Category: Education
How are American parents different?
The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.
“The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else,” Harkness told Slate .
For part of their research, the authors focused just on parents in the United States and the Netherlands. The differences are stark: American parents emphasized setting aside “special time” with each of their children, while Dutch parents spent a few hours each day together with their kids as an entire family.
…American parents were the only ones to consistently mention their children’s advanced intellect, while other countries focused on qualities like “happiness,” being “easy” to manage, or the even more zen-like “well-balanced,” in Italy. (Italians also used the word simpatico, a group of characteristics suggesting social and emotional competence).
The article, by Olga Khazan, is interesting throughout and for the pointer I thank an excellent and loyal MR reader.
Max wants to know what to do
Max has me stumped. I promised him an answer months ago, but I’ve come up with nothing of value, other than perhaps citing Adam Smith on alienation and the division of labor. I’ve felt guilty ever since and I suppose today is the day I fess up to having no good response at all. Here is his initial email:
1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor’s degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a “passion” such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist?…
For question two, then, you may sense where this is going…
2) Assume I have no such passion. Furthermore, I am a fairly well-qualified young generalist.* What paths should most appeal to me if my goal is to maximize doing “interesting” work? Doing meaningful work? Achieving social status? (Which of these goals should be primary?) Need I try to develop a passion before selecting a life path/career, and if so how do I do it?
All the best,
Max*Two years out with a BA from an Ivy League school. Top 10% of the class but not an academic rock star. A record of primarily reading/writing-intensive courses, as well as basic to intermediate economics, calculus, statistics, a proofs course. Time spent abroad in study and travel, though no foreign language fluency. Two years in the private sector with a decent amount of analytic and management experience, but without a big name behind it.
Max is hardly doomed. Still, reading emails such as Max’s makes me more of a determinist. He seems to have a meta-preference for more career passion, but no way of getting there. I would tell Max to at least consider the world of consulting (and here is Robin Hanson on same). I also would tell him that meta-preferences are overrated, as there is no reason per se to side with the meta-preference over the preference. Passion isn’t a value in and of itself.
What other advice can you all give?
Inform pedestrians, not drivers
From Sacha Kapoor and Arvind Magesan (pdf):
Most empirical studies on the role of information in markets analyze policies that reduce asymmetries in the information that market participants possess, often suggesting that the policies improve welfare. We exploit the introduction of pedestrian countdown signals – timers that indicate when traffic lights will change – to evaluate a policy that increases the information that all market participants possess. We find that although countdown signals reduce the number of pedestrians struck by automobiles, they increase the number of collisions between automobiles. We also find that countdown signals caused more collisions overall. The findings imply welfare gains can be attained by revealing the information to pedestrians and hiding it from drivers. We conclude that policies which increase asymmetries in information can improve welfare.
Hat tip goes to @m_sendhil.
University of Chicago follows George Mason
The University [of Chicago] turns a former seminary into a new home for economics.
…When the refurbished building reopens in 2014, the economics department and Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics will have a spectacular space. Planned upgrades include a cloister café, LEED certification, high-tech classrooms in old library and chapel areas, and more.
Some of you will know that the Fairfax offices of Alex and me are in the space of a former church (scroll down to 1960)…
Here is more information and an interview with the architect. For the pointer I thank Mike Tamada.
Levitt and Fryer on race and IQ
From their April 2013 AER piece:
Analyzing these data, we find extremely small racial differences in mental functioning of children age 8 to 12 months. Absent controls, the mean white infant outscores the mean black infant by 0.055 standard deviation units — only a sliver of the one-standard-deviation racial gap typically observed at older ages. The raw scores for blacks are indistinguishable from Hispanics and Asians, who also slightly underperform whites. Adding interviewer fixed effects and controls for the child’s age, gender, socioeconomic status (SES) and prenatal circumstances further compresses the observed racial differences. With these covariates, we cannot reject equality in test scores across any of the racial/ethnic groups examined.
The piece is titled “Testing for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children.” Versions of the piece are here, but I believe the final version is not yet in jstor.
Note that to the extent you treat parental IQ as affecting the IQ of the child through environment, these results are consistent with a wide variety of accounts of racial gaps in IQ. Still, there is no serious evidence, from these results, against the claim that the measured racial IQ gap is due to environment and environment alone.
Edward Luce has lunch with Michael Sandel
I ask Sandel whether he does anything in his own life to make the world less money-minded. He begins a couple of answers but peters out. I suggest that he makes all his lectures free online. “Yes, that’s one thing,” he agrees. After our lunch I see that Sandel is listed on Royce Carlton, a speaker’s agency, as one of its big names (without apparent irony, a posting by the agency last year said Sandel was available to lecture “at a reduced fee in conjunction with his new book, What Money Can’t Buy”).
The rest of the meal is presented here, possibly behind an FT gate; Sandel opted for Legal Seafood and Luce ordered fish and chips.
Does anyone give money to charity efficiently?
Scott Alexander meets up with Robin Hanson and reports from the front:
Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody.
…One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.
…Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.
The post is interesting throughout, and the hat tip goes to Geoffrey Miller, @MatingMind.
The hybrid educational model works
This is from the new William G. Bowen book, Higher Education in the Digital Age:
…we found no statistically significant differences in standard measures of learning outcomes (pass or completion rates, scores on common final exam questions, and results of a national test of statistical literacy) between students in the traditional classes and students in the hybrid-online format classes…This finding, in and of itself, is not different from the results of many other studies. But it is important to emphasize that the relevant effect coefficients in this study have very small standard errors…what we have here are “quite precisely estimated zeros.” That is, if there had in fact been pronounced differences in outcomes between traditional-format and hybrid-format groups, it is highly likely that we would have found them.
Note also that this finding holds across various subgroups of the basic student population, including students from families with incomes below 50k a year, first-generation college students, non-white students, and students with GPAs below 3.0.
The core report is here.
What’s the best sentence ever formed?
That was the topic of a recent Quora forum (by the way may I officially announce that Quora seems to have succeeded? Would it be so bad to spend less time with your Google Reader and more time browsing Quora?), and here was the top pick:
“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”
(Dmitri Borgmann, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. Scribner, 1965)
This is a ‘rhopalic’ sentence: A sentence or a line of poetry in which each word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word.
File under “Very good sentences’! If I understand the Quora system correctly, that was from Ramnath Ragunathan.
Nishit Jain has the runner-up:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
No, really. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on it – Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
The sentence’s intended meaning becomes clearer when it’s understood that it uses the city of Buffalo, New York and the somewhat-uncommon verb “to buffalo” (meaning “to bully or intimidate”), and when the punctuation and grammar is expanded so that the sentence reads as follows: “Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: “Buffalo-origin bison that other Buffalo bison intimidate, themselves bully Buffalo bison.”
The entire thread is worth reading, and in your spare time you can ponder why most of the best answers come from individuals with names from the subcontinent. Here is the contribution of Veekas Shrivastava, listed as an elementary school chess player (retired):
A little grammar puzzle:
“that that is is that that is not is not that is it is it not”
Correctly punctuated: “That that is, is. That that is not, is not. That is it, is it not?”
Here is from Sugavanesh Balasubramanian:
“However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.”
So there.
The Flynn effect vs. population aging
Here is some good news for you all on Easter Sunday, good news until 2042 that is:
Although lifespan changes in cognitive performance and Flynn effects have both been well documented, there has been little scientific focus to date on the net effect of these forces on cognition at the population level. Two major questions moving beyond this finding guided this study: (1) Does the Flynn effect indeed continue in the 2000s for older adults in a UK dataset (considering immediate recall, delayed recall, and verbal fluency)? (2) What are the net effects of population aging and cohort replacement on average cognitive level in the population for the abilities under consideration?
First, in line with the Flynn effect, we demonstrated continued cognitive improvements among successive cohorts of older adults. Second, projections based on different scenarios for cognitive cohort changes as well as demographic trends show that if the Flynn effect observed in recent years continues, it would offset the corresponding age-related cognitive decline for the cognitive abilities studied. In fact, if observed cohort effects should continue, our projections show improvements in cognitive functioning on a population level until 2042—in spite of population aging.
That is from Vegard Skirbekk, Marcin Stonawski, Eric Bonsang, and Ursula M. Staudinger, and one gated link is here. Do any of you know of an ungated copy?
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The word that is Swedish
1. Bloggbävning, n.
Definition: Literally translating to “blogquake,” the word describes the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked by by more mainstream media outlets.
Used in an English sentence: “Man, that ‘ogooglebar’ thing really caused a bloggbävning today.”
Somehow I don’t think this post itself is going to Bloggbävning. Here are fourteen other Swedish words you should know, interesting throughout.
The new Candlemakers’ Petition (sentences of interest)
The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”
But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.
There is more here.
Mexico’s economy: current prospects and history
That is a new MRUniversity course, taught by University of Oklahoma Professor Robin Grier (with a small number of guest videos from me, too). It is absolutely excellent and I recommend it highly. The course outline is this:
1 An Overview of the Mexican Economy
2 Colonial Legacies: Obstacles to Growth after Independence3 Development Strategies4 Social Issues5 Land & Agriculture6 The Debt Crisis of the 1980s7 The State Retreats: Reform in the 1980s & 1990s8 The Peso Crisis9 NAFTA & the Mexican Economy
The early videos are now on-line and new videos will be appearing regularly. You can view them on your own or register sign up for email updates at the link. You can check out our other courses at the home page of MRUniversity.com.
From David Sinky on subsidies for science, by email
Since it seems that the supply of talented researchers in any specific area is likely fairly inelastic in the short term, to what extent do you see cash funding (as opposed to supply of talent) as a major constraint to specific scientific research in either the short and medium terms?
>Even if we believe that this funding will lead to a proportional increase in clean-tech research, I suspect that returns may be quite low since the impacts of this funding would seem to be:
1. Pulling smart people from their private sector efforts into publicly funded research
2. Funding marginal projects by lower quality researchers where returns are likely to be significantly lower than average returns to research funding (which may be quite low already)
3. Increasing the funds available to established, high-status labs and researchers. If a large percentage of a lab’s output is due to the abnormally high human capital of its lead researchers, the binding constraint is their time and mental resources rather than cash so the returns on additional cash would not be very high.
4. Allowing institutions that were already going to fund this sort of research to direct additional funds to other priorities such as undergraduate academics (stem or otherwise), student amenities or other unrelated research initiatives.
I suspect much of this logic also applies to donations to “cancer research charities” which I believe may be one of the single least efficient use of charitable dollars.
In general, I am disappointed that neither the right nor the left seems interested in trying to estimate the return to marginal government spending on research (either in aggregate or for specific programs).
The points above lead me to suspect it is quite low in aggregate but I’m open to being convinced otherwise if you think there is good evidence to do so.
Shout it from the Rooftops! Performance Pay for Teachers in India
Several years ago I reported on a very large, randomized experiment (JSTOR) on teacher performance pay in India that showed that even modest incentives could significantly raise student achievement and do so not only in the incentivized subjects but also in other non-incentivized subjects, suggesting positive spillovers. The earlier paper looked at the first two years of the program. One of the authors, Karthik Muralidharan, now has a follow-up paper, showing what happens over 5 years. The results are impressive and important:
Students who had completed their entire five years of primary
school education under the program scored 0.54 and 0.35 standard deviations (SD) higher than
those in control schools in math and language tests respectively. These are large effects
corresponding to approximately 20 and 14 percentile point improvements at the median of a
normal distribution, and are larger than the effects found in most other education interventions in
developing countries (see Dhaliwal et al. 2011).Second, the results suggest that these test score gains represent genuine additions to human
capital as opposed to reflecting only ‘teaching to the test’. Students in individual teacher
incentive schools score significantly better on both non-repeat as well as repeat questions; on
both multiple-choice and free-response questions; and on questions designed to test conceptual
understanding as well as questions that could be answered through rote learning. Most
importantly, these students also perform significantly better on subjects for which there were no
incentives – scoring 0.52 SD and 0.30 SD higher than students in control schools on tests in
science and social studies (though the bonuses were paid only for gains in math and language). There was also no differential attrition of students across treatment and control groups and no
evidence to suggest any adverse consequences of the programs.…Finally, our estimates suggest that the individual teacher bonus program was
15-20 times more cost effective at raising test scores than the default ‘education quality
improvement’ policy of the Government of India, which is reducing class size from 40 to 30
students per teacher (Govt. of India, 2009).
In another important paper, written for the Government of India, Muralidharan summarizes the best research on public schools in developing countries. His conclusion is that there are demonstrably effective and feasible policies that could improve the public schools thereby increasing literacy and numeracy rates and raising the incomes of millions of people.
The generation entering Indian schools today is the largest that has ever, or for the foreseeable future, will ever enter Indian schools so the opportunity to raise educational quality for essentially the entire Indian workforce over the next several generations is truly immense.