Kindergarten Math Skills Predict Later Academic Achievement Best

The transition from a home to a school environment is seen by many kindergarten teachers as associated with learning difficulties like an inability to follow directions, trouble working independently or in groups, and a lack of academic skills. A National Research Council report reckons social and emotional aptitude is as important as language and cognition in young children’s scholastic achievement, while another NRC report emphasizes the importance of early acquisition of linguistic skills, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics considers good math instruction helps 3 to 6 year olds.

To shed light on what constitutes school readiness and which K-5 skills and behaviors predict later academic success, UC Irvine distinguished professor of education, Greg Duncan and colleagues identified six population based data sets—involving 16,387 children—that included measures of reading and math competency, attention skills, prosocial behavior, and antisocial and internalizing behavior taken around the time of school entry, as well as measures of reading and math competency taken later in the primary or middle school years. Duncan says:

We found that only three of the school entry measures predicted subsequent academic success—early reading, early math and attention skills, with early math skills being most consistently predictive. Early behavior problems and social skills were not associated with later reading and math achievement. These patterns generally held both across studies and within each of the six data sets examined.

A student’s school entry ability to pay attention and stay on task is modestly predictive of later achievement, while early problem behavior and other dimensions of social and mental health issues are not at all correlated. If school readiness is defined as having the skills and behaviors that best predict subsequent academic success, concrete numeracy and literacy skills are decidedly more important than socio-emotional behaviors.

Prof Greg Duncan

Early math skills appear to be the strongest predictor of subsequent scholastic success, more so than early reading skills. While this analysis provides a clear pointer to the relative role of school entry skills and behaviors, Duncan and Katherine Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently extended the work with a second study using two large data sets (2,843 children) and the same achievement, attention and behavior measures.

They determined that K-5 students with persistently low math skills were much less likely to graduate from high school or attend college. The math results were striking. Children with persistent math problems in elementary school were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate from high school and 29 percentage points less likely to attend college.

Surprisingly, chronic reading problems were not predictive of these outcomes, after accounting for the fact that children who struggle with reading tend to also struggle with math. In contrast to the first study’s findings, persistent antisocial behavior was correlated to dropping out of high school and not attending college. But chronic difficulty paying attention and internalizing behavior were not predictive of this. Duncan proposes further work:

The next level of research should focus on why math skills—which combine conceptual and procedural competencies—are the most powerful predictor of subsequent achievement and attainment. Experimental evaluations of early math programs that focus on particular skills and track children’s reading and math performance throughout elementary school could help identify missing causal links between early skills and later success.

Houston, a Glimpse into America’s More Caring Future?

The 2011 Kinder Houston Area Survey took in a representative sample of 750 Harris County residents—including 240 respondents contacted by cell phone. The University of Houston administered the survey. Survey author, Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Institute and professor of sociology, said:

Houston is where America’s four major ethnic communities—Anglos, Asians, blacks and Latinos—meet in more equal numbers than almost anywhere else in the country. The challenges and opportunities of creating a more unified and inclusive multiethnic society will be seen here first.

As a city at the forefront of the country’s demographic revolution, Klineberg thought that Houston offers a glimpse into America’s future, and the survey’s assessment of the city may offer important lessons for strengthening the rest of the country:

• create policies that moderate the inequalities
• nurture a far more educated workforce
• develop cities into environmentally and aesthetically appealing destinations
• empower all members of a multiethnic society.

Though Texas is a red state traditionally wanting less government, a majority of Houstonians today (52 percent) said that government has a responsibility to help reduce the inequalities between rich and poor in America (up from 45 percent in 2009). This year 48 percent said that “government should do more to solve our country’s problems” (up from 36 percent in 1996). 72 percent of respondents thought most poor people in the US today are poor because of circumstances they can’t control (up from 68 percent in 2007, and 52 percent in 1999). Although 86 percent agreed “if you work hard in this city, eventually you will succeed”, 67 percent also think “people who work hard and live by the rules are not getting a fair break these days”.

Respondents are a bit more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks—26 percent (up from 20 percent in 2010) report improving personal financial conditions—but remain pessimistic about the long term national prospects—only 31 percent (down from 43 percent in 2007) believe that young people will eventually have a higher standard of living than adult Americans today:

Houstonians feel that the bleeding has stopped, but a robust recovery is not yet on the horizon.

Stephen Klineberg

78 percent disagreed with the statement “A high school education is enough to get a good job”. The percent of people who spontaneously mentioned education when asked to name the biggest problem facing people in Houston jumped to 7.6 percent this year from just 1.7 percent in 2009 and 2 percent in 2010:

There’s a new awareness that this is now a high tech, knowledge based economy and there aren’t many good jobs for people without a college education. Education is more important than ever. Long gone are the days when you could get a job out of high school, work hard and make enough money until you retire. The resources of the knowledge economy are not found in factories, they are situated between the ears of the best and brightest, who can live anywhere.

Klineberg

Public support for new initiatives to improve the quality of life in Houston has remained firm or grown stronger across the 30 years of the survey. Area residents support measures to enhance the city’s green spaces and bayous, revitalize and preserve urban centers and improve air and water quality.

Though most respondents (52 percent) said they would prefer to live in a single family residential area, a large minority (45 percent) would choose an area with a mix of homes, shops and restaurants. In 2010, 41 percent said they’d prefer a smaller home within walking distance of shops and workplaces, rather than a single family home with a big yard “where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go”.

Asked how they would feel if a close relative of theirs wanted to marry a non-Anglo, 8 percent of the Anglo respondents this year said they would disapprove, down from 13 percent in 2002 and 23 percent in 1995. Among the Anglo respondents under the age of 30, 93 percent said they would approve of such intermarriage, compared with 69 percent of those 60 or older. Seventy percent of Anglos under 30, but only 35 percent in the older group, said that the increasing immigration into this country today mostly strengthens American culture. 73 percent of the younger respondents, compared with 52 percent of those 60 or older, said they are in favor of granting illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship if they speak English and have no criminal record.

So, older Houstonians’ attitudes toward diversity, which will continue growing rapidly, are in conflict with younger Anglos more comfortable with the demographic trends.

Empathy—the Hallmark of a Compassionate and Civilised Society

Science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system:

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, so that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it’s domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen adds:

The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people’s actions, we don’t try to simply condemn them. There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital. When people commit crimes, there may be determinants of their behaviour which are outside their control. No one is responsible for their own genes.

More at http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/empathy-the-universal-solvent.

Education not Poverty—Reclaiming What is Ours!

In the 2007, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test, students from Singapore took first or second place in all science categories. The United States ranked 11th.

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

Barack Obama

Mark Roth, a former science editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks why do pupils, in a nation that is world leader in scientific research lag, behind other countries in science. Excuses range from poverty, poor training of teachers, disdainful attitudes to education and knowledge, the shockingly poor scientific illiteracy of American adults to the convenience of paying to import scientists and mathematicians from abroad where standards are higher. It is is actually cheaper for corporations to hire foreign scientists that for have to pay taxes to improve the US education service.

Meanwhile, the huge gap between students in affluent and poor school districts is reflected in racial disparities in scores. Affluent white kids in the US do as well as white kids in Europe. In the European Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, American students as a whole scored 502 in 2009, slightly above the industrialized nation average of 500. Arthur Eisenkraft, a science education expert at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said economic differences play a part in the discrepancy:

We’ve always known there are high correlations between poverty and how kids do in school.

The downside is particularly noticeable in large urban school districts like Pittsburgh. Only two of the 17 big city school districts that participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress science tests, in 2009, had more than a third of their students scoring in the proficient range. Eight of the districts had more than half of their students below the basic level. Alan J Friedman, a science education consultant, emphasized that those who are below basic in science at the eighth grade level most probably will be freezing themselves out of a whole lifetime of advancement opportunities.

Part of the reason for the fall in test scores from the elementary school to middle school is attitude—and is shared by parents as well as kids. In Asian countries, doing well in science is considered to be by application, hard work, but Americans think it is whether you have a natural gift for a subject, aptitude, natural ability—you just don’t want to do it! Students say, “I’m no good at science, and that’s just how it is”. Being a “celebrity” seems a lot more fun!

Besides the need for effort, school pupils need to know how to analyze problems and work out the answers to them. But many teachers who teach science are poorly trained in it themselves. Many have not done science in college. It becomes particularly critical if the content is controversial, as in teaching evolution in biology classes. Lack of the proper training in science and evolution leaves teachers without the confidence to face up to aggressive Christian kids challenging them, especially when they have equally aggressive and sometimes influential parents coming into the school to complain. Many parents love Jesus so much that they love guns, and high school shootings have become popular recently.

The lack of scientific literacy in America is compounded by the determination of many US Christians no keep on sabotaging science on the grounds that all the answers necessary are in Genesis. All Genesis answers is what is in it, and whatever regard people have for it, it is not science.

Ultimately America, and much of the west—the UK is going the same way—needs proper regulation of corporate greed. If people are to work hard, they need rewards that seem proportionate—decent wages, apprenticeships and training schemes, and sposorship of education—but corporate America could not care less than it does about American society. If they could get people to work for nothing they would, and when industry is fully robotized, that will be the real situation.

But who then would be able to buy anything? Without money at the base of society, at consumer level, society collapses, and discontent rises. Intelligent young people already see it, experience it, and feel that education is pointless when the prospect of any work for most is negligible. Already there are places where hundreds of people compete for each job that becomes available. They wonder whether it is lucky or clever to take any such job, if offered, because they will have to work for peanuts under a perpetual threat of being fired. Why bother? It is easier and more lucrative to be a thief. Already vast swathes of the inner cities are dying or dead, because industries have moved to cheap labor countries, or to another state in the Union that will offer the biggest incentives—bribes.

Social responsibility has to be made an important factor in corporate decisions. It can be done by strictly enforced legislation. And should the corporate bosses decide to move abroad, then they should do it with the knowledge that their products will be heavily taxed if they are imported to the USA, and Americans domiciled abroad whose businesses have been moved from the USA, should be taxed as if they still lived in the USA. It is time the country was taking back what it has allowed a small body of people to take away—the nation’s jobs and wages.