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I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just be

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough. The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Everyone can move at their own pace. That's the best choice going forward. We have the technology. We have the ability to liberate our children to learn at their individual pace. I don't know why we cling to the old sage-on-a-stage model.

77pt77 7y ago
> We have the ability to liberate our children to learn at their individual pace What makes you think society wants to allow that, let alone encourage it?
daxorid 7y ago
That's because, as per usual, they buried the lede. First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school performance, not performance of the gifted students. A perfectly valid way of reading this article is: gifted kids in de-tracked schools do the teachers' jobs for them by helping out the slower kids, which results in better school performance.
- catalogia 7y ago
  It may be the case that the gifted kids are helping slower kids score better, but not actually learn better. At least, that's what it was like when I was a kid. Teachers would constantly pair up smart kids with dumb kids for group assignments or study, and the smart kids would end up doing all the work. This benefits the teachers when they're evaluated by how well students are scoring.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    They usually use test results to measure achievement, though, and the smart kids can't do that for the other kids (at least assuming they aren't cheating)
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Whenever teachers realize they're being evaluated based on some metric, they almost immediately begin gaming that metric and with that it ceases to be a good metric. I had teachers give a lot of "group tests", walk out of the classroom during tests, etc. Standardized testing aims to correct this, but I think it's now considered by many teachers to be a joke. Even when exams are administered by independent proctors, teachers can still game the metric by "teaching the test" instead of imparting meaningful understanding of the material. I think this is a subject that will continue to defy rigorous objective scientific analysis.
      - pingyong 7y ago
        Tbh if you can "teach the test" without imparting meaningful understanding of the material, the test wasn't good the first place.
        catalogia 7y ago
        It turns out creating "good tests" isn't so easy. Generally tests suffer from one or more of the following: subjective grading, game-able question formats, or superficial coverage of the material. Most tests administered by school teachers have very subjective grading. Basically every essay question has subjective grading, as do "show your work" math test questions. Multiple choice questions remove much of that subjectivity, but at the expense of a system that can often be gamed and often covers the subject matter in a superficial way. If incentives are correctly aligned, tests with subjective grading can work reasonably well. But when tests taken by students are used to evaluate the performance of teachers, the incentives of the teachers align against you. For wide scale experimentation, you want a test that actually measures meaningful understanding of the subject matter and at the same time can be graded objectively and at the same time defies the attempts of students, teachers, and school administerators to subvert the results. That's basically the holy grail of tests.
dcbadacd 7y ago
The sage-on-a-stage also comes with socializing both during and after lessons, that can't be replaced with computers. If anything, I think it'd cause a lot more sadness than the current system.
- kick 7y ago
  Socializing generally isn't productive for gifted children past a certain point; when they're too far ahead of their peers, there's not much value that comes from it.
  - dcbadacd 7y ago
    Somewhat. If the gifted kids can socialize among themselves then that certainly is more beneficial. In theory it'd be nice to only interact with people like oneself but I don't see that happening, learning how to interact with others is definitely not useless but indeed depends on the amount. Not sure I'd measure usefulness with some productivity metrics, that success = productive kid at that point in time, social skills are hard to measure like that.
    - kick 7y ago
      Children aren't really the "others" of the adult world; they aren't fully grown enough, generally, to be of interest. Were the child or adolescent interacting with non-gifted adults, it would make sense. Not so much children.
cortesoft 7y ago
Your experience is as the parent of a high achiever, it sounds like. This article is talking about the achievements of the entire class, which includes both high and low achievers. It might be true that the higher achievers do better separated, but that the reduction in performance for the lower achievers more than offsets that. This makes sense, because the high achievers are probably going to do pretty well either way, and as you get to the higher test scores (on which performance is measured for these studies), there is less room to improve for the top students. Of course, this is a complicated question. What is the relative importance of helping lower performing students verse maximizing the top performing students? This is not a question that can be answered with raw data alone, because it is a values question.
- waterhouse 7y ago
  In the absence of further information, a decent start might be to give each student with special needs (be they due to giftedness or disability) the same amount of effort or funding. At least in terms of federal funding (because it's easier to aggregate across the U.S.), one Google result[1] says: "The federal government does provide GT funding to school districts through the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Education program. The funding for the Javits program is $12 million annually, which equates to $2.50 to $4 per GT student in this country." I think I saw an article saying the current administration proposed canceling it, but it seems that hasn't happened. Meanwhile, in terms of special education: "Ever since its initial enactment, the federal law has included a commitment to pay 40 percent of the average per student cost for every special education student. The current average per student cost is $7,552 and the average cost per special education student is an additional $9,369 per student, or $16,921. Yet, in 2004, the federal government is providing local school districts with just under 20 percent of its commitment rather than the 40 percent specified by the law, creating a $10.6 billion shortfall for states and local school districts."[2] Well, if they currently pay about 20% of $7500 per student, that comes out to $1500-ish. So that's a difference of ~400x. Not that I think the federal government should be funding such things, but given that it is... [1] https://ednote.ecs.org/do-we-really-need-to-fund-gifted-programs/ https://ednote.ecs.org/do-we-really-need-to-fund-gifted-prog... [2] http://www.nea.org/home/19029.htm http://www.nea.org/home/19029.htm
empath75 7y ago
I think they’d do better by taking the kids who understand the material and asking them to work with the kids who don’t. You learn as much by teaching as doing, if not more.
- wott 7y ago
  It is very difficult to explain something which was obvious to you. Often you would not know how to decompose it, and above all, you would not know the pain points the others encounter, and why those points are painful. Teaching is a trade, after all.
  - bradlys 7y ago
    > It is very difficult to explain something which was obvious to you. I think that's the point. Teaching the kids who are performing well on something on how to distill their knowledge to others.
  - swish_bob 7y ago
    This is explicitly why I did so well at Maths at A-Level. Once I could explain something to my less gifted peers, I had it. Completely and without the need to do the endless repetition I found so boring that is otherwise normally used to get good at solving those types of problems.
- ravedave5 7y ago
  My daughter did this and it wore on her. She complained that she spent most of the math period helping the other kids, she liked it a little but doing it every day is a bunch of work & responsibility on a child.
- 77pt77 7y ago
  This is recipe for disaster for everyone.
lutorm 7y ago
A good teacher doesn't let you redo the same simple math problems. Mine didn't.
jcranberry 7y ago
The article seemed to imply detracking functionally comes along with teachers catering to the capabilities of individual students since the class is not defined by a particular education level.

77pt77 7y ago

> We have the ability to liberate our children to learn at their individual pace What makes you think society wants to allow that, let alone encourage it?

daxorid 7y ago

That's because, as per usual, they buried the lede. First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school performance, not performance of the gifted students. A perfectly valid way of reading this article is: gifted kids in de-tracked schools do the teachers' jobs for them by helping out the slower kids, which results in better school performance.

catalogia 7y ago
It may be the case that the gifted kids are helping slower kids score better, but not actually learn better. At least, that's what it was like when I was a kid. Teachers would constantly pair up smart kids with dumb kids for group assignments or study, and the smart kids would end up doing all the work. This benefits the teachers when they're evaluated by how well students are scoring.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  They usually use test results to measure achievement, though, and the smart kids can't do that for the other kids (at least assuming they aren't cheating)
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Whenever teachers realize they're being evaluated based on some metric, they almost immediately begin gaming that metric and with that it ceases to be a good metric. I had teachers give a lot of "group tests", walk out of the classroom during tests, etc. Standardized testing aims to correct this, but I think it's now considered by many teachers to be a joke. Even when exams are administered by independent proctors, teachers can still game the metric by "teaching the test" instead of imparting meaningful understanding of the material. I think this is a subject that will continue to defy rigorous objective scientific analysis.
    - pingyong 7y ago
      Tbh if you can "teach the test" without imparting meaningful understanding of the material, the test wasn't good the first place.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        It turns out creating "good tests" isn't so easy. Generally tests suffer from one or more of the following: subjective grading, game-able question formats, or superficial coverage of the material. Most tests administered by school teachers have very subjective grading. Basically every essay question has subjective grading, as do "show your work" math test questions. Multiple choice questions remove much of that subjectivity, but at the expense of a system that can often be gamed and often covers the subject matter in a superficial way. If incentives are correctly aligned, tests with subjective grading can work reasonably well. But when tests taken by students are used to evaluate the performance of teachers, the incentives of the teachers align against you. For wide scale experimentation, you want a test that actually measures meaningful understanding of the subject matter and at the same time can be graded objectively and at the same time defies the attempts of students, teachers, and school administerators to subvert the results. That's basically the holy grail of tests.

dcbadacd 7y ago

The sage-on-a-stage also comes with socializing both during and after lessons, that can't be replaced with computers. If anything, I think it'd cause a lot more sadness than the current system.

kick 7y ago
Socializing generally isn't productive for gifted children past a certain point; when they're too far ahead of their peers, there's not much value that comes from it.
- dcbadacd 7y ago
  Somewhat. If the gifted kids can socialize among themselves then that certainly is more beneficial. In theory it'd be nice to only interact with people like oneself but I don't see that happening, learning how to interact with others is definitely not useless but indeed depends on the amount. Not sure I'd measure usefulness with some productivity metrics, that success = productive kid at that point in time, social skills are hard to measure like that.
  - kick 7y ago
    Children aren't really the "others" of the adult world; they aren't fully grown enough, generally, to be of interest. Were the child or adolescent interacting with non-gifted adults, it would make sense. Not so much children.

cortesoft 7y ago

Your experience is as the parent of a high achiever, it sounds like. This article is talking about the achievements of the entire class, which includes both high and low achievers. It might be true that the higher achievers do better separated, but that the reduction in performance for the lower achievers more than offsets that. This makes sense, because the high achievers are probably going to do pretty well either way, and as you get to the higher test scores (on which performance is measured for these studies), there is less room to improve for the top students. Of course, this is a complicated question. What is the relative importance of helping lower performing students verse maximizing the top performing students? This is not a question that can be answered with raw data alone, because it is a values question.

waterhouse 7y ago
In the absence of further information, a decent start might be to give each student with special needs (be they due to giftedness or disability) the same amount of effort or funding. At least in terms of federal funding (because it's easier to aggregate across the U.S.), one Google result[1] says: "The federal government does provide GT funding to school districts through the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Education program. The funding for the Javits program is $12 million annually, which equates to $2.50 to $4 per GT student in this country." I think I saw an article saying the current administration proposed canceling it, but it seems that hasn't happened. Meanwhile, in terms of special education: "Ever since its initial enactment, the federal law has included a commitment to pay 40 percent of the average per student cost for every special education student. The current average per student cost is $7,552 and the average cost per special education student is an additional $9,369 per student, or $16,921. Yet, in 2004, the federal government is providing local school districts with just under 20 percent of its commitment rather than the 40 percent specified by the law, creating a $10.6 billion shortfall for states and local school districts."[2] Well, if they currently pay about 20% of $7500 per student, that comes out to $1500-ish. So that's a difference of ~400x. Not that I think the federal government should be funding such things, but given that it is... [1] https://ednote.ecs.org/do-we-really-need-to-fund-gifted-programs/ https://ednote.ecs.org/do-we-really-need-to-fund-gifted-prog... [2] http://www.nea.org/home/19029.htm http://www.nea.org/home/19029.htm

empath75 7y ago

I think they’d do better by taking the kids who understand the material and asking them to work with the kids who don’t. You learn as much by teaching as doing, if not more.

wott 7y ago
It is very difficult to explain something which was obvious to you. Often you would not know how to decompose it, and above all, you would not know the pain points the others encounter, and why those points are painful. Teaching is a trade, after all.
- bradlys 7y ago
  > It is very difficult to explain something which was obvious to you. I think that's the point. Teaching the kids who are performing well on something on how to distill their knowledge to others.
- swish_bob 7y ago
  This is explicitly why I did so well at Maths at A-Level. Once I could explain something to my less gifted peers, I had it. Completely and without the need to do the endless repetition I found so boring that is otherwise normally used to get good at solving those types of problems.
ravedave5 7y ago
My daughter did this and it wore on her. She complained that she spent most of the math period helping the other kids, she liked it a little but doing it every day is a bunch of work & responsibility on a child.
77pt77 7y ago
This is recipe for disaster for everyone.

lutorm 7y ago

A good teacher doesn't let you redo the same simple math problems. Mine didn't.

jcranberry 7y ago

The article seemed to imply detracking functionally comes along with teachers catering to the capabilities of individual students since the class is not defined by a particular education level.