The racial performance gap explained | Hacker News Reader

The racial performance gap explained

method.ac

84 pointsduopixel33 comments

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.

Treisman's publication in College Mathematics Journal (linked in the submitted article):

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.

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.

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.

Probably mostly the Hawthorne effect; making "any" change tends to lead to temporary improvements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Lots of these team sports require development leagues. And then decades of improvement.

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.

I've seen people who were better at written communication in English than verbal communication. It was easier to both understand them and have them understand me.

I think everyone would be at the same disadvantage, regardless of English competency, when it comes to 19th century English poetry. ;-)

As a self-taught English reader (recently listener and rarely speaker) I should note that understanding sound and rhythm of English poetry taught me so much.

I was able to semi-decently communicate technical things before I come to Shakespeare's "To be or not to be". It completely changed my view on English language. Before that I was reading English prose as a deformed version of Deutsch (language I learned at school). What worked for technical prose stopped working for verses. I had to dig deeper.

From my experience I think that someone who barely speaks foreign language cannot have an adequate opinion on that language verses.

And I think that GP is right about cheating.

The testing would have caught anyone who didn't know the material. Yes, they learned as a group and corrected each others homework, but they also put in lots of individual hours.

I knew several Asian students who did this, even in the engineering department it was rampant.

When I was in college I do recall there being a stigma associated with "studying too much" among Black students. It wasn't that they didn't study, but too much time talking about academics was frowned upon -- and it was very non-competitive. With my Asian friends it was quite the opposite. Not only was it common to spend a lot of time in study groups, there was a fair bit of grade competition. It was friendly competition (at least from the exterior), but there was definitely a level of grade competition that I didn't see among Blacks (or Whites for that matter).

I think its great to point out these studies. Make them part of the HS curricula to learn about them. But at the end of the day I think each of us needs to make our own decision about our path forward.

Myself, I was a pretty good student. And I partied some, but looking back a little more partying probably wouldn't have killed me.

In Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey, he recorded an exchange with a black student (p.223):

"I just don't understand it, Dr, Sowell," he said. "The Jewish students do twice as well as we do."

"Only twice as well?" I said. "When they work three times as hard? What I can't understand is how you fellows do as well as you do, with no more effort than you put into it."

Earlier in the book, he talks about how he nearly flunked out of Harvard during his first semester there because he was working like he had at Howard and it wasn't enough. (pp.118-9)

I wonder what it was about the culture they came from that encouraged that.

Unfortunately I think that the weakness in Western culture here is the same as its fundamental strength -- anti-authoritarianism. For white students (and to an even greater extent black students), it's not cool to study hard because that's what authority figures like teachers and parents want you to do.

I'm not sure what can be done about this. I doubt it would work just for teachers and parents to pretend they don't want the kids to work hard in the hope that they will.

Part of the solution, I think, is to provide pointless and arbitrarily rules for the kids to rebel against harmlessly. At my school, the teachers were very keen on making sure we had our shirts tucked in, and I never understood why, but now I understand that these sorts of pointless rules provide an opportunity for kids to rebel against something without actually engaging in any destructive or dangerous behaviour.

I wonder what it was about the culture they came from that encouraged that.

I wonder if all foreign students struggling with English exhibit the same behaviour. I say this because such students would find it hard to fit in and participate in other campus activities. They would probably be concentrating on their studies.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great read. Thanks for posting.

I concur. Fantastic post! I encourage everyone to read the pdf of the published work which is linked on the page.

Still can't figure out why people downvote me for liking a story.

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

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

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