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From the abstract: These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance an

From the abstract: These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate. My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. Especially in recent years our (teachers’) performance is measure by passing rate and I have very little incentive to fail a student even if they don’t know the material. I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. I suggest the possibility that maybe some people start off school in kindergarten behind their peers and never catch up. If the rate of learning is largely the same for people then starting off in kindergarten in the upper half in terms of knowledge would likely lead to one ending up in the upper half of knowledge at the end of college.

korroziya 4y ago
>I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others Ironic that if you say this almost anywhere (academia, Reddit, your local bar) people immediately assume you're talking about Eugenics, accuse you of racism and try to get you fired.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I’m kind of confused because I’ve never heard of “some people are smarter than others” to be a eugenicist position. That’s more for stuff like “we should have IQ minimums to become parents” or something.
  - korroziya 4y ago
    Slightly related: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      > While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true". I mean, that's pretty clearly racism.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        This is why I don’t take anyone who says “you can’t talk about X anymore” seriously.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    At the time of eugenics “some people are smarter than others” was self evident. Now we’re entering an era where “all inequality is due to systemic racism” where the act of finding a cause that isn’t systemic racism is in effect acting in support of that very system. Which makes it unfalsifiable and thus not a theory but a new religion.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      You’re constructing a straw-man argument. Nobody believes the thing you think you are refuting.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        The book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden does. It’s written by a progressive for progressives. It’s not logically sound and admits to taking such a position on faith in the service of being anti-racist.
        jeffbee 4y ago
        [flagged]
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I assumed you were stating that no-one believes the second point not that no-one believes the first point. Yes, she takes the view that individually some people are smarter than others due to purely random factors, a combinations of variants, she also takes the view that the important variants for intelligence are basically equally distributed among races. Thus the inter racial group differences must be due to racism. The book is an attempt to split the difference and in doing so spells out the explicit biases that must be taken on faith. Which is what makes it interesting. The book as gotten quite a bit of push back on the "some people are smarter than others" aspect which demonstrates that there exist people that believe that some people are not inherently smarter than others. I should have been more explicit on my second message but your response was trite and I assumed in bad faith.
- syzarian 4y ago
  I don't know why you are down voted. I've been accused of racism for saying that some people are smarter than others. I guess it is a given for some people that a person's worthiness is tied to their intelligence. I hold no such view but I guess people assume that since I think some are smarter than others then there must be a racial component to said belief. I would never say to colleagues at my university that I hold the belief that some people have more intellectual talent than others. Amongst certain vocal subgroups of academia an unassailable core belief they hold is that all people are equal in intellectual abilities and that only external factors contribute to any divergence in perceived intellectual talent or in knowledge.
  - chaxor 4y ago
    If someone says that the phrase 'some people are smarter than others' is racist, that's specifically them being racist, (as they're the ones who brought race into it in their own mind) not the speaker of the phrase.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. Einstein's report cards https://www.openculture.com/2020/04/albert-einsteins-grades-a-fascinating-look-at-his-report-cards.html https://www.openculture.com/2020/04/albert-einsteins-grades-...
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
  - Sai_ 4y ago
    Fifteen is also around the time students get introduced to calc, isn’t it? In India, fifteen is around tenth or eleventh year of education and while I’m too old now to recall when we started diff calc, it definitely wasn’t in the 12 or later years of education. In that light, this particular achievement of Einstein’s doesn’t seem very impressive.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      High school in the US (~ages 14-18) doesn't have one track, and calculus isn't required to graduate. There were around 800 students in my year, and I'd guess only around 100-200 took the class, and it was usually in the final year. So of the other group, the ones that went straight into working instead of college never had it. Edit: to clarify, mine was in the mid-2000s, don't know if there have been changes with things like Common Core, but from what I've seen/heard that seems focused on much earlier years so I don't think it would have affected this part of math education.
    - SkyBelow 4y ago
      It would depend upon the details of what is meant by learning calculus. Learning enough to pass the average high school class on it isn't much. Above average at math, but nothing very impressive. But the same language could also describe learning it at something closer to the level of analytics, having a much deeper understanding than the average class produces. The deeper the understanding, the more impressive the achievement, yet it would still be described in layman terms as "learning calculus".
throwawaysalome 4y ago
I have no expertise on this topic but it seems some people are smarter than others. It's a sign of the times that a person with two decades of experience as an educator needs to heavily qualify an obvious fact.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  I welcome people being more aware of their own cultural, geographic, economic, and preferential biases. If only everyone saw their unrecorded and unreviewed experiences for the anecdotes they are... what a world that would be.
- causi 4y ago
  It's also a sign of the times that schools have realized it's much easier (and cheaper) to create student outcome equity by preventing exceptional success than by preventing failure.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Which universities engage in preventing exceptional success? Even with grade inflation, it's usually pretty easy to tell when someone is exceptionally capable/intelligent/successful compared to their peers at the same institution. And the problem of grade inflation is more about universities competing for prestige (and keeping wealthy donor/legacy families happy) than about creating outcome equity.
    - nlavezzo 4y ago
      I think it's probably earlier (elementary, middle) schools that just don't provide opportunity for kids that are very advanced to pursue materials that are actually challenging or interesting to them.
    - molsongolden 4y ago
      I assumed the parent meant K-12 schools (in the USA) cutting gifted and talented programs. The subject of ending tracking in schools and defunding programs for high performing students has been popping up on HN every 6mo or so.
rdevsrex 4y ago
I agree. As highly controversial as IQ is, it does measure something, and is correlated to certain outcomes. I scanned the paper, but I don't recall if this was just K-12, or also higher ed, but I wonder if this result would fall apart in more complex subjects. Also, no matter what the learning rate really is, if a student isn't interested in the subject, good luck getting them to learn much at all!
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    IQ is controversial because it's not obvious: 1. How it relates to g-factor and whether it tests it accurately 2. How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices 3. How it relates to academic and professional success 4. How much apparent academic and professional success is influenced by parental cheating and influence - including bequests, donations, "special" deals behind the scenes, in-group networking, and so on It's not controversial that some people are smarter than others in specific ways, just as some people are better athletes than others. But there are a lot of unanswered questions about what "smarter" really means, how broad the definition should be, how much it's defined by covert and contingent expectations, whether "smart" behaviours are innate or acculturated, who defines them, and how/why.
    - peterfirefly 4y ago
      > How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices According to adoption studies, there's barely any influence at all. We can measure a little when the kids are young (the better the measurements, the less we can measure). It gradually disappears as they get older.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    IQ is controversial because it is a vague and one-dimensional metric, which all sorts of idiots are both delusional about and obsessed with.
xiphias2 4y ago
,,I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others'' As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change. Also one more big disadvantage is that most people can't distinguish between a smart person and an a$$hole (Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole... Elon Musk is an even more controversial example)
- syzarian 4y ago
  Elon Musk is both smart and an asshole in my opinion. Same for Dr. House. The two properties are not mutually exclusive.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    Can you make an example of a hyperfocused authistic high achieving leader person who you don't consider an asshole? (As a counterexample)
    - syzarian 4y ago
      I don't know of any examples of hyper focused, autistic, high achieving leaders. I'm not aware of any examples of hyper focused, high achieving leaders having been confirmed as being autistic. So, for vacuous reasons, the answer to your question is no. Let's suppose that there are no such examples. What then? If a person is an asshole what does it matter why they are an asshole?
  - kentm 4y ago
    He seems to have the raw capacity for intelligence and appears to have applied it well in understanding rocketry, but he does not apply it equally. He's said and done a lot of bone-headed things and ignored genuine expertise.
- scythe 4y ago
  >As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change. I don't believe that intellectual ability necessarily requires you to miss out on facial expressions or adaptability. It occurs in some people, but even, e.g., John von Neumann was famously gregarious and friendly. Furthermore, it is worth noting that autism (even high-functioning autism) does not consistently present with exceptional ability in formal reasoning — that is also a "sometimes". >Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole Dr. House is a fictional character. I don't think there has ever been a real life doctor who diagnoses his patients consistently from intuition and then sends his residents on a scavenger hunt for kicks.
freehorse 4y ago
> My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. This still does not explain why some performed less than others (the ones that should and ones who should not pass). > I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. This is a fact indeed, but the real question is how much variability in performance/learning this explains, and if there are other factors that explain part (and how much) of this variability. For this we need data.
bluenose69 4y ago
> passing students who don’t deserve to pass At one time, students were routinely "held back" if they didn't understand something well enough to pass. That gave them a chance to catch up, so that when they got back into the class, they would be more likely to succeed. It always seemed to me that this was an act of kindness, for the alternative is for them to sit in classes of more and more demanding material, feeling less and less adequate. Back in those days, it was not really considered a terrible thing to spend some extra time catching up. Folks would ask me around report time whether I had passed my exams. It was not meant as an insult, and was not taken to be one, either. I see postsecondary students all the time who clearly have missed some steps at around grade 9 or so. Being smart and ambitious, these students would definitely have caught on, if someone had assessed them honestly. Instead, they live in an imposter-syndrome world, always waiting to be "found out". Folded in with the false kindness of passing everyone is, as others have pointed out, the deeply corrosive influence of measuring teaching performance by passing rates. It doesn't really take a lot more than honesty and sometimes a helping hand, to let students realize their potential, whatever it might be.

korroziya 4y ago

>I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others Ironic that if you say this almost anywhere (academia, Reddit, your local bar) people immediately assume you're talking about Eugenics, accuse you of racism and try to get you fired.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I’m kind of confused because I’ve never heard of “some people are smarter than others” to be a eugenicist position. That’s more for stuff like “we should have IQ minimums to become parents” or something.
- korroziya 4y ago
  Slightly related: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true". I mean, that's pretty clearly racism.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      This is why I don’t take anyone who says “you can’t talk about X anymore” seriously.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  At the time of eugenics “some people are smarter than others” was self evident. Now we’re entering an era where “all inequality is due to systemic racism” where the act of finding a cause that isn’t systemic racism is in effect acting in support of that very system. Which makes it unfalsifiable and thus not a theory but a new religion.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    You’re constructing a straw-man argument. Nobody believes the thing you think you are refuting.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      The book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden does. It’s written by a progressive for progressives. It’s not logically sound and admits to taking such a position on faith in the service of being anti-racist.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        [flagged]
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I assumed you were stating that no-one believes the second point not that no-one believes the first point. Yes, she takes the view that individually some people are smarter than others due to purely random factors, a combinations of variants, she also takes the view that the important variants for intelligence are basically equally distributed among races. Thus the inter racial group differences must be due to racism. The book is an attempt to split the difference and in doing so spells out the explicit biases that must be taken on faith. Which is what makes it interesting. The book as gotten quite a bit of push back on the "some people are smarter than others" aspect which demonstrates that there exist people that believe that some people are not inherently smarter than others. I should have been more explicit on my second message but your response was trite and I assumed in bad faith.
syzarian 4y ago
I don't know why you are down voted. I've been accused of racism for saying that some people are smarter than others. I guess it is a given for some people that a person's worthiness is tied to their intelligence. I hold no such view but I guess people assume that since I think some are smarter than others then there must be a racial component to said belief. I would never say to colleagues at my university that I hold the belief that some people have more intellectual talent than others. Amongst certain vocal subgroups of academia an unassailable core belief they hold is that all people are equal in intellectual abilities and that only external factors contribute to any divergence in perceived intellectual talent or in knowledge.
- chaxor 4y ago
  If someone says that the phrase 'some people are smarter than others' is racist, that's specifically them being racist, (as they're the ones who brought race into it in their own mind) not the speaker of the phrase.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. Einstein's report cards https://www.openculture.com/2020/04/albert-einsteins-grades-a-fascinating-look-at-his-report-cards.html https://www.openculture.com/2020/04/albert-einsteins-grades-...

chrisco255 4y ago
> At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
- Sai_ 4y ago
  Fifteen is also around the time students get introduced to calc, isn’t it? In India, fifteen is around tenth or eleventh year of education and while I’m too old now to recall when we started diff calc, it definitely wasn’t in the 12 or later years of education. In that light, this particular achievement of Einstein’s doesn’t seem very impressive.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    High school in the US (~ages 14-18) doesn't have one track, and calculus isn't required to graduate. There were around 800 students in my year, and I'd guess only around 100-200 took the class, and it was usually in the final year. So of the other group, the ones that went straight into working instead of college never had it. Edit: to clarify, mine was in the mid-2000s, don't know if there have been changes with things like Common Core, but from what I've seen/heard that seems focused on much earlier years so I don't think it would have affected this part of math education.
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    It would depend upon the details of what is meant by learning calculus. Learning enough to pass the average high school class on it isn't much. Above average at math, but nothing very impressive. But the same language could also describe learning it at something closer to the level of analytics, having a much deeper understanding than the average class produces. The deeper the understanding, the more impressive the achievement, yet it would still be described in layman terms as "learning calculus".

throwawaysalome 4y ago

I have no expertise on this topic but it seems some people are smarter than others. It's a sign of the times that a person with two decades of experience as an educator needs to heavily qualify an obvious fact.

BobbyJo 4y ago
I welcome people being more aware of their own cultural, geographic, economic, and preferential biases. If only everyone saw their unrecorded and unreviewed experiences for the anecdotes they are... what a world that would be.
causi 4y ago
It's also a sign of the times that schools have realized it's much easier (and cheaper) to create student outcome equity by preventing exceptional success than by preventing failure.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Which universities engage in preventing exceptional success? Even with grade inflation, it's usually pretty easy to tell when someone is exceptionally capable/intelligent/successful compared to their peers at the same institution. And the problem of grade inflation is more about universities competing for prestige (and keeping wealthy donor/legacy families happy) than about creating outcome equity.
  - nlavezzo 4y ago
    I think it's probably earlier (elementary, middle) schools that just don't provide opportunity for kids that are very advanced to pursue materials that are actually challenging or interesting to them.
  - molsongolden 4y ago
    I assumed the parent meant K-12 schools (in the USA) cutting gifted and talented programs. The subject of ending tracking in schools and defunding programs for high performing students has been popping up on HN every 6mo or so.

rdevsrex 4y ago

I agree. As highly controversial as IQ is, it does measure something, and is correlated to certain outcomes. I scanned the paper, but I don't recall if this was just K-12, or also higher ed, but I wonder if this result would fall apart in more complex subjects. Also, no matter what the learning rate really is, if a student isn't interested in the subject, good luck getting them to learn much at all!

peterfirefly 4y ago
[flagged]
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  IQ is controversial because it's not obvious: 1. How it relates to g-factor and whether it tests it accurately 2. How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices 3. How it relates to academic and professional success 4. How much apparent academic and professional success is influenced by parental cheating and influence - including bequests, donations, "special" deals behind the scenes, in-group networking, and so on It's not controversial that some people are smarter than others in specific ways, just as some people are better athletes than others. But there are a lot of unanswered questions about what "smarter" really means, how broad the definition should be, how much it's defined by covert and contingent expectations, whether "smart" behaviours are innate or acculturated, who defines them, and how/why.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    > How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices According to adoption studies, there's barely any influence at all. We can measure a little when the kids are young (the better the measurements, the less we can measure). It gradually disappears as they get older.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  IQ is controversial because it is a vague and one-dimensional metric, which all sorts of idiots are both delusional about and obsessed with.

xiphias2 4y ago

,,I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others'' As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change. Also one more big disadvantage is that most people can't distinguish between a smart person and an a$$hole (Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole... Elon Musk is an even more controversial example)

syzarian 4y ago
Elon Musk is both smart and an asshole in my opinion. Same for Dr. House. The two properties are not mutually exclusive.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Can you make an example of a hyperfocused authistic high achieving leader person who you don't consider an asshole? (As a counterexample)
  - syzarian 4y ago
    I don't know of any examples of hyper focused, autistic, high achieving leaders. I'm not aware of any examples of hyper focused, high achieving leaders having been confirmed as being autistic. So, for vacuous reasons, the answer to your question is no. Let's suppose that there are no such examples. What then? If a person is an asshole what does it matter why they are an asshole?
- kentm 4y ago
  He seems to have the raw capacity for intelligence and appears to have applied it well in understanding rocketry, but he does not apply it equally. He's said and done a lot of bone-headed things and ignored genuine expertise.
scythe 4y ago
>As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change. I don't believe that intellectual ability necessarily requires you to miss out on facial expressions or adaptability. It occurs in some people, but even, e.g., John von Neumann was famously gregarious and friendly. Furthermore, it is worth noting that autism (even high-functioning autism) does not consistently present with exceptional ability in formal reasoning — that is also a "sometimes". >Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole Dr. House is a fictional character. I don't think there has ever been a real life doctor who diagnoses his patients consistently from intuition and then sends his residents on a scavenger hunt for kicks.

freehorse 4y ago

> My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. This still does not explain why some performed less than others (the ones that should and ones who should not pass). > I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. This is a fact indeed, but the real question is how much variability in performance/learning this explains, and if there are other factors that explain part (and how much) of this variability. For this we need data.

bluenose69 4y ago

> passing students who don’t deserve to pass At one time, students were routinely "held back" if they didn't understand something well enough to pass. That gave them a chance to catch up, so that when they got back into the class, they would be more likely to succeed. It always seemed to me that this was an act of kindness, for the alternative is for them to sit in classes of more and more demanding material, feeling less and less adequate. Back in those days, it was not really considered a terrible thing to spend some extra time catching up. Folks would ask me around report time whether I had passed my exams. It was not meant as an insult, and was not taken to be one, either. I see postsecondary students all the time who clearly have missed some steps at around grade 9 or so. Being smart and ambitious, these students would definitely have caught on, if someone had assessed them honestly. Instead, they live in an imposter-syndrome world, always waiting to be "found out". Folded in with the false kindness of passing everyone is, as others have pointed out, the deeply corrosive influence of measuring teaching performance by passing rates. It doesn't really take a lot more than honesty and sometimes a helping hand, to let students realize their potential, whatever it might be.