out interspaced levels e.g. 2-4-6-8 then "refining" with the two remaining tries around the approximate minimum. This necessitates to model implicitly/intuitively the plant growth as a unimodal (increasing, then decreasing) function of the fertilizer level, thinking ahead with the limited tries constraint, and mentally planning different outcomes of the two steps.
I'd go contrary to the flow and say that 33% of 4rth graders solving an assignment of this difficulty is pretty darn awesome.
Okay, I'm stumped. How DO you find the ideal fertilizer level when you only have six trays? I read the whole report and that example is NEVER used. I easily and correctly answered all the questions at 4th, 8th and 12th grade levels, which is heartening given I have a BS in Biology, but this fertilizer problem is a real thorn in my side.
"When asked about the ideal fertilizer levels for plant growth, however, only one-third of the students were able to perform the required experiment, which featured nine possible fertilizer levels and only six trays."
Okay, I'm stumped. I have a BS in biology, but can't figure out how you WOULD test nine fertilizer levels using six trays. I read the whole report (which is interesting) and correctly answered all the examples in it, but I can find NO mention of this experiment. Can someone help me out here?
I have looked at the problem with plants that was given to kids, and the part about fertilizer is bogus as far as experiments are concerned.
There is an implied assumption that the plant flowers and leaves growth per the amount of fertilizer graph has a single, wide and approximately symmetric peak, so 6 samples will be always sufficient. However no such information is provided, and nothing in the experiment tests those assumptions. If one considers the hypothesis of a single peak to be "obvious", it's still impossible to predict the sufficient number of measurements. It happens to be six, but it may not be. For example, a perfectly valid sharp asymmetric peak:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
3 9 7 7 7 7 7 4 3
Now how would one justify any six measurements to get the correct result only based on the values from already performed measurements?
The kid may decide that the task is to perform the measurements with "obvious" assumption that there is one peak and in the hope that six measurements will be sufficient, however none of this is a valid approach to the experiment, and single-peak assumption is a common mistake to begin with.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Or, you know, maybe they used a standard test of statistical significance with an alpha value of 0.05 (which is what the report, in somewhat dumbed-down language, seems to say they did, see p. 19 of the report, under "Interpreting the Results"), and while there was an observed different in the mean results at 12th grade between API and White students, they weren't statistically significant by that standard.
Applying a standard statistical test to determine if measured differences in the sample are likely enough to represent real differences in the underlying population from which the sample is drawn isn't "hidden message" or "bias" (well, I guess its could be a hidden message of "you should only report things as being meaningfully different if the results provide a reason to believe they represent a real difference", or a bias against reporting meaningless results.)
Atheism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rationality.
There is no national comparison made or implied. The test was conducted in the US and posted to the Internet.
"When asked about the ideal fertilizer levels for plant growth, however, only one-third of the students were able to perform the required experiment..."
/Headed there sooner than you think
//I don't want to live on this planet any more
Did anyone suggest Brawndo? Don't they know it's got what plants crave?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I don't understand this article.
One pop-quiz he gave a multiple choice test on integration by parts where every single answer but one was "e) none of the above".
Putting "none of the above" as a possible answer in a multiple-choice-single-answer test confuses the students and reduces the reliability of the scoring of the test as it favors the "gamblers".
Spamming a test which requires calculation is not only counterproductive - it as an asshole move.
Instead of calculating for one solution, student now must find a solution - and then double and triple check his/her calculations to be absolutely certain that it is not ANY of the above before selecting "none".
So, a task that would take 5 minutes now eats up 10-15 minutes of the time given.
And when students run out of time, only thing left is to gamble.
So As get downgraded to Bs, which are worth as much as Ds as a measure of actual knowledge, cause the whole test favors "I'm feeling lucky" gamblers.
A test should be as objective as possible. It should not favor math geniuses, nor memorizers, nor slackers.
Every single student who attended the classes must be able to pass the test.
Those who did all the homework must be able to get top grades.
Those who only did SOME homework should be able to get at the very least average grades.
You get 50% of students who are failing the test, despite their attendance of the classes?
It's not the students who are failing but either your teaching skills or your tests.
The first question of the midterm (worth 20% of the grade) was to write down maxwell's equations in complete english sentences using no mathematical symbols. I'm sure that thwarted many of the "flash-card" memorizers.
That is not a "memorizer trap".
That's a goodwill bonus, an equivalent to giving points for signing your name right.
Since he was a chain smoking creationist. (Oh, and he looked like he wanted any excuse to start a fight with one of the parishioners which he would probably win, he seemed like a pretty tough bastard.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Teach them compassion not competition and everything will fall into place.
Interesting in the light of the recently published statistic that 46% of Americans do not believe in evolution.
There is not enough information in the article to see if I am able to pass this test. There are 9 fertilizer levels and 6 containers. Meaning, I assume there is only space to test 6 of the levels and infer the others. What information about the fertilizer for each was given? Was there a consistent variation of levels across the 9? And was there more then one type of fertilizer and how was it varied? How am I supposed to know whether or not I could pass?
Given the provided information, I will state that level 7 was the best fertilizer because this is more then 1/2 but not too much. And 7 is a faithful number, and we all know that logic is simply an extension of faith.