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Spoiler Alert: Smart Kids Become Successful Adults
itwbennett writes "Researchers from the University of Edinburgh set out to test the long-held assumption that kids who performed well in school at a young age carried that early success through to adulthood. And prove it they did! Specifically, 'Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later.' Early success even correlates 'over and above associations with intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status in childhood.'"
Well, yeah, clearly! I mean, just look at me...
Math and reading ability at age 7 and socioeconomic status of the parents.
Socioeconomic status and socioeconomic status of the parents.
So has this study really shown anything other than the transitive property?
...does being smart lead to a more stressful life? Realizing how much you still don't understand, grasping the bad state of some things in world, feeling the general existential pain and philosophizing things, and so on.
First define successful adult. Success means different things to different people. I know a lot of people with no more than an 8th grade education that are successfully supporting their families and are genuinely happy people.
Specifically, 'Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later.'
Not necessarily.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Correlation != causation.
People only succeed because of privilege. If they read well at age seven, it is because of privilege.
It really took a pile of government money to fund some geniuses at a university to figure that out, huh? And people wonder why the planet is going broke!
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Success like food, shelter and passing on your genes?
Or success like a big house, fancy car and a vapid meaningless life?
I thought this was slash dot? I somehow stumbled onto Oprah's website?
sh*t i'm 30 and was smart at school i believe the study, it just means i'm not an adult yet
Wait. I've been told rich people are just evil and greedy not smarter.
Move along.
Everyone knows that trust fund kids are better educated and therefore more successful.
New Economic Perspectives
I've always felt that performing well in school is less a measure of intelligence and more a measure of one's ability to follow rules, complete assigned tasks, get along with teachers and classmates, and behave in socially acceptable ways. It even seems like highly intelligent people often perform worse-than-average in school because high intelligence often comes along with lower-than-average social skills (or a disinterest in adhering to social norms).
And this is why we need good teachers in the school system when the kids are at a young age. This is how I would re-organize the Canadian school system in Ontario:
1) Religion in schools need to be cut. Replace Religion with math and science, math and science promote logic, God promotes making up stories because we want to.
2) Teach math and science harder, really push them as corner stones of education, if students aren't getting the concepts increase class length. I would say by grade 5 you should be comfortable with variables.
3) Every day should have a gym component where kids are FORCED to participate,
4) Science class should contain hands on experiments and labs. If you can't test it, don't teach it.
5) Find a way to make homework interactive, not just copy question out of a book.
6) Computer Programming should become a mandatory class starting in grade 4, get kids playing with visual languages, they massively help you learn and work out logical problems that be applied in other areas.
7) Music class, make kids learn instruments or at least get involved with Music, this will allow there creative abilities to expand.
8) Don't let the kids sit more then 1 hour at a time, make sure they're moving around and getting involved in the class.
Those would be the initial adjustments I would make, I'm sure it's not perfect but it's a FAR better system then one currently in place.
When I was 7 I was a math and english idiot. I was told by my maths teacher I would be a refuse collector.
At age 40 I am doing extremely well.
At age 20 something dyslexics learn to play the system in which they fail and generally out perform many others.... We have skills others don't.
What the fuck is a "successful adult"? Someone who succeeds at reaching adulthood? An adult who is, at the time, succeeding at not dying?
I don't believe this study proves anything. My parents made a comfortable middle-class living, and I nearly aced the math part of my SAT back in the early nineties. Yet here I am at 38 making $18/hour, which is below the national average salary. Where did I go wrong? Social skills.
I will propose that social skills have a much higher correlation to financial success than intelligence OR the "socioeconomic status" of one's parents.
I agree with you but more importantly we need good parents. Less babysitters, less nannies, less ipad, less facebook, less drinking and drugs.
Parents should spend time with their kids and be available to help.
Headline: ...Smart Kids Become Successful Adults.
Article: Math and reading skills correlate with success even more strongly than intelligence.
It seems pretty unsurprising that superior academic achievement in childhood would, on average, lead to somewhat better professional outcomes, at least within the "what part of 'middle class' does your salary put you in" band of professional wage labor.
I'd be curious to know what the data look like at the extremes of the distribution, though: "The data suggest, for example, that going up one reading level at age 7 was associated with a £5,000, or roughly $7,750, increase in income at age 42." So, people who earn, say £60,000 probably had better average performance at school age than the £50k or £40k tiers. What about the people who earn £600,000? There aren't even enough reading levels available to explain that. Is the relationship nonlinear(with each incremental increase in early performance carrying a greater incremental increase in outcome?), does correlation simply break down above(and possibly below) a certain adulthood salary band?
Actually, the article says the exact opposite of the title. The title should say
Spoiler Alert: *SUCCESSFUL* Kids Become Successful Adults
because the article says:
These findings imply that basic childhood skills, independent of how smart you are, how long you stay in school, or the social class you started off in, will be important throughout your life," say Ritchie and Bates.
When you come up with an answer like this, it raises the question, "What is the causal link?"
They dismiss both intelligence and socioeconomic status, and yet I would guess that there's some connection between reading/math ability and intelligence/socioeconomic status. Dumb children with poor uneducated parents are probably not doing well on these tests. Also they seem dismissive of the role of later education, though I'm sure that early test performance affects subsequent educational opportunities.
It seems like they may have found a statistical correlation without explaining what it actually means.
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism? Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
My very personal experiment is still pending any tangible proof of success.
In a related 'duh' study: public education can be rather shit - even in low student count, rural settings.
Grades are mostly a sign of being socially integrated/assimilated and stupid memorization instead of smarts, at least in my experience. We had some teachers who went for one or two "combine your knowledge/derive your own" questions at least in some tests and these were usually the ones where the "good" students all failed miserably and complained afterwards that it was not in scope ;)
We should make the reading and math tests easier so that more kids have above average math and reading skills.
Seriously, the study did not go into why the kids were better at math and reading. You can't teach math and reading to a pile of bricks...no matter how much money we pour into education.
This is true for developed countries where the children who excel in those subjects can find a job where that matter. Whoops! Forgot to include most of the population in the world where this study will fall apart due to opportunities.
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OK, it claims reading/math ability at age 7 is a stronger predictor than socioeconomic status and intelligence. Socioeconomic status should be pretty easy to control, you just compare within a group. But I am very skeptical of any intelligence testing independent of reading and math abilities. Oh, I'm sure that someone will say there is a way, I'm just not sure I would believe it.
A the age of 7 the young mind is pure. Just slightly disconnected from only following parents, and not yet distracted by the opposite (or same) sex, no competition with others. At this age, the inherent aptitude for general skills shows.
Later, in the phase for mostly factual learning, this no longer holds true. This is where most "relevant" tests are held. After that, calming down, the purity returns. At the age of wikipedia, memorized facts don't matter. Aptitude is.
Hence, child-hood abilities correlate to those of the grown-up person.
Everyone is asking "what is a successful adult" and that is valid as that was not presented in the case study. However I am also wondering what is determined as "successful" in terms of schooling? Are you talking arbitrarily the grades someone made? Are you talking scores on standardized tests?
All I can say is that people who do well in school at a young age tend to do well as an adult. That is what the study states. However I would also add that it is not necessarily all inclusive as many people don't do well in school (at a young age) but succeed in life as well as academically.
He who has much will be given more.
Teachers encourage students who they believe are smart and discourage students who they believe aren't smart. Double blind studies have shown that if you tell a teacher that a student is smart, then that student will probably do better.
This study is BS. I was a child prodigy, yet I'm lying in a ditch right now!
I would argue that social standing and that of your parents is a better predictor of your future success.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/162936707/movin-on-up-that-may-depend-on-your-last-name
... still waiting for that success though.
I can show you straight A students who's life became a total tragic wreck. I can show you a C's & D's student who became a successful & happy adult. Our current socialized childcare(AKA public school system) with their GPA's & Competitive academics, will one day be viewed in the same light as the medical practice of bleeding out the bad blood: harmful and counterproductive. I'm sure Murdoch5 would agree that schools too often lack the very core of learning: creativity.
The most reliable predictor a child's success is the wealth of the parents. The race dos not always go to the swift but that is the way to bet.
However, there still is a big problem with kids in lower socioeconomic status obtaining higher grades
Not at all. There is a problem with how society teaches kids, and it's just the case that some richer parents can overcome this handicap for their children.
I was homeschooled at an early age. As part of that I did a number of things with groups of other homeschooled kids. Many of the parents were poor (my own included). But because schooling at home is so much more productive and meaningful most of the children did really well, and all of the ones I kept in contact with have done well later in life also.
There is no problem being poor and being able to learn. Kids can learn in so many ways, many of them costing nothing or being free. You simply have to get out of the way and enable the spirit of exploration which is natural, instead of trying to crush it via conformity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are we really looking at success or intelligence? they are not mutually exclusive. my kid attends a public school for kids in the 99% and the school's research shows that these kids don't actually become especially gifted adults, they don't always apply their genius level IQ towards something out of the ordinary, in fact the single highest predictor of IQ is parental income, if you start out rich it's easier to stay that way. doesn't mean that poor kids aren't smart, nor that they can't be successful, they can a are, but it also means that not so smart kids can grow up to be successful, not so intelligent adults!
Beautiful people become even more successful than smart kids when they are adults.
Conclusion:
lazy ass kids become lazy ass adults. DUH.
Slow news friday /. ?
When you find a correlation in statistical data you don't get a prediction for the FUTURE. You just get a statement of what was (in that data from the past). If you want to find out if you've got something that can make a prediction, you have to actually MAKE one (a prediction), i.e. you have to predict something that WILL show up in FUTURE data. Only if it does that do you have something. Proving "backwards" on the time line is not a "prediction", you cannot use the same data you used to create you hypothesis to also prove it. Otherwise, whatever coincidental correlations you find in your data - and the more data you have, the more (completely random) correlations you are going to find! - is useless.
They claim to have found evidence that "Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later."
The article goes on to say: "more evidence that a strong early education is a huge factor in helping children escape poverty."
How did they make that leap? Where's the evidence suggesting that "strong early education" is directly correlated with math and reading ability at age 7?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series
I did fantastic in school until around 4th-5th grade. Then I was simply disinterested and FAR beyond the concepts school was teaching. I wrote in cursive in 1st grade when the other kids were learning to print and the teacher actually told my mom to have me stop writing in cursive because it wasn't the right "time" for the other children.
My mom was pissed because she said I had beautiful cursive and to this day my handwriting is absolutely horrid and hard to follow. I also have great memory and can recall the apartment my mom lived in alone with me when I was just a baby. She moved out of there when I turned 8 months yet I can remember what color the walls were, furniture, the floor plan, and I still have the mental pictures in my head which is amusing because all views are from the floor.
I remember when she would put cereal pieces on the tray of my walker while listening to music in the house during cleaning. I remember locking myself out of the little sliding glass apartment door that lead to a patio barely big enough to hold an average size grill today. I was pretty much *just* walking by then and still under 1yr old.
I know my preschool's floor plan, the names of my teachers, kids who were in my class..... I remember we had this rug with a big circle of numbers. We would all fight over who gets to sit in the "3" and "4" squares because that was our age at the time.
I remember all these vivid details yet none of that mattered in school. I was always able to pick up stuff rather quickly and then be bored wasting the next two weeks going over it again and again. School just had nothing to tell me except how wrong I was, and how I needed to slip into shape.
By 4th and 5th grade I was done, clocked out, and socially starting to open up. I spent all my time learning computers and programming while playing Nintendo and such constantly. I actually played outside and all that jazz with the local kids.... Not at all a shut-in or anything like that.
Yet school showed I was barely passing and some kind of a slacker.... I would skip homework and program, read some RFC, or try to write a new kind of chat server. I was growing just fine but according to school I wasn't.
Then after I drop out senior year already living on my own since the DAY I turned 18, I land a sweet job making $60,000/year a year later at 19. Now at 25 I'm in the 110,000 range without any college or even a high school diploma. I can quit my job today and find another six figure job before 2 days pass by just picking up the phone. I have already made so many connections and relationships I'm pretty much set.
Yet I flunked school, didn't get to graduate with my peers, and couldn't get my application accepted at McDonalds, yet I could go make $60+ an hour easily..... According to school (and McDonalds) I'm a failure..... Fuck that noise. The problem is I'm now ruined by the years and years of people telling me I'm wrong or something. So I'm very aggressive at finding new opportunity only to further "prove" that school was wrong.
So even though I'm making bomb money for a 25 yr old...... I'm not happy. School taught me that. Gotta keep playing the game and advancing or you're a loser. I didn't really get it before I lived it. Life's like a drag race..... one slip up or mess up and you'll never run the best time no matter what you do at the end. So I live always thinking *something* will be the next thing that sets me off course so I'm always hedging my bets which means I never have enough "safety" stashed away. Thanks again for that school. I used to just love learning and growing but school hammered it into my head that I have to be rushing to do something all the time.
TL;DR, I'm stoned and blabbing, nothing to see here.
Does that mean that ability in math and reading at an early age is separated from intelligence or at least you are able to be successful at it early (and do well as an adult) without being intelligent? What exactly is intelligence anyways? Apparently it isn't anything to do with the types of problems that might be difficult for people from different cultures/disadvantaged socially so that rules out the typical word games in IQ tests. It seems that math and reading skills aren't very strongly correlated with intelligence either. So how exactly do we determine someone is intelligent without using math or language?
I wonder how much of things are just relative. I was very gifted in science as a kid but as an adult only slightly above average as a university science grad. Part of it is selection I guess: people good at math and science tend to select themselves into the physics program. But still I wouldn't consider myself as exceptional now as I was when I was 12 doing relativity problems.
Just wondering... :(
Now look at the changes to the US over the same period of time. I cannot help but wonder whether there is some strange conservation law at work.
I would have modded you up but you just had throw "leftists" in there which completely ruined your well reasoned post. This isn't a left vs right issue, it's a rich vs poor. The fact that you had to make this a stab at liberals conveys to me that either you are rich (which I doubt) or that you have fallen, either through ignorance or apathy, for the usual conservative arguing points that some day if you work hard enough then you just might be rich (which is demonstable untrue). If you think there is a liberal agenda to make 100k/yr persons be just as priveledged as billionaires then I might reverse my decision. I doubt you can though because this plan just doesn't exist as you noted in the final line of your post.
Makes sense. Unfortunately people draw conclusions that people with educated parents need less assistance. There's an entire place in my school where some get extra assistance, yet because my parents had graduate degrees it's assumed I need nothing extra (Phd/Masters). Now, no consideration is given to the fact that my father is dead.
Now, the truth is I don't need the help, but I'm sure there are people with the same parental credentials who do. I think assistance should be provided by aptitude, not by the fact that my parents had 20+ years of higher education combined.
The amount of dope smoked.
There are too many contributing factors to success and failure.
So what about Forrest Gump?
Ha ha ha!
I was an extremely smart kid, but now I'm an adult I'm a total failure! People laugh at me in the street and tell me what a loser I am!
So much for that theory - looks like I'm right as usual!
It's actually children of rich parents get access to better resources and therefore develop better math and reading ability and therefore get a better socioeconomic status later on. That and having your rich parents get their former college buddies to give the kids a high paying job, regardless of abilities.
AccountKiller
the story is complete bollocks however.
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This outcome is because early successes build confidence and lower resistance to learning new things in our education systems. The discovery a strong correlation here is a symptom of our flawed education systems. I struggled massively as a child and after two hard-fought degrees, I have become a successful engineer. The correlation certainly isn't a law.
It may have to do with IQ but it also has to do with EQ.
I was hanging out with a high school buddy the other day. We're both geeks, I went into getting an IT degree and work in web dev/sysadmin and many others, he went to a game design school and does freelance graphic design. Both of us are, economically, losers. We were talking about a buddy we knew who we nicknamed "the black Johnny Bravo." Grade-A doofus but a smooth talker with a handsome face and a winning smile. He's a real estate agent and just bought a new Mercedes. All from middle-class families, except maybe mine which is middle class *at best.*
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