Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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From this blogger, I like much better his post on the distinction between rationality and IQ,

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/rationality-vs-intellig...

a subject brought to popular attention especially by psychologist Keith R. Stanovich.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...

I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics. Whole countries do MUCH better than the United States in providing good background in science and mathematics to pupils in K-12 education,

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

so much so that the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile level for those countries, or (from another point of view) the United States top quartile level of achievement is only at the median level for those countries. I think United States policy-makers ought to devote a lot more time to thinking about how to learn from those good examples.

Some United States mathematicians have taken care to look at how badly mathematics is taught to elementary pupils in the United States

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf

and have suggested reforms.

http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083

> I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics.

But this is not meaningful without controlling for IQ. What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?

> the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile level for those countries

And this is not meaningful without controlling for ethnicity. Disaggregated results show that Americans of European descent are competitive with Europeans, Americans of Asian descent competitive with East Asians, and so on.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering-the-w...

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2463278

In the last link, yummyfajitas seems to have noted this particular point to you before.

What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?

Ask a question, get an answer. What allows you to achieve subject matter background in science and mathematics is good teaching of those subjects. That's the point of the international educational achievement comparisons. They show, as do studies of high-ability United States students,

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...

http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-l...

that what limits educational achievement (and thus preparation for college studies) of many United States students is not limits in their capacity to learn, but limits in the curriculum they were taught. The United States school system doesn't step up to INCREASE the ability of the national populace the way many other school systems do better.

After edit: If you actually want to learn something serious about ethnicity in its many manifestations around the world, start here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

and keep reading until you've read a dozen or so of those books, to get past the many errors found in most blog posts on the subject.

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