A 'Special' Resonance

Resonance, the "journal of science education" published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, had something 'special' in its March issue: as Guest editors Prajval Shastri and Sudeshna Mazumdar-Leighton write in their editorial, "while this issue is no different from any other in intent, it is ‘special’ because it has an all-female authorship."

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Hat tip to Vasudevan Mukunth's article in The Wire, which also points to special issues of Current Science and Physics News, but I am not able to locate their URL.

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Update: The original post had a link to the special issue of Current Science; a friend alerted me that this issue has not yet been published.

Ricardo Hausmann on The Education Myth

His Project Syndicate column argues that education is not what we should look to for economic growth.

... [T]hough the typical country with ten years of schooling had a per capita income of $30,000 in 2010, per capita income in Albania, Armenia, and Sri Lanka, which have achieved that level of schooling, was less than $5,000. Whatever is preventing these countries from becoming richer, it is not lack of education.

A country’s income is the sum of the output produced by each worker. To increase income, we need to increase worker productivity. Evidently, “something in the water,” other than education, makes people much more productive in some places than in others. A successful growth strategy needs to figure out what this is.

Make no mistake: education presumably does raise productivity. But to say that education is your growth strategy means that you are giving up on everyone who has already gone through the school system – most people over 18, and almost all over 25. It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century. An education-only strategy is bound to make all of them regret having been born too soon.

Links

1. Latika Chaudhury What constrained the expansion of education in British India?

   The overall enrolment patterns provide strong evidence of India’s limited achievement at the primary level, but relatively superior performance at the secondary level. As late as 1891, only one out of 10 primary school-age children were enroled in any type of school. The number of students enrolled steadily increased in the 20th century, but even by 1941 only about one-third of school age children were enrolled in school, with sharp regional differences. Secondary and collegiate level enrolment was more remarkable — enrolment more than quadrupled between 1891 and 1941 with more than 6% of school-age children attending secondary school by 1941.

   Variations across regions and social groups

   However, these enrolment levels mask the tremendous regional variation within India. At every level, the more advanced coastal provinces of Bengal, Bombay and Madras out-performed the interior provinces of Bihar and United Provinces. Tremendous variation across social groups was also evident - certain religions such as Christians and Jains were among the most literate in colonial India. At the other end of the spectrum, tribal groups living in geographically remote parts of the country had the lowest literacy rates (less than 1%). Average Muslim literacy at 6.4% was below Hindu literacy at 8.4%, but there were significant regional differences. Among Hindus, there were large differences by caste — Brahmans at the upper end of the caste spectrum averaged 33%, while lower castes averaged 1.6%.

2. Natasha Sarin and Sarah Cannon: Larry Summers: Two Women's Perspective

3. Triggered by a horrible FoxNews interview of Reza Aslan, author of a recent book on Jesus, Adam Gopnik pens a short piece on the historical narratives about Jesus.

   As always in these things, the interpretation involves picking out some texts as core while dismissing others as late or interpolated, with the criterion for choosing between them seeming to be, more or less, whether stories float your boat rather than what truths can be shown to walk on water. If you privilege the radical, Zealot Jesus—the one who eats with prostitutes and dismisses kosher diets and rails against Caesar —you have a hard time explaining the unworldly, Sermon on the Mount Jesus, and a still harder time explaining the purely hieratic, apolitical non-human savior-from-heaven Jesus who emerges in Paul’s letters in the decades after Jesus’s death. If you like the messianic son-of-man Jesus, you have a hard time explaining what it was that riled up the Romans. If you go for the angry activist Yeshua who drove the poor money changers from the Temple (many of them no worse than the kinds of currency-exchange folks you see at airports), you have a hard time explaining how he emerged so quickly as Paul’s Christ, a figure so remote from politics or life itself—no personal stories with wise sayings—as to lead to the rational suspicion that Paul did not intend to indicate anyone of earthly existence at all.

4. NYTimes on the Colin McGinn affair, and the broader debate about sexism in academic philosophy: A Star Philosopher Falls, and a Debate Over Sexism Is Set Off.

5. Ruth Starkman: Confessions of an Application Reader: Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley.

6. Meena Menon: Of Maal and Men: "We protest about rape, dowry deaths and the murder of unborn girls, but most of us end up ignoring men who consider it their right to stare at women."

Links

1. Roland Fryar's experiments in tech-enabled motivation:

   A groundbreaking experiment that bombarded US high school students with inspiring text messages was found to be a success on all counts except one: it made no difference to how the students performed in school.

2. Vikram Garg: Behind Middle India’s Celebration of the Meritorious Marginalized.

3. Fabio Rojas: How do graduate students actually choose their advisers?.

4. Science Insider: U.S. Supreme Court Strikes Down Human Gene Patents

5. Abstruse Goose: Alone in my room.

Links

1. Computer Science Culture Clash -- John Regehr at Embedded in Academia.

2. Earning a PhD by studying a theory that we know is wrong -- Matt von Hippel in Ars Technica.

3. Did the metro help reduce air pollution in Delhi? -- Deepti Goel and Sonam Gupta at Ideas for India.

4. Giving Poor Kids Computers Does Nothing Whatsoever To Their Educational Outcomes -- Matt Yglesias at Moneybox.

Links

1. Karen Markin in CHE: Plagiarism in Grant Proposals.

   It's not news that software exists to check undergraduate papers for plagiarism. What is less well known is that some federal grant agencies are using technology to detect plagiarism in grant proposals.

2. Louis Menand in New Yorker: Today's Assignment: Arguments for and against homework for school children.

   Like a lot of debates about education, what Cooper calls “the battle over homework” is not really about how to make schools better. It’s about what people want schools to do. The country with the most successful educational system, according to the Economist study, is Finland. Students there are assigned virtually no homework; they don’t start school until age seven; and the school day is short. It is estimated that Italian children spend a total of three more years in school than Finns do (and Italy ranked twenty-fourth).

   The No. 2 country in the world, on the other hand, is South Korea, whose schools are notorious for their backbreaking rigidity. Ninety per cent of primary-school students in South Korea study with private tutors after school, and South Korean teen-agers are reported to be the unhappiest in the developed world. Competition is so fierce that the government has cracked down on what are called private “crammer” schools, making it illegal for them to stay open after 10 p.m. (though some attempt to get around this by disguising themselves as libraries).

   Yet both systems are successful. [...]

3. Ranjit Goswami in University World News: Indian Exchange Programmes Must Start at Home:

   Student exchange programmes in India have tended to mean exchange at the international level.

   Despite the tremendous language, cultural and social diversity that various Indian states and regions enjoy, both at the interstate and intrastate levels, India has not considered whether there could be more effective, more affordable, more popular and more effective national-level student exchange programmes between institutions within the country, particularly in areas such as business studies or other applied academic programmes. [...]

   It is difficult to believe that an MBA student studying in Assam would not benefit from the cultural diversity and sharing of local history, culture and traditions that could come through an exchange programme with an MBA student in Tamil Nadu or with a student from a business school in Gujarat.

Links

1. Anirudh Krishna (Duke University) at Ideas for India: The root of poverty: Ruinous healthcare costs.

2. James Choi at : How Noisy is Economics/Finance Peer Review?, with excerpts from this paper. I was quite surprised to read this:

   For economics journals, when two referees are consulted, the top-10p [percentile] paper receives two rejects with probability 14%, one reject and one non-reject with probability 47%, and two non-rejects with probability 40%. With three referees, the top-10p papers receives a majority of reject recommendations with 30% probability, a majority of non-reject recommendations with 70% probability.

3. Annie Murphy Paul in NYTimes: It’s Not Me, It’s You, an essay on intelligence and stereotype threat.

4. Felix Salmon: What education reformers did with student surveys.

Links

1. Samanth Subramanian at India Ink: Happy 80th Birthday, Air India.

2. Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham at Ideas for India: Why Indian education needs to get back to reality:

   What is the best advice to give an Indian education department official? This column argues that the best thing officials can do is drop the assumptions and stick to reality – otherwise many children will be missed out and left behind.

3. Confirmation of Marc Hauser's fraud. While there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, Harvard played coy on Hauser's misconduct by not releasing its investigation report; so it's good to have ORI's report in the public domain.

Thanks to the Silent Minority

"What is 1 divided by 0?" my high school mathematics teacher asked us twenty five years back.

Sweaty naked kneels clashing, compressed were we, in small benches misaligned in the general direction of the black board, which was more white than black.

We chorused "zero".

Short, strong, white flanneled and bare footed -- our village Swami Vivekananda -- our teacher smiled; then asked, "what is 1 divided by 1?"; we answered correctly. "What is 1 divided by 2?" Of course, "it is 0.5," we piped. So "What would be 1 divided by 4?" "0.25."

And then he paused. By now even us last-benchers sitting inside a little ramshackle of a room with thatched roof and limestone stained walls, got ourselves enthused.

Learning Outcomes

Fresh semester begins today. I begin it by learning new things. Or may be old things in a new way. For instance, I understand 'learning outcomes are not learning objectives'. Because

The learning outcomes approach recognises and encourages learner-centred learning.

That is from a document (pdf download) recommended to me; for assisting primarily 'academics with teaching and unit of study development commitments' in writing their 'learning outcome' in 'higher education courses'.

BTW, 'unit of study', in a language which address Chennai auto drivers as 'transport executives', means 'subject' (a la Thermodynamics).

What would the success of MITx mean for MIT?

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Steve Kolowich has an article on an interesting debate within MIT about MITx, its effectiveness, its potential, and its role within the institution. He links to two articles -- by Prof. Woodie Flowers and Prof. Samuel Allen -- that appeared in the MIT Faculty Newsletter [Update: Should have added here links to MITx: MIT's Vision for Online Learning by L. Rafael Reif and the editorial which appeared in the same issue]. While both are worth reading in full, the critique by Prof. Flowers is what I want to focus on.

Prof. Woodie Flowers takes a hard line against MITx in its current form arguing (among other things) that (a) "education" is not the same as "training", and that (b) online resources are probably good for "training":

I believe that education and training are different. To me, training is an essential commodity that will certainly be outsourced to digital systems and be dramatically improved in the process. Education is much more subtle and complex and is likely to be accomplished through mentorship or apprentice-like interactions between a learner and an expert. [...]

Education is the source of comparative advantage for students. Education is worth its cost. Person-to-person training often is not worth its cost.

To clarify a bit: Learning a CAD program is training while learning to design requires education; learning spelling and grammar is training while learning to communicate requires education; learning calculus is training while learning to think using calculus requires education. In many cases, learning the parts is training while understanding and being creative about the whole requires education.

And this is how he sees MITx:

I believe the “sweet spot” for expensive universities like MIT is:

1. access to highly-produced training systems accompanied by

2. a rich on-campus opportunity to become educated.

MITx seems aimed at neither.

Flowers is clear that the web offers a chance to develop effective training tools (he cites Khan Academy) by replacing textbooks with media-rich, interactive texts:

We seem to have decided to offer “courses” rather than participate in the exciting new process of replacing textbooks with more effective training tools.

Apple just announced their software system to support new-media texts. If they do for textbooks what iTunes did for music distribution, the tipping point will be passed.

All early indicators are that E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is the current gold standard for digital biology texts. The first two chapters are already offered through Apple’s new e-text system. These chapters are impressive. The entire text will require years of work by a talented team and already represents an investment of millions.

These are early days for online (or, more broadly, web-enabled) education, so it's not clear what may work well, what may not, and how much of the success/failure can be attributed to the use of the web. It will probably take a few years before these issues are settled with some (semi)definitive evidence. In the meantime, it's time for experiments, lots and lots of them.

I think we already have some evidence that short video explanations of concepts / phenomena / examples, à la Sal Khan, work well. Hour-long video lectures? Not much, unless they are delivered by rock-star teachers. As the experiments progress, we will get a clearer picture of the kinds of things that work well online. The IHE story also touches on this experimental nature of MITx:

The goal of developing virtual laboratories and software that automatically assesses students’ ability to vanquish complex problems and tasks is not to eliminate the need for real, live professors, says Sussman; it is to figure out what parts of the face-to-face delivery model can be automated so professors and students can double-down on the pieces of an MIT education that are oriented to apprenticeship.

MITx may have the official backing of its parent institution, and others, like Udacity and Coursera, may have the "brand pull" of some of their charismatic founder-teachers. [And a company called 2tor seems to be making waves, too, with its "expensive" model.] But these are all just early experiments -- online education is yet to get out of its Friendster days.

How about writing a thesis on comic books ...

... in the form of a comic book? This awesome idea is what Nick Sousanis is running with, and I think it's great that his advisers/mentors at Columbia University's Teachers College are supporting him.

On his blog, Sousanis has been posting some of his work (including his HASTAC talk in which he presents some ideas that will presumably go into his thesis). I especially liked his letter / tribute to Prof. Maxine Greene the comic entitled Maxine Says.

He gets it exactly right when he highlights the superiority of the comics format over the "research paper":

"I know if I took a research paper I wrote of the same topic, the same density, there's no chance I could hand it to somebody on the street [and they would read it]. My mom might read it, but that's about where it would end."

Anu Partanen on Finland's School Success

At The Atlantic:"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

Video Links

1. A neat video on the Montessori method: Superwoman was already here! [via Christopher Shea]

2. Errol Morris: The Umbrella Man: "On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site."

3. A TEDx talk by Jay Smooth: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race [see also this shorter video How to tell people they sound racist].

4. Oh, what the heck. Here's Kolaveri. It has traveled as far as Salman Rushdie and Mark Liberman.

Links

1. Three Biggest Myths about Women in Tech by Allison Scott and Freada Kapor Klein.

2. Do Government School Teachers in Tamil Nadu educate their own children in Government schools or Private Schools? by Satyanarayan at Education in India.

3. The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share, adapted from Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science.

4. Chart: One Year of Prison Costs More than One Year at Princeton by Brian Resnick at The Atlantic.

Links

1. A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute:

   Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

   This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

2. James Fallows: Hacked! Fallows recounts the scary tale of the hacking of his wife's GMail account, and its aftermath. The second part has some solid advice about how to protect your online life.

   What about the rest of us, who are not security professionals? I asked that of every person I interviewed. Many of their recommendations boiled down to the hope that people would think more about their life online. “We’d like people to view their information life the way they view other parts of their life,” Andrew Kovacs of Google said. “It’s a good practice to review your financial situation every so often, and it’s a good practice to review your passwords and online-account information too.” Another official compared “cloud hygiene” to personal hygiene: you feel bad if you don’t brush your teeth or take a shower, and you should learn to feel bad if you’re taking risks online.

3. India Today profiles Prof. Dan Shechtman, winner of this year's Chemistry Nobel. [Copy-paste operation is broken on that site -- so, no excerpts!]

Let's round it all out with this cartoon from SMBC:

Do Surgeons Need Coaches?

Atul Gawande does it again, with an awesome essay that weaves in keen observations on coaching in sports and music with his novel experiment of having a coach keep a watchful eye while he performs complex surgeries.

Gawande has an an extended section about coaching of teachers:

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes. What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can? I talked to Jim Knight about this. He is the director of the Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas. He teaches coaching—for schoolteachers. For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers. Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores. People like Jim Knight think we should push coaching.

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

Knight experienced it himself. Two decades ago, he was trying to teach writing to students at a community college in Toronto, and floundering. He studied techniques for teaching students how to write coherent sentences and organize their paragraphs. But he didn’t get anywhere until a colleague came into the classroom and coached him through the changes he was trying to make. He won an award for innovation in teaching, and eventually wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Kansas on measures to improve pedagogy. Then he got funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka, and he has been expanding his program ever since. Coaching programs have now spread to hundreds of school districts across the country.

Paul Tough: What If the Secret to Success is Failure?

His fascinating article in NYTimes is about the importance of key character traits (such as grit, self-control, curiosity, and optimism), and what two different kinds of schools -- one with rich kids and the other with poor kids -- are doing to strengthen these traits in their students.

... It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.

And it’s that problem that Randolph [the principal of the school with rich kids] is up against as he tries to push forward this new kind of conversation about character at Riverdale. When you work at a public school, whether it’s a charter or a traditional public school, you’re paid by the state, responsible, on some level, to your fellow citizens for the job you do preparing your students to join the adult world. When you work at a private school like Riverdale, though, even one with a long waiting list, you are always conscious that you’re working for the parents who pay the tuition fees. Which makes a campaign like the one that Randolph is trying to embark on all the more complicated. If your premise is that your students are lacking in deep traits like grit and gratitude and self-control, you’re implicitly criticizing the parenting they’ve received — which means you’re implicitly criticizing your employers.

Finnish Envy

LynNell Hancock in the Smithsonian: Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union. [...]

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

There's so much more in there (including a reference to "Finnish Envy") that I run the risk of 'excerpting' all of it. Go read the whole thing.

Derek Sivers: "Why You Need to Fail"

I like this video because it distills a lot of literature (and popular articles) on becoming an expert (deliberate practice, the 10,000 hours rule, "talent is overrated," the growth mindset, etc.), and presents it all in under 10 minutes.