8 ms·

The racial performance gap explained

84 points by duopixel 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago
Treisman's publication in College Mathematics Journal (linked in the submitted article): http://avid.panam.edu/Documents/Research/Studying_Students_Studying_Calculus_A_Look_at_the_lives_of_minority_mathematics_students_in_college.pdf http://avid.panam.edu/Documents/Research/Studying_Students_S... The money quote in the article is "We were advised by some graduate researchers in the social sciences to step back and question our hypotheses; this was really useful." It wasn't until the author and his colleagues reexamined their initial assumptions that their study began making interesting, actionable findings.
jsavimbi 15y ago
Great read. Thanks for posting.
- boneheadmed 15y ago
  I concur. Fantastic post! I encourage everyone to read the pdf of the published work which is linked on the page.
  - jsavimbi 15y ago
    Still can't figure out why people downvote me for liking a story.
spydum 15y ago
Great point made in the paper, and I couldn't agree more: "Now, freshman courses need to inspire students and invite them into the major". Absolutely! I think the first year should be just exploration and finding what subjects excite the student. So many folks just trudge through their years in a major that is completely boring. Even more just decide "college isn't for them" and drop out.
- Shenglong 15y ago
  Agreed. There's nothing like university to show you what you don't want to do.
patio11 15y ago
I sincerely wished a magic bullet existed, but I note that Berkeley has not been front page news every day for the last fifteen years, so it makes me skeptical that this is it.
- duopixel 15y ago
  In any human endeavor there's an execution component that scientists tend to overlook. You can't just form study groups and expect everyone to excel. The details add up and you end up with a successful program. The original article states that Treisman's grant ran out, but all of Berkeley was eager to get a part of the program, it changed hands and then went downhill from there, so I guess the guys who inherited the program overlooked the finer details that made it successful in the first place.
  - billswift 15y ago
    Probably mostly the Hawthorne effect; making "any" change tends to lead to temporary improvements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
AndrewDucker 15y ago
So the basic difference is that the Chinese students worked longer, and in cohesive teams? I wonder what it was about the culture they came from that encouraged that.
- canistr 15y ago
  It's interesting that this is occurring in an academic environment. Yet in athletics, China (or perhaps most Asian countries) tend not to perform as well in team events compared to Western nations.
  - yoshyosh 15y ago
    I would imagine that their builds have something to do with it when it comes to certain sports, however, they excel tremendously in others. Baseball comes to mind with Japan being regarded as the #1 competitor each year in the world cup and Korea also being known as strong top 4 candidate. These could be outliers, but they present a case for Asian countries being able to compete on equal footing in team events.
    - canistr 15y ago
      That is a good point. Not to say that there isn't teamwork involved, but I would argue that baseball is slightly different in that there is a higher emphasis on individual skill than on teamwork. The better counter-argument would perhaps be the Chinese women's volleyball team that won Gold Medal in the Olympics (can't remember which Olympics, but they won it)
  - jamesteow 15y ago
    Lots of these team sports require development leagues. And then decades of improvement.
- Duff 15y ago
  Or cheated. I went to a mid-tier public college. Certain cliques of asian students with no ability to communicate verbally in English were somehow able to produce amazing criticisms of 19th century english poetry. It's difficult not to draw a parallel between people like that and the fraternity people (who were incapable of communicating in English for other reasons) who achieved similar feats.
winestock 15y ago
Essentially, the performance gap disappeared when the students formed study groups ("learning groups" in this article). The students were not selected from the general population, but from UC Berkeley undergraduates. Let's see if anyone can replicate these results on a large scale in average American public high schools.
- rockarage 15y ago
  Well you're have to find a group of students who are willing to spend long hours studying so they can excel academically and that's much easier to do at universities. I think the intellectual background of many "Black" and "Hispanic" students are different. Their is a strong emphasis on being so called "street smart" instead of excelling academically. So they desire to excel at being a hustler. That problem is compounded with the entertainment industry where many of the successful rappers have a criminal history and they glorify hustling and the thug life. This is frustrating because there are "Blacks" and "Hispanics" that are academics and intellectuals, but their accomplishments is mostly ignored in the noise of pop culture. Many kids get a perverted view of what they should strive for and how they should act. Meaning all of sudden being black becomes synonymous with hustling on the streets, the hard knock life while studying and being clean cut makes you far worst than a nerd, it makes you an uncle tom, a sell out.
omonra 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_...
- chrismealy 15y ago
  Here is what you would never know about the Minnesota study from reading Jensen and Rushton, or, for that matter, Saletan. It held neither race nor expected IQ constant; the black children were adopted at a later age than the other children, which the study’s own authors note is associated with depressed IQ; the black children’s mothers had lower educational levels than those of the white children; the “quality of placement” for the white children was higher than for the other children; and as the study’s own authors have noted, the black and mixed-race children experienced severe adjustment problems as they grew up. -- http://www.slate.com/id/2179073 http://www.slate.com/id/2179073
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
fuzzylizard 15y ago
Interesting article; however, I would suggest that the Universities themselves are to blame. There were very few courses that I took where the professor encouraged us to talk to one another about problems and assignments. Usually it was the reverse. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to talk to anyone else, nor were we to work with other students in the class. Any collaboration was considered cheating and plagiarism. Obviously, this did not apply to things like study groups, but once you have had it drilled in to your head that collaboration was bad, it is very difficult to then create the network necessary for a study group. Universities need to change the way they teach and mark such that collaboration is not only suggested, but required. In addition, I think universities, if they really care about these differences, need to create some form of mentoring program for incoming students.
- ipince 15y ago
  Interesting. In my university collaboration was greatly encouraged. However, I'd say the subjects which I learned best were those in which I worked on the problem sets by myself. The problem sets were hard, so if I could do them on my own, it meant I really had a good grasp on the subject. I'm not saying collaboration is bad. It's great. But individual work can be just as valuable.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  I would guess that this is handled differently between universities and even between departments at the same university. My math and science profs went out of their way to encourage collaboration. The courses were typically weighted so that test results were the majority of your grade. If you were cheating on the homework by copying everything from your study group you'd be found out on the test. The CS department was a mixed bag. Lots of group projects, lots of collaboration encouragement, but some of the intro courses like algorithms took the collaborating is cheating approach. Where I encountered the most resistance to collaboration was in the humanities. Any course that had lots of writing or research pretty much had a work by yourself mandate. I blew through those courses without much effort and wouldn't have worked in groups anyway, but I always found it odd how often plagiarism was brought up and threats about academic suspension were made.
deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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temp765 15y ago
I think there might be two things happening. When students work in groups they not only share ideas (which help solidify concepts), but you also share answers. In my experience (in physics), most students worked together and when you get stuck on a problem you go and ask someone else how to do it. Obviously you end up doing better on the homework (because you complete all of it), and you also understand how to do the problems a little better, so the end result is you get a better grade in the class. The better solution is to do it all yourself. But often that's not possible (because you simply don't know how to do some problems) or you simply don't have to time. So in a per-hour-spent sense, working together and copying solutions probably makes you learn faster, and it definitely gets you better grades on the homework (and consequently in the class). Also, it's much easier to work 14 hours with some friends, then 8 hours in solitude.
jchonphoenix 15y ago
So basically, this research has shown that putting more effort in and studying longer hours combined with more effective studying grants higher grades. This isn't a huge surprise. If you look at why working in groups gets higher grades, its because you have a support network to explain the material when you get confused. When you're stuck, you can have someone explain it to you in 10 minutes rather than sitting there thinking about it for 10 hours.
losethos 15y ago
You gotta beat them.
msie 15y ago
I wonder if some students have a problem with study groups because they can't find one to join. So they accuse the group of having an unfair advantage ("cheating"). As long as HW is not weighted as much as the tests (like 10%-90%, 5%-95%) I don't see a problem with groups. You can't make things "completely fair" anyways. Also, in the real world, people collaborate on problems all the time so it's good practice to get students working together. The point of a course (you'd think) is to teach the material to the students and if study groups contribute to this then all the more power to them.
Hyena 15y ago
The article mentions that there is a weird problem among African American students at Berkeley: the middle of the SAT distribution and low end of the income distribution were doing better than the high ends of either. They chocked this result up to "disorientation". Treisman himself seems to emphasize the importance of the group aspect. Shouldn't we pull back a little on the claims about study then? It seems possible, though without much data, that hours of study and hours of group study aren't perfect substitutes, at least for some subset of the population.

84 points by duopixel 15y ago

Treisman's publication in College Mathematics Journal (linked in the submitted article): http://avid.panam.edu/Documents/Research/Studying_Students_Studying_Calculus_A_Look_at_the_lives_of_minority_mathematics_students_in_college.pdf http://avid.panam.edu/Documents/Research/Studying_Students_S... The money quote in the article is "We were advised by some graduate researchers in the social sciences to step back and question our hypotheses; this was really useful." It wasn't until the author and his colleagues reexamined their initial assumptions that their study began making interesting, actionable findings.

jsavimbi 15y ago

Great read. Thanks for posting.

boneheadmed 15y ago
I concur. Fantastic post! I encourage everyone to read the pdf of the published work which is linked on the page.
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  Still can't figure out why people downvote me for liking a story.

spydum 15y ago

Great point made in the paper, and I couldn't agree more: "Now, freshman courses need to inspire students and invite them into the major". Absolutely! I think the first year should be just exploration and finding what subjects excite the student. So many folks just trudge through their years in a major that is completely boring. Even more just decide "college isn't for them" and drop out.

Shenglong 15y ago
Agreed. There's nothing like university to show you what you don't want to do.

patio11 15y ago

I sincerely wished a magic bullet existed, but I note that Berkeley has not been front page news every day for the last fifteen years, so it makes me skeptical that this is it.

duopixel 15y ago
In any human endeavor there's an execution component that scientists tend to overlook. You can't just form study groups and expect everyone to excel. The details add up and you end up with a successful program. The original article states that Treisman's grant ran out, but all of Berkeley was eager to get a part of the program, it changed hands and then went downhill from there, so I guess the guys who inherited the program overlooked the finer details that made it successful in the first place.
- billswift 15y ago
  Probably mostly the Hawthorne effect; making "any" change tends to lead to temporary improvements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

AndrewDucker 15y ago

So the basic difference is that the Chinese students worked longer, and in cohesive teams? I wonder what it was about the culture they came from that encouraged that.

canistr 15y ago
It's interesting that this is occurring in an academic environment. Yet in athletics, China (or perhaps most Asian countries) tend not to perform as well in team events compared to Western nations.
- yoshyosh 15y ago
  I would imagine that their builds have something to do with it when it comes to certain sports, however, they excel tremendously in others. Baseball comes to mind with Japan being regarded as the #1 competitor each year in the world cup and Korea also being known as strong top 4 candidate. These could be outliers, but they present a case for Asian countries being able to compete on equal footing in team events.
  - canistr 15y ago
    That is a good point. Not to say that there isn't teamwork involved, but I would argue that baseball is slightly different in that there is a higher emphasis on individual skill than on teamwork. The better counter-argument would perhaps be the Chinese women's volleyball team that won Gold Medal in the Olympics (can't remember which Olympics, but they won it)
- jamesteow 15y ago
  Lots of these team sports require development leagues. And then decades of improvement.
Duff 15y ago
Or cheated. I went to a mid-tier public college. Certain cliques of asian students with no ability to communicate verbally in English were somehow able to produce amazing criticisms of 19th century english poetry. It's difficult not to draw a parallel between people like that and the fraternity people (who were incapable of communicating in English for other reasons) who achieved similar feats.

winestock 15y ago

Essentially, the performance gap disappeared when the students formed study groups ("learning groups" in this article). The students were not selected from the general population, but from UC Berkeley undergraduates. Let's see if anyone can replicate these results on a large scale in average American public high schools.

rockarage 15y ago
Well you're have to find a group of students who are willing to spend long hours studying so they can excel academically and that's much easier to do at universities. I think the intellectual background of many "Black" and "Hispanic" students are different. Their is a strong emphasis on being so called "street smart" instead of excelling academically. So they desire to excel at being a hustler. That problem is compounded with the entertainment industry where many of the successful rappers have a criminal history and they glorify hustling and the thug life. This is frustrating because there are "Blacks" and "Hispanics" that are academics and intellectuals, but their accomplishments is mostly ignored in the noise of pop culture. Many kids get a perverted view of what they should strive for and how they should act. Meaning all of sudden being black becomes synonymous with hustling on the streets, the hard knock life while studying and being clean cut makes you far worst than a nerd, it makes you an uncle tom, a sell out.

omonra 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_...

chrismealy 15y ago
Here is what you would never know about the Minnesota study from reading Jensen and Rushton, or, for that matter, Saletan. It held neither race nor expected IQ constant; the black children were adopted at a later age than the other children, which the study’s own authors note is associated with depressed IQ; the black children’s mothers had lower educational levels than those of the white children; the “quality of placement” for the white children was higher than for the other children; and as the study’s own authors have noted, the black and mixed-race children experienced severe adjustment problems as they grew up. -- http://www.slate.com/id/2179073 http://www.slate.com/id/2179073

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

fuzzylizard 15y ago

Interesting article; however, I would suggest that the Universities themselves are to blame. There were very few courses that I took where the professor encouraged us to talk to one another about problems and assignments. Usually it was the reverse. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to talk to anyone else, nor were we to work with other students in the class. Any collaboration was considered cheating and plagiarism. Obviously, this did not apply to things like study groups, but once you have had it drilled in to your head that collaboration was bad, it is very difficult to then create the network necessary for a study group. Universities need to change the way they teach and mark such that collaboration is not only suggested, but required. In addition, I think universities, if they really care about these differences, need to create some form of mentoring program for incoming students.

ipince 15y ago
Interesting. In my university collaboration was greatly encouraged. However, I'd say the subjects which I learned best were those in which I worked on the problem sets by myself. The problem sets were hard, so if I could do them on my own, it meant I really had a good grasp on the subject. I'm not saying collaboration is bad. It's great. But individual work can be just as valuable.
ktsmith 15y ago
I would guess that this is handled differently between universities and even between departments at the same university. My math and science profs went out of their way to encourage collaboration. The courses were typically weighted so that test results were the majority of your grade. If you were cheating on the homework by copying everything from your study group you'd be found out on the test. The CS department was a mixed bag. Lots of group projects, lots of collaboration encouragement, but some of the intro courses like algorithms took the collaborating is cheating approach. Where I encountered the most resistance to collaboration was in the humanities. Any course that had lots of writing or research pretty much had a work by yourself mandate. I blew through those courses without much effort and wouldn't have worked in groups anyway, but I always found it odd how often plagiarism was brought up and threats about academic suspension were made.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

temp765 15y ago

I think there might be two things happening. When students work in groups they not only share ideas (which help solidify concepts), but you also share answers. In my experience (in physics), most students worked together and when you get stuck on a problem you go and ask someone else how to do it. Obviously you end up doing better on the homework (because you complete all of it), and you also understand how to do the problems a little better, so the end result is you get a better grade in the class. The better solution is to do it all yourself. But often that's not possible (because you simply don't know how to do some problems) or you simply don't have to time. So in a per-hour-spent sense, working together and copying solutions probably makes you learn faster, and it definitely gets you better grades on the homework (and consequently in the class). Also, it's much easier to work 14 hours with some friends, then 8 hours in solitude.

jchonphoenix 15y ago

So basically, this research has shown that putting more effort in and studying longer hours combined with more effective studying grants higher grades. This isn't a huge surprise. If you look at why working in groups gets higher grades, its because you have a support network to explain the material when you get confused. When you're stuck, you can have someone explain it to you in 10 minutes rather than sitting there thinking about it for 10 hours.

losethos 15y ago

You gotta beat them.

msie 15y ago

I wonder if some students have a problem with study groups because they can't find one to join. So they accuse the group of having an unfair advantage ("cheating"). As long as HW is not weighted as much as the tests (like 10%-90%, 5%-95%) I don't see a problem with groups. You can't make things "completely fair" anyways. Also, in the real world, people collaborate on problems all the time so it's good practice to get students working together. The point of a course (you'd think) is to teach the material to the students and if study groups contribute to this then all the more power to them.

Hyena 15y ago

The article mentions that there is a weird problem among African American students at Berkeley: the middle of the SAT distribution and low end of the income distribution were doing better than the high ends of either. They chocked this result up to "disorientation". Treisman himself seems to emphasize the importance of the group aspect. Shouldn't we pull back a little on the claims about study then? It seems possible, though without much data, that hours of study and hours of group study aren't perfect substitutes, at least for some subset of the population.