Symptoms include:
As in: ‘we have always been starting to wonder if I’m dyscalculic because I cannot seem to improve my math SAT score, despite all of my studying.’
Interesting conversations happening in the comments of this post, one of which has to do with whether or not college should be profession training.
As a liberal arts degree holder, i would ike to think that my young ones could have that same opportunity, when they had been therefore inclined. In my fantasy world, they utilize summer internships to explore career options and acquire to study art, history and literature in college. Am I dreaming?
Elise, an engineer, and commenter below, is the mother of 3 effective young ones, one of who got an 800 in the math SAT and is valedictorian of his course. She believes college is career training.
Thankfully, The Chronicle of Higher Education just published the Median Earnings by Major, for the practically minded.
A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Catherine said, ‘Debbie, it is time for you to read Daniel Willingham.’
Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology during the University of Virginia. His website is just a treasure trove of useful information regarding how we learn.
From Willingham’s article, What Will Improve A student’s Memory:
Wanting to remember some-thing doesn’t always have much bearing on whether or maybe not you will actually remember it….Here’s the way you should think of memory: it’s the residue of thought, meaning that the greater you think about something, a lot more likely it is that you’ll remember it later.
Students allocated, on average, just 68 percent of the right time needed seriously to get the target rating. We can sum this up by saying the third principle is that people tend to think their learning is more complete than it surely is.
The final strategy to avoid forgetting would be to overlearn…..Students should learn until they understand the material then keep studying……A good rule of thumb is to put in another 20 percent of the time it took to master the material.
The entire article is well worth the read.
I have been doling out the guidelines like little Scooby treats to my son, as he prepares for finals. Interestingly, he’s interested and is using the advice.
The greater I read Daniel Willingham, the more I realize why the SAT can be so hard for me. I’m lacking the foundation knowledge that I must problem solve on these tests.
From Willingham’s article on Inflexible Knowledge:
A far more benign cousin to rote knowledge is what I would call ‘inflexible’ knowledge. At first glance it might appear rote, but it is not. And, it’s absolutely vital to students’ education: Inflexible knowledge seems to function as the unavoidable foundation of expertise, including that part of expertise that enables individuals to fix novel dilemmas by making use of knowledge that is existing new situations—sometimes known popularly as ‘problem-solving’ skills.
Knowledge is flexible when it can be accessed out of the context in which it had been applied and learned in new contexts. Flexible knowledge is of course a desirable objective, but it is not an effortlessly achieved one. When encountering new product, the human head seems to be biased towards learning the surface features of problems, maybe not toward grasping the deep structure that is essential to produce knowledge that is flexible.
Over Twenty Thousand Students Took SAT Prep in China year that is last
As my SAT scores continue to plateau, despite months of study and determination (and lot of fun), I’ve stomped my legs and declared on more than one occasion: ‘Who are these kids rocking the SAT and exactly what are their parents feeding them?’
From May 5, 2011 Business Week:
Twenty thousand students took prep that is SAT China with ‘New Oriental’ last year, representing at least a 90 % share of that market……
‘New Oriental seems to have cracked the SAT code,’ claims Phillip Muth, associate dean for admissions at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Its 1,200 candidates from Asia this year had an average of 610 out of 800 on the SAT’s reading section and 670 in writing, in place of 641 in reading and 650 in writing for U.S. applicants. In mathematics, they achieved the average of 783, compared with 669 for U.S. students. ‘
It’s not lost on me either that English is a second language.