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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!
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.
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.
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...
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'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
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/
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."
Yes, that kind of circular reasoning is called induction. A car example, specially for Slashdot: A Trabant is no car. No car is better than a Bentley. Therefore a Trabant is better than a Bentley.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'll be 44 in a couple of weeks.
Another name for this is "job security".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Don't get down. Biology is barely a real science.
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