Undead Astronauts

a Texas A&M study found 70% of middle grade students didn’t fully understand the equal sign.

“The equal sign is pervasive and fundamentally linked to mathematics from kindergarten through upper-level calculus,” Robert M. Capraro says. “The idea of symbols that convey relative meaning, such as the equal sign and “less than” and “greater than” signs, is complex and they serve as a precursor to ideas of variables, which also require the same level of abstract thinking.”

The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes.

“Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer,” he explains. “So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.

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diversity in college punishes asians. we all know this, as there have been articles and books published about the subject. a new study of top tier schools show by just how much.

To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas — either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas — the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.

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This is crazy. Remaining disassembly and test firing after the break.

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the list of top US high schools is out again (this is newsweek’s list). see where your school ranks. interesting to see birmingham having the number 2 ranked high school.

see here for last year’s list (this is USNews’ list).

cultural neuroscience has continued to find differences between eastern and western minds (see previous finding here). a 2006 study found that chinese and whites use different parts of the brain to process arabic numbers. the chinese in the study processed numbers through the visuospatial regions of their brain while the whites used regions involved in language.

it’s beyond strange to me that an entire swath of humanity uses the language pathway to think about mathematical computations rather than visuospatial pathways, but maybe that’s only because i’ve been conditioned to think visuospatial iq is correlated to mathematical ability. it would be interesting to see which pathway was more computationally efficient for the brain.

once the most efficient pathway was determined, researchers could study how to train students to use the best pathway for mathematical problems. another possibility is that there is no universally efficient pathway. perhaps whichever pathway has the highest comparative iq (visuospatial or verbal) is going to be the most efficient. that would take education into experimental science. each student would need a brainscan to see which educational method he needed. if this turns out to be true for math, then what about other subjects?

AoR writes about the commonly perceived advantage east asians have in visio-spatial (math) iq. i’m not going to spend much time on that b/c i haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary, and at least they do alright in competition. but something that isn’t especially clear to me is the evidence on a lag on verbal scores.

as AoR cited, 97 asian-american verbal iq is a number i’ve seen bandied about in the bell curve, and richard lynn’s comparisons of different national verbal scores show asians with a lower verbal. exactly how the tests were done however is something i still don’t know. the lower verbal score for asian-americans might, in part, be due to a slower start in english b/c their parents spoke an asian language at home. a friend of mine took an iq test at his school’s urging after arriving in the states from taiwan as a young teenager. he did well on the visio-spatial part of the test, but horrible on the verbal. he said that he barely understood half the english questions at the time b/c he had only recently arrived.  by the end of high school, he was in AP english and graduated salutatorian in his class (an ABC grabbed 1st).

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a study has come out that asked college freshmen how many AP courses they took in high school. this is not a measure of iq. it is only a measure of how hard a student is willing to push himself in high school. obviously asians answered that they took more AP courses than other groups. this is in spite of the fact that more white and hispanic kids went to schools that offered AP courses. from previous studies u might then expect the following group order: asians, whites, hispanics, blacks. but in fact it doesn’t go that way.

hispanics actually take more AP courses than whites. looking further into the numbers, u see that a higher percentage of hispanics go to schools where AP classes are offered. but even so, the numbers show that hispanic kids are willing to work harder in the classroom.

unfortunately even though they take the class at higher rates, their rate of scoring 3′s or above is lower than whites. so while it may be that they work harder than whites, hispanics aren’t seeing all the fruits that might be expected from that hard work.

hat tip to 8asians for the story link.