9 ms·

Thank you for looking it up! My personal hunch is that COVID related disruption in schooling is responsible for most of the within-group drop, and the rest is m

• trhway 2y ago
  i think the impact of COVID lockdowns and de-SAT-ing would be harder to reverse than to build logical and mathematical reasoning into ChatGPT. The former is political and the latter is technical problem. Our whole industry, great at solving technical problems, is throwing tens of billions today, and it will be hundreds tomorrow, to solve the latter. So the math skills for the majority of the population is probably going the way of the "paper map" skills, etc.
  • lanternfish 2y ago
    The problem is that mathematics education isn't just about learning times tables. It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut math as a target without fundamentally reworking curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments.
    • barry-cotter 2y ago
      > It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. That would be news to History and English teachers among others. You need to learn to make a structured and coherent argument based on evidence in many subjects and the evidence for the existence of transfer learning is so weak it seems unlikely basic Math makes the average or even 75th percentile student better at reasoning. Most people follow a formula at best, and forget that much rapidly after the end of school.
      • lanternfish 2y ago
        I'd differentiate here between deductive and inductive reasoning. While english and history - through argumentation - expose some deductive reasoning, the vast majority of it is inductive.
    • trhway 2y ago
      >negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself. That begs the question - what is the core competency of humans? I see so far only the one - the ability to discover, to dig further into unknown. I think though once we get ChatGPT a bit further, such an ability would be pretty easy to add, and it would do much better than humans as it would be able to generate, prune, evaluate, verify hypotheses much faster and at incomparably larger scale/numbers.
      • klabb3 2y ago
        > ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself. And this is based on..? LLMs suffer from all logical fallacies humans do, afaik. It performs extremely poor where there’s no training data, since it’s mostly pattern matching. Sure, some logical reasoning is encoded in the patterns, but clearly not at a sophisticated level. It’s also easily tricked by reusing well-known patterns with variations - ie using a riddle like the wolf-lamb-shepherd with a different premise makes it fall into training data honey pot. And as for the main argument, to replace literally critical thinking of all things, with a pattern parrot, is the most techno-naive take I’ve heard in a long time. Hot damn.
        • trhway 2y ago
          you're listing today's deficiencies. ChatGPT didn't exist several years ago, and will be a history in several years. >to replace literally critical thinking of all things Nobody forces you to replace. The ChatGPT would just be doing it better and faster as it is a pretty simple thing once the toolset gets built up which is happening as we speak. >it’s mostly pattern matching it is one component of ChatGPT. The other is the emergent (as a result of simple brute-force looking training) model over which that pattern-matching is performed.
      • itishappy 2y ago
        > ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself. Is that really what you'd teach your kids? No need for deductive reasoning, just trust the robot? ChatGPT is certainly an interesting authority to appeal to, but I believe we as humans have a complicated history with authority.
• bcrosby95 2y ago
  It probably varies by grade and locale. My oldest is in 4th grade now, and the most relevant maths are from 2nd and 3rd grade. Basic division, multiplication, and fractions matters (3rd grade) - but so does adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers (2nd grade) because multiplication/division is now multiple digit (which is the actual, new, 4th grade material). Interestingly, she used almost no adding and subtracting in 3rd grade, to the point where the teacher supplemented required coursework to help stave off attrition, so you could actually get by 3rd grade while being terrible at adding and subtracting. Her covid year was kinder. It made her cohort pretty bad at writing. But that seems to have largely worked itself out over the past 4 years. It's not clear to me when these tests were taken, and that kinda matters - were they by people who were starting 4th grade, finishing 4th grade, or completed 4th grade? It matters because it tells us what they missed due to COVID - if these 4th graders had 1st grade for COVID, I'm not sure if that would be a huge deal. The most relevant bits are also taught in kinder, and they cover adding and subtracting again in 2nd. But if their main COVID year was 2nd, I could see 4th being a huge problem, especially with the general lack of adding and subtracting in 3rd grade.
  • lumost 2y ago
    I have a preschooler, it's been observed by the local preschools that kids need OT and other interventions at substantially higher rates in the covid cohort than in the non-covid cohort. We are likely to see an ongoing wave of kids experiencing some disruption due to the covid period.
    • capybaraStorm 2y ago
      For much of my child's formative infant year, people were screaming bloody murder if we wanted our infant to develop a sense of facial expression in strangers and in public. They were also hell bent on banning much of the social events that people might bring infants to that may help develop early socialization. You do not get a more neuroplastic year than the first one. There was a lot of stuff going on where one has to wonder how much we disproportionately sacrificed the children for disproportionately the elderly. It still deeply bothers me what effect this could have had on my child.
• GlassOwAter 2y ago
  How about COVID reducing IQ?
  • Beijinger 2y ago
    Unlikely. How about cell phones making kids unable to concentrate more than 5 secs?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • hirvi74 2y ago
    Perhaps IQ is becoming a poorer measurement as we progress? As in, IQ tests might test for more attributes that are less advantageous in modern times. I do not believe students are less intelligent now than previous generations. However, I do believe attention spans have a decreased across the board as a whole (adults too). I'm probably explaining it poorly, but what if IQ was not a test of just 'intelligence', but perhaps some proxy of intelligence, attention, motivation, and other factors combined? Having taken the WAIS-IV myself, I am not convinced the measurements are all they are cracked up to be. Think about Homer's Odyssey. The entire epic poem was passed down verbally from memory. If I am not mistaken, Homer thought reading would make people less intelligent because reading would diminish the one's capacity for memory. Does not having the ability to recite the entire Odyssey from memory mean we have become less intelligent, or perhaps, maybe we do not need to memorize the Odyssey because our intellectual capacity is better spent on other endeavors?
• WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
  COVID is known to cause neurological damage including brain damage. I think we're now seeing the collective impact to IQ due to repeated COVID infections.
  • cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    Or maybe, just maybe, closing school for two years had a disastrous impact on kids.
    • capybaraStorm 2y ago
      They closed them then re-opened them in time for one of the biggest waves of asylum/undocumented immigration in recent history, part of which incentivized bringing children (who often need ESL and cultural integration assistance) who then are entitled to attend public schools whether or not the school has been allocated the resources for such influx. Such re-allocation of finite resources to include so many students with extra integrative needs would track well with across the board drops regardless of race. I can't imagine what it is like to be teaching 29 or 30 students and one pops in after crossing the Darien Gap, possibly witnessing people being raped and swept away by the jungle, then having to go on and go straight into learning arithmetic -- and then realize this is happening at mass scale. "What is 5 - 1?" The number of us remaining after we crossed the last stream. Visa based immigration pathways, especially the non family linked ones, tend to display this effect less prominently since professional visas bring in people who on average paying higher property and other taxes and have had the resources to prepare their children for school in the US.
      • skywhopper 2y ago
        While there are certainly specific districts and schools where this is a problem, this effect would not be remotely significant compared to the overall US population. There just aren’t that many new immigrants, regardless of whatever sources you’re reading say.
        • 2y ago
• programjames 2y ago
  Your comment is kind of confusing to me, because I don't understand how you're grouping kids. By school/district/city/county/state?
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    The same way the entire US educational establishment officially groups and tracks students for the purpose of outcome comparison: by self-identified racial classification primarily, and by country of origin for immigrants secondarily. Was it not clear from my original comment, where I talked about white Americans and immigrant students?
    • dgfitz 2y ago
      Nope
    • programjames 2y ago
      That's what I was thinking given it's America, it just makes no sense in relation to the rest of your comment. If you want to know how COVID effected students, the most natural grouping is by school policies with regard to COVID.
    • bugglebeetle 2y ago
      It’s not so much unclear as premised on a number of false distinctions that make it unfalsifiable. For example, at what point and under what conditions does a foreign-born child of Polish immigrants that immigrate to the U.S. become white such that they move from one group to the other? How would you correlate however said group membership requirements correspond to test performance? Why does your curiosity about the relevance of Simpson’s paradox disappear when discussing the category of immigrants, a group with more diverse membership than any of your racial categories, and thus more probable to being prone to its effects?
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  Personally, I suspect there's likely a generational non-COVID caused reduction in child welfare at play, the leading edge of which happened to get hidden by COVID. The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.
  • zxcvbnm69 2y ago
    [dead]
  • rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Would you care to share more about what this means? "moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards" When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district. As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.
    • digdugdirk 2y ago
      1. Non-IEP = Not Special Needs. 2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools. 3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive. 4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar. The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
• xracy 2y ago
  Why would "COVID" only impact the US? It's a global pandemic? If anything the comment would be exclusively about education policies. Because the education policies around COVID would be worse. But also just looking around at my own region of the US, there's a lot of talk about how to lower the school budgets where I live. Which would be lowering on top of inflation's effects Seems like a pretty easy correlation in my head. Aside: Your 2 comments are sounding alarm bells in my head, and I can't pinpoint why. Especially when the numbers seem to demonstrate the exact opposite of what you're describing in your first comment (scores amongst white students seem to shift downward).
  • jdminhbg 2y ago
    > Why would "COVID" only impact the US? It's a global pandemic? Schools in much of the US were closed longer than many of those around the world.
    • idunnoman1222 2y ago
      In California, maybe
      • jdminhbg 2y ago
        CA is a pretty big state, but even still is not the only one with closures that lasted over a year.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I'd want to hear more about this on a global level, but there's many many accounts on how children in schools became more unrily and apathetic in class post COVID. As well as this rising narrative on treating teachers as "babysitters" more than educators. I haven't heard as such in other countries. Doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere, but that may be a cultural issue due to many of the social safety nets that exist in other countries simply not being a thing in the US.
    • defrost 2y ago
• slifin 2y ago
  My hunch is the health crisis Kids are riddled with ADHD auto immune diseases like psoriasis or eczema, obesity, depression I think the skin and mental health conditions are the canary in the coal mine I'm hearing about adults dying to colon cancer all the time, some hit very close to home Peak intellect requires a stable physiological basis