3 ms·

I suspect that home and community culture is the main reason, and race is somewhere off in the noise. I'd like to see research on different home cultures. I'd

I suspect that home and community culture is the main reason, and race is somewhere off in the noise. I'd like to see research on different home cultures. I'd especially like to see a way to assign a metric to a family to rate how "scholarly" the environment is for the children. You couldn't ask people directly, because pretty much every parent will agree with the statement: "We think education is important." It's just that a lot of them don't translate that into action. E.g. "What, why would you read to a 1 year old? They can't understand it." Instead, go to substantive things like: 1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months 2) When did your child first start watching TV? 3) Do you have books or magazines in the house? 4) Do you read with your kids every day? ...

Alex3917 16y ago
Reading to your kids doesn't seem to help them read more proficiently, at least not on average. The 1994 Scarborough & Dobrich paper on this is one of the most famous in education literature, and there are a bunch of good responses to it as well.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  I'll check that out, if I have time. The problem I have with a lot of these studies and various parenting advice is that tiny, tiny details matter. Word choice, what you remark on, what you reward, and how you behave by default (as opposed to when consciously teaching) matter so much. Investigations into child psychology should probably teach us a lot about the children, themselves. The problem with investigating parenting is that you really need a 24/7 video log.
- util 16y ago
  How about encouraging them to read by themselves?
  - stevie 16y ago
    African-American Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer did that with monetary incentives and found it worked for getting children to not only read, but to do homework as well as achieve higher marks on tests.
- stevie 16y ago
  I think this is wrong. Reading does help, but it has to done in the correct way, like much else to do with education in general. The Success For All study done in 2006: "Conclusion The quantity and quality of research on Success for All, and the positive outcomes found in almost all studies by more than fi fty investigators in eighteen different research institutions worldwide, clearly establish that Success for All is highly effective in increasing student reading. The effects can be quite substantial, averaging more than half of the national white-minority achievement gap and almost a full grade equivalent by second grade (see Slavin et al., 2006). In a time when educators are increasingly being asked to use proven programs, Success for All is the best demonstration in existence of the idea that rigorous research on practical programs can be done and can show substantial positive effects. Every child should have a right to participate in a program with this level of evidence."
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    Right, that's why I said 'at least not on average'. If you are asking your kids questions while you read that are phrased in the proper way then there is benefit, but most people wouldn't do that unless they were trained to.
wdewind 16y ago
Agreed. Anyone who has been through a metro public school system has more than enough anecdotal evidence to know it's not race (and NOT the school), but the culture and family the kid goes home to at night that makes the biggest difference. While I agree with the idea of picking specific metrics and asking about them, at a cultural level I think what is going on here is a little more complicated than simply not knowing. Frequently public schools teach things that the subcultures feel are simply not relevant, to their lives. Let me give you an example: When I showed up for day 1 of high school, I was immediately bombarded with the idea of applying to college. I was essentially told that the next four years would be spent preparing for college - that's what the "point" of hs was. This in an of itself is pretty bad, in terms of limiting intellectual exploration and all that good stuff. But imagine you aren't planning to go to college. Imagine no one in your family went to college, and it's likely you'll end up working a blue collar job where your degree doesn't matter. What exactly should your parents be doing/saying here to get their kid interested in school? And why even bother? TLDR: I think this is much more about subcultural groups feeling excluded from, and thus rejecting, mainstream education, and the cultural norms that are projected from it, than simply explaining the cultural norms more scientifically.
maxklein 16y ago
Well, I suspect that scholarly families tend to continue that way, and that a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house. African-American culture did not just happen on its own, you know. There were major societal factors that forced that group of people to have a culture that is the way it is.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  I don't understand why you're taking this tone. I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. It's very important to make the culture vs. race point because culture changes over time, as you've pointed out. Also, I like to focus on culture because it's crazy that people get ultra-detailed in their discussion of race, while often ignoring this thing that is much more causative, in my experience.
- anamax 16y ago
  > a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house. How many farmers do you know and where? I'm serious. Commercial farming in the US is quite high-tech and successful farming has always been reasonably intellectual.
roel_v 16y ago
"1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months" Is there any documented benefit to this? I'll be a father in about 3.5 months so I still have a little time to prepare :)
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  I'm using this as a measure of how scholarly the parents are. Kids imitate what you do, so I wasn't thinking about it in the context of a learning program, but rather being part of a house where everyone reads all the time. It's useful to know if it's the kind of place where reading to the child would take extra effort, or where not reading to the child would take extra effort.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Maybe I just can't understand yet until our daughter is born, but I don't see myself yet sitting there reading to an infant who can't even sit up straight by herself, let alone understand what I'm reading to her. I consider our family quite scholarly, with both of us being (at least part time) academics and my wife being a professor. Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree. (an interesting tidbit I remember, it may be from the Freakonomics book or blog, is a study that showed that children in households with many books did better at school; so some city council thought it wise to give all new mothers a few shelves worth of books, in an attempt to boost performance of all children in the city. This turned out (iirc) to have no effect at all, which is rather obvious to me, as you may have the book in the house, but you still need to read them). Which is exactly your point I guess ;)
    - JabavuAdams 16y ago
      > Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree. Yes, that's right. "Reading" to our infant consisted of her lolling in our laps and attempting to lick the board-book pages, while we maybe got to read a page or two. Later on, she'd bat at the pages, trying to imitate our page-turning. The only difference between a book and a chew-toy was that we'd compliment her on reading and point out when we were reading too. If you don't think you'd want to make a big deal about reading to your child, then don't fake it. It sounds like she won't lack for opportunity or encouragement in your household. P.S. The best parenting advice I ever got was to ignore parenting advice I don't agree with, but to respond to all parenting advice with "Thanks, we'll try that". People want to help, it's just that they're often wrong (for you and your child). UPDATE> On a tangent: it's amazing how significant what we choose to remark on is for little kids. We would point out colours of shapes, and praise our daughter when she got the colour right. Now colours are extremely significant. I.e. every object must be described as (colour, name). I wonder what the result would have been if we'd started with some other property. She also has to have us roll up her pants when wearing boots, because once we mentioned that she should roll up her pants so she wouldn't trip. Now it's dogma -- roll up pants or else meltdown. It's neat to see her little world-model forming: you don't trip because of a physical obstruction to your toe. No, you trip because your pants aren't rolled up.
dflock 16y ago
There's a chapter on this in Freakonomics: "Factors that are important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, maternal age of greater than thirty when the child was born, low birth weight, English as the primary language spoken in the home, parental involvement in the PTA, and many books in the home environment. Also, adopted children tended to have lower standardized test scores than their non-adopted peers. Factors that are not important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: the family is intact, the parents recently moved to a better neighborhood, the mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten, the child attended Head Start (US government program providing education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families), the parents regularly take the child to museums, the child is regularly spanked, the child frequently watches television, the parents read to the child nearly every day. Noting the overgeneralization, Levitt explains that what is important in parenting is who you are, not what you do." http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist_Explores_the_Hidden_Side_of_Everything http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist...
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  What you do is who you are. It was a surprise to me that not all fathers read math books for enjoyment in their spare time. It was a surprise to me that people study things they're not interested in. I've noted elsewhere in this thread the difference between doing things "because it'll be good for the kids", and doing things that are good for the kids because it's what you do every day. So it could be that parents who do these enrichment activities but don't "live it" are dragging the average down. I'm not sure how you'd test for "preach it" vs. "live it", though.

Alex3917 16y ago

Reading to your kids doesn't seem to help them read more proficiently, at least not on average. The 1994 Scarborough & Dobrich paper on this is one of the most famous in education literature, and there are a bunch of good responses to it as well.

JabavuAdams 16y ago
I'll check that out, if I have time. The problem I have with a lot of these studies and various parenting advice is that tiny, tiny details matter. Word choice, what you remark on, what you reward, and how you behave by default (as opposed to when consciously teaching) matter so much. Investigations into child psychology should probably teach us a lot about the children, themselves. The problem with investigating parenting is that you really need a 24/7 video log.
util 16y ago
How about encouraging them to read by themselves?
- stevie 16y ago
  African-American Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer did that with monetary incentives and found it worked for getting children to not only read, but to do homework as well as achieve higher marks on tests.
stevie 16y ago
I think this is wrong. Reading does help, but it has to done in the correct way, like much else to do with education in general. The Success For All study done in 2006: "Conclusion The quantity and quality of research on Success for All, and the positive outcomes found in almost all studies by more than fi fty investigators in eighteen different research institutions worldwide, clearly establish that Success for All is highly effective in increasing student reading. The effects can be quite substantial, averaging more than half of the national white-minority achievement gap and almost a full grade equivalent by second grade (see Slavin et al., 2006). In a time when educators are increasingly being asked to use proven programs, Success for All is the best demonstration in existence of the idea that rigorous research on practical programs can be done and can show substantial positive effects. Every child should have a right to participate in a program with this level of evidence."
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Right, that's why I said 'at least not on average'. If you are asking your kids questions while you read that are phrased in the proper way then there is benefit, but most people wouldn't do that unless they were trained to.

wdewind 16y ago

Agreed. Anyone who has been through a metro public school system has more than enough anecdotal evidence to know it's not race (and NOT the school), but the culture and family the kid goes home to at night that makes the biggest difference. While I agree with the idea of picking specific metrics and asking about them, at a cultural level I think what is going on here is a little more complicated than simply not knowing. Frequently public schools teach things that the subcultures feel are simply not relevant, to their lives. Let me give you an example: When I showed up for day 1 of high school, I was immediately bombarded with the idea of applying to college. I was essentially told that the next four years would be spent preparing for college - that's what the "point" of hs was. This in an of itself is pretty bad, in terms of limiting intellectual exploration and all that good stuff. But imagine you aren't planning to go to college. Imagine no one in your family went to college, and it's likely you'll end up working a blue collar job where your degree doesn't matter. What exactly should your parents be doing/saying here to get their kid interested in school? And why even bother? TLDR: I think this is much more about subcultural groups feeling excluded from, and thus rejecting, mainstream education, and the cultural norms that are projected from it, than simply explaining the cultural norms more scientifically.

maxklein 16y ago

Well, I suspect that scholarly families tend to continue that way, and that a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house. African-American culture did not just happen on its own, you know. There were major societal factors that forced that group of people to have a culture that is the way it is.

JabavuAdams 16y ago
I don't understand why you're taking this tone. I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. It's very important to make the culture vs. race point because culture changes over time, as you've pointed out. Also, I like to focus on culture because it's crazy that people get ultra-detailed in their discussion of race, while often ignoring this thing that is much more causative, in my experience.
anamax 16y ago
> a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house. How many farmers do you know and where? I'm serious. Commercial farming in the US is quite high-tech and successful farming has always been reasonably intellectual.

roel_v 16y ago

"1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months" Is there any documented benefit to this? I'll be a father in about 3.5 months so I still have a little time to prepare :)

JabavuAdams 16y ago
I'm using this as a measure of how scholarly the parents are. Kids imitate what you do, so I wasn't thinking about it in the context of a learning program, but rather being part of a house where everyone reads all the time. It's useful to know if it's the kind of place where reading to the child would take extra effort, or where not reading to the child would take extra effort.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Maybe I just can't understand yet until our daughter is born, but I don't see myself yet sitting there reading to an infant who can't even sit up straight by herself, let alone understand what I'm reading to her. I consider our family quite scholarly, with both of us being (at least part time) academics and my wife being a professor. Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree. (an interesting tidbit I remember, it may be from the Freakonomics book or blog, is a study that showed that children in households with many books did better at school; so some city council thought it wise to give all new mothers a few shelves worth of books, in an attempt to boost performance of all children in the city. This turned out (iirc) to have no effect at all, which is rather obvious to me, as you may have the book in the house, but you still need to read them). Which is exactly your point I guess ;)
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    > Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree. Yes, that's right. "Reading" to our infant consisted of her lolling in our laps and attempting to lick the board-book pages, while we maybe got to read a page or two. Later on, she'd bat at the pages, trying to imitate our page-turning. The only difference between a book and a chew-toy was that we'd compliment her on reading and point out when we were reading too. If you don't think you'd want to make a big deal about reading to your child, then don't fake it. It sounds like she won't lack for opportunity or encouragement in your household. P.S. The best parenting advice I ever got was to ignore parenting advice I don't agree with, but to respond to all parenting advice with "Thanks, we'll try that". People want to help, it's just that they're often wrong (for you and your child). UPDATE> On a tangent: it's amazing how significant what we choose to remark on is for little kids. We would point out colours of shapes, and praise our daughter when she got the colour right. Now colours are extremely significant. I.e. every object must be described as (colour, name). I wonder what the result would have been if we'd started with some other property. She also has to have us roll up her pants when wearing boots, because once we mentioned that she should roll up her pants so she wouldn't trip. Now it's dogma -- roll up pants or else meltdown. It's neat to see her little world-model forming: you don't trip because of a physical obstruction to your toe. No, you trip because your pants aren't rolled up.

dflock 16y ago

There's a chapter on this in Freakonomics: "Factors that are important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, maternal age of greater than thirty when the child was born, low birth weight, English as the primary language spoken in the home, parental involvement in the PTA, and many books in the home environment. Also, adopted children tended to have lower standardized test scores than their non-adopted peers. Factors that are not important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: the family is intact, the parents recently moved to a better neighborhood, the mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten, the child attended Head Start (US government program providing education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families), the parents regularly take the child to museums, the child is regularly spanked, the child frequently watches television, the parents read to the child nearly every day. Noting the overgeneralization, Levitt explains that what is important in parenting is who you are, not what you do." http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist_Explores_the_Hidden_Side_of_Everything http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist...

JabavuAdams 16y ago
What you do is who you are. It was a surprise to me that not all fathers read math books for enjoyment in their spare time. It was a surprise to me that people study things they're not interested in. I've noted elsewhere in this thread the difference between doing things "because it'll be good for the kids", and doing things that are good for the kids because it's what you do every day. So it could be that parents who do these enrichment activities but don't "live it" are dragging the average down. I'm not sure how you'd test for "preach it" vs. "live it", though.