“Your college major is a pretty good indication of how smart you are…”
When I read the so-titled piece on relationship between “intelligence” (see test scores) and college degree today, my first reaction was to think that all the averages were rather unimpressive. The gist of it is that education majors do worse on standardized tests such as the SAT, GRE, and the Army General Classification Test… compared to just about all other majors, but particularly physical sciences and engineering.
This should not be a surprise. Those tests are designed to identify people who would be good at science and engineering; they do identify people who are good at test-taking. Good at test-taking is not the same as good at teaching, or even good at people (something a good teacher must be). People who score well on such tests may or may not be good at teaching; do we even have a standardized measure of teaching effectiveness that would facilitate valid comparison of the two separate skill sets? I doubt it. I’ve certainly never heard of such an instrument.
The problem is that assessment is not the only reason education majors do comparatively poorly on such exams. Education majors do poorly because undecided (or poorly-decided) undergrads are “sorted” into majors by how well they do in courses such as general chemistry. Gen chem is not that difficult–I should know, I was a supplemental instruction TA–but people struggle with it because they are unprepared to dedicate the amount of time necessary, because they have math-panic, because they have never been taught to use logic. Not because they are not smart enough, although, of course, intelligence helps a lot. Being “good at numbers” ensures that you will feel confident when faced with numbers rearranged into the new language of chemistry… or statistics, another course that serves to weed-out the mathematically fainthearted.
And hence the vicious circle. An effective introduction to numeracy in preschool and kindergarten equips children for learning maths in elementary school. A good math teacher in elementary school inspires confidence and love of (mathematical) learning. By the time they get to middle school, the die may well be cast. For example, my youngest son who is in 7th grade, already doing algebra, thanks his lucky stars that his classes are restricted (by socioeconomic status, intelligence, and luck) to “good” students who may be rambunctious, but are less likely to cause serious class disturbances… and the teachers can be much more effective. My eldest son, a freshman in high school, missed the “fast track” because the math system in his last school did not match up with the one here (we moved before he entered eighth grade). He is doing geometry now, with a mixed batch of students, some of whom are completely uninterested in learning.
Students in AP courses (or their equivalent) get multiple advantages: they are taught more challenging information at a faster pace, and they are grouped with others who are similarly academically inclined. Their teachers are happier (believe me, I know. It is so much more fun to teach a group of motivated, well-prepared students at the top of their class than to teach the lower groups) and often better.
As it stands today, the main predictor of being in an “advanced” class in high school is socioeconomic status of parents. (yes I know there are exceptions). This won’t change unless we introduce a new motivator: trained, inspired, and inspiring teachers, with sufficient resources and support, from the child’s first contact with the classroom. Of course, there are many such teachers already (well maybe we need to ignore the resources provision), but not enough. I’ve seen teachers assign worksheets with incorrect grammar (and send tons of communications to parents with glaring grammatical and stylistic errors). I’ve seen math problems graded incorrectly on top of math explained poorly. It goes on and on.
I cannot solve the problems of k12 education, and we’re all a bit tired of hearing about them. What motivated me to write this blog was a direct encounter with the basic problem of funding for research into education at the university level. We already know that PhDs in education are too often unfunded; we know that it is much easier to get into a doctoral program in education. And yet, so much money is poured into grants with the purpose of improving retention and student performance, at all levels.
This semester I am working on an outside (of my department) grant dedicated to improving K-12 student outcomes. It’s a big grant; they’ve got many projects running and employ a lot of people. I ended up here because one of my statistics professors was asked to recommend a grad student he would supervise to run sophisticated statistical analyses. I’d been TA’ing for the past three semesters, and this project sounded interesting. I was told by a few people (in good faith) that I would be receiving the same GRA pay as I had been, so I (foolishly) did not confirm this before the semester started. I had worked (and billed) 32 hours last semester, so I was looking forward to a big paycheck… When it came, it was slightly smaller than my usual paycheck, so I assumed the billed hours had not been counted. I proceeded to ask the person responsible for such things two questions: Where is the money for the hours billed last semester, and why was my paycheck smaller than expected? (there could be many valid reasons, so I was mainly worried about the missing hours billed…)
You can imagine my reaction when told that the (meager) paycheck included both. The next day the problem was solved, with them agreeing to match my previous salary, including backpay. Lesson learned (never base salary negotiations–or skip them–because of past experience). But, I am still shocked. Apparently the RAs working here with me are paid little more than half my already-very-limited grad student salary.
No wonder I’ve spent hours and hours fixing the mistakes they had made with the data. In fact, they are having to collect more data because their measurement device was so poor. It had been prepared by grad students with absolutely no training. You get what you pay for.
When I was talking with my supervisor here (not the stats person), he told me that there had been a serious misunderstanding when they hired me. They wanted “cheap labor” in the form of a GA who wanted his or her name on a publication rather than fair pay. Right. The analyses I am running for them does not COME cheap. No one in this office has the least idea of how to so much as FRAME the problem. I suppose they wanted my stats professor (who bills one hour/week) to train someone with little or no stats experience to do it… he’d have to dedicate hours and hours to teaching that person (billing only 1hr/wk), or they’d be working until next year just to format the data file.
And here we have a problem inherent in the What’s Wrong With Our Schools issues: no funding.
Last summer I worked on a separate grant, not as a data analyst, but researching/grant writing. It was also dedicated to improving student outcomes–but at college level. They paid me well (compared to the standards of this place) and I could work from wherever I wanted. Now I have to spend 20hrs/week at my “work station.”
That may not seem like much, but as a PhD student with a TA position, one has to be in a specific place (on campus) approximately 10 hours/week between lectures, labs, and office hours. Add an hour for paperwork, etc. One may have an average of 2-6 additional hours per week (depending on the course, supervisor, and experience), but those can happen wherever you want. Why? Because the department KNOWS we are all busy with our own research, running labs, classes, etc. They KNOW the salary is not much. It may still look like slave labor from the outside, but it’s in our interests, flexible, and part of the training. And compare it to my current position, where most of the RAs are in the office 20 hours a week, for 60% of what I was being paid to TA.
Back to the topic at hand. Money goes into student performance at the university level, and RAs are treated accordingly. What happens with research dedicated to K-12?? Let’s find the cheapest labor available, so much for quality of research.
Improving childhood educational outcomes would help enormously with college outcomes. Much of the student retention effort at the college goes to remedial programs designed to bring students up to the level of math and writing needed to meet the demands of college courses. It goes towards learning centers that help unprepared students with organizational and study skills. Those chemistry supplemental instruction classes? A lot of class time is dedicated to practice (and many good students self-select, and are there for that forced-study time), but at the beginning of each term, instructors must teach basic skills, such as setting realistic goals, preparing study schedules, and sticking to them. The “smart” (in all sense of the word) students don’t need this, they will pass gen chem on their own… they are there for the A. But for many many students, it’s not about intelligence, or even preparation (face it, everything you need in a gen chem course is TAUGHT in the gen chem course… beyond PEMDAS, that is. And your TA will remind you of the rules of operations). It’s about study and organizational skills, and the disadvantages inherent in being a first generation college student, or financial and/or family problems.
They should be taught the study and organizational skills before they ever get to college.
People make fun of the PhD in Education, probably because it is primarily a path to administration. Also because it’s an easy doctoral option. Don’t have the research credentials for admittance to a PhD program in _________ (e.g. psychology)? Go for Education.
And if you do have the test scores and research experience that will ensure your admittance to almost any other program, you’re probably not going to go for education, unless you are already dedicated to that profession. Why? Funding. Let’s see, tuition waiver plus stipend or GRA assistantship vs. pay thousands of dollars a year and no guaranteed funding? It’s a no-brainer, even if you really want to do research in education.
and then there’s the fact that people value things according to their cost and the effort it takes to get them… but that’s another topic.