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>I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

Good thing professional educators are almost as observant as you in regard to teaching.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=differentiated+instruction

I really love how HN conceit lets people post about entire industries as if those people just have no clue what they are doing. And not only do people here hold those pompous and generally ignorant positions, but other people support them!

I read cletus's post to suggest that primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S. A lot of it is budgets and politics. No need to infer that cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

I read cletus's post to suggest that primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

That's how I read it too. And that is a finding of international studies of primary mathematics education. The newly industrialized countries of east Asia do much better in primary mathematics education, using textbooks (and teacher professional development to ensure that the textbooks are well applied in the classroom) such that key concepts are presented from multiple points of view, to reach as many learners as possible. The TIMSS test results

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

suggest this is working out well for those countries. A book-length description of how mathematics primary education differs between much of the United States and much of China

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

is an eye-opening read.

> This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

Demonstrably true here in India as well.

True that I can't speak for all of India, or you can't speak for all of US; but I believe I have enough data points for the extrapolation to be valid.

I think that's enough to infer we have a problem, and it's largely ignored.

> cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

I don't think it matters what cletus thinks. Conceited or not, I see his observations mostly hold in the real world.

> primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

I would say that it is demonstrably not true in many EU countries. Maybe "non personalisation" is the tendency of lazy teachers, but I remember pretty well how my math teachers repeated the same subject thrice: the first time describing its core in an abstract way, the second time with concrete examples (apples and pears) and the third time in very little incremental steps. The first explanation was for naturally able math learner, the second for those how needed practical examples and the third for less able pupils. Some of us complained about the fact that it was a boring way to teach (and you know how horrible bored kids can be in the class) but I'd say it was worth it to have all my classmates learning more or less at the same pace with nobody left behind.

Actually, I complain more about the fact that we had to change math teachers so many times because of educational reforms and budget cuts/reorganizations.

Which country do you live in? I don't know about the quality of schools in general here (the Netherlands), but I've met too many people who say they "can't do math" to think very highly of our elementary educational system. Granted, though, this may have more to do with the fact that it's generally acceptable to 'just not able to do math'.

(This is not to say that I think everyone can do math equally well, but I've seen some otherwise intelligent people making such comments that made me want to rip my eyes out.)

I think of it like Sturgeon's Law applied to humans. Most humans just are not very good at most stuff.

Look at the percentage of programmers that are basically not any good at programming all and yet are able to continue being called programmers; if we apply standards of expectation uniformly, then you would expect to see even people in technical fields be able to be useless at math and have everyone basically just shrug and accept it.

Nice idea, but to what extent has it been implemented? Hard to find info on that. And in my own experience, differentiated instruction within the context of traditional mixed-ability, set-pace classroom instruction is still relatively weak.

Further, why be an ass and post a lmgtfy link when the op is clearly not aware of the term to google. You see the contradiction there I'm sure. Next time just post a link to the search results.

First, it's not my job to educate you. Go look it up yourself if you feel like commenting on it.

The fact the original poster fabricated his post out of naked overconfident ignorance is more than enough to warrant a snide reply. His post was not a critique on current educational theory or instruction but based on his experiences as a grade schooler that might be decades out of date, and seen through the eyes of a child.

Chances are your school implemented a similar style of teaching, except your teacher didn't come into a room of 3rd, 5th or 10th graders and say :

"Ok students, I spent 2 weeks this summer on my "vacation" training 8 hours a day and now I will be differentiating my instruction! I sure hope you don't all grow up to be overconfident ignorant asses who can't see beyond the direct and personalized instruction I give each one of you. I hope you realize that I might be explaining these concepts to different students in a way that suits them! Also, I hope you don't make fun of the kids who are in the low classes or need the help of an in class aide.

Now here are three ways to look at multiplication."

Since you've been registered here almost two years, I would hope you'd be aware that snide comments are discouraged here, regardless of context. I have yet to hear why you are more qualified to speak on the topic than anyone else, but I will add my personal experience as a student - I went to some good schools and had some good teachers, but we were rarely introduced to a topic in different ways. For one thing, there simply wasn't time.

The best math course I ever took was geometry. The teacher never lectured - instead, he had written a worksheet of problems for us to do during every class period. Each worksheet would start out asking deceptively simple questions, which built upon other questions or challenges to prove something true. By the end of the worksheet, you had taught yourself a new concept in geometry (or proved a series of fundamental theorems) without really realizing what was happening. If you got stuck, you were encouraged to ask the students next to you, or the teacher himself, who would wander the classroom providing hints and alternate ways of approaching the problem.

There was a textbook, but we only touched it for homework problems (and occasionally as a reference).

I'm not going to defend parfe but I will point out that just because you may not have been offered three different ways of learning a subject doesn't mean the school was only offering one and only one way of teaching it.

The original article is saying based on a simple test you can throw half of the students directly into a 'learn to program' class and the other group into something else (I wish they had explored that a bit more). At no point is the student offered a choice. From their perspective the school only has one track.

Now, your school may indeed have been terrible... but I think the point that parfe was trying to make (ineloquently) is: don't presume that your one experience makes you an expert in the system. You probably weren't even aware of things going on behind your back in your own school, much less all of the other schools in the 'education system'.

This is one of those things like graphic design.. Everyone has an opinion; some people have training. Those who work in the field might come resent those who have opinions without knowing about the training.

Here's the argument that shows that the educators are doing something wrong. I'll break it down into numbered points:

1. If you spend three weeks on only the topic of assignment, any idiot (who has been admitted to university) can master that one concept to the level required to answer this stupid simple question correctly.

2. The fact that the students failed to exhibit mastery of even this one simple point at end the of three weeks means the class moved past this very fundamental concept too quickly.

3. It follows that this study doesn't really address the question of how students would do at programming if this fundamental mental model were taught.

Point 1 is the weakest, as it is justified only by common sense, but I'd put money on it.

> I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

I've found that education, at least K-12, is slowly shifting attitudes from 'Why are students so dumb?' to 'How can we teach this better?' Computer Science is notoriously bad at believing the former over the latter, and papers like this are demonstrations of this.

It would be a lot easier to teach CS to 18 year olds if they had stronger foundations in algebra, logic, and abstractions.

When "teach a bunch of freshmen to program" is your mission statement then it's perfectly understandable to prefer the students with solid fundamentals.

No, it's not. Sorry to be blunt, but it seems colleges want more and more of their students.

Already know how to program and have several jobs under your belt to prove it? Step right in, of course we'll accept you over the schmuck who wasted his high school drawing or playing music.

It angers me that what is primarily an educational institution insists on having their students pre-educated. You'd ideally want your students to have solid fundamentals, yes. But the reality is that most of them don't, and casting away those kids is the easy way out. I listened to a talk by a dean of one of the best technical schools in Turkey, and he said, "we spend your first year erasing all the junk put into your brain in highschool, and re-teach you the fundamentals". I think this is the better way.

That sounds a lot like General Education requirements in college in the US. You can avoid taking many of them if you test well enough, but otherwise they're pretty much bringing everyone up to a highschool level, because some didn't take that class or simply don't remember it well enough.

Stated another way, it's perfectly understandable that a large percentage of incoming undergrad students can't program at all, when their education up to that point has failed to introduce them algebra and higher mathematics, logic, or reducing complexity through abstraction.

You make a number of good points but I want to respond to one thing - the failure of education.

I think it may not be so much a failure of education as so much the economics of education. The use of a single curriculum reduces complexity and administrative overhead (teacher time) which at the professor level is expensive. If the computer science courses were designed to use multiple methods you could indeed better educate a variety of students but at an increased cost.

In my mind the question then is whether or not it is worth the money to educate those that can't succeed with the current teaching method. The entire CS department would need to charge students more per class in order to have more successful students and in order to justify this cost there would need to be a corresponding beneficial pressure for the student to pay those costs (increased demand or higher pay for programmers).

Wouldn't increasing the success rate by 30-60% pay for itself? If that much of the class fails out after the first course, that's tuition lost for the remainder of the courses, is it not?

Not really. STEM professors generally get most of their money through grants, so they don't really care about the tuition that students bring in. Plus, teaching uses up resources (both professor time and grad students) that could be used on research that could bring in more grants.

But the students who flunk out of CS or other STEM fields usually don't go away, they end up in the humanities instead. There, professors aren't getting a lot of money based on their research, and they usually have a surplus of grad students that they need to put to use somehow. And the college gets the same tuition either way.

Possibly, but only if the subsequent classes do not also have the increased staffing costs.

I guess my point is that just because this group learns how to assign variables doesn't mean they'll be able to program recursively, understand how a compiler works, or be able to debug the stack and they will need just as much help in those classes as they did at the onset.

I think you're on to something. When musical students are learning to be accompanists, a very common question is "how do I know what chords to play?" and there's no real answer. There's nothing more than the intuition and taste that evolves after trying many many chords many many times, to different melodies, and it somehow - mysteriously - "clicking" eventually. Eventually you just get to know.

Similarly, when learning to be a Jazz soloist, students are encouraged to practice the great solos from Jazz legends of history over and over, by rote - just keep doing it. Eventually an aptitude develops and the student just gets to reach in and feel for why a particular set of notes might be chosen, or a certain ornament here, a pause there. Somehow, this can then develop into their own particular style and personality too, and evolve beyond mere emulation.

As musicians progress, they begin to develop higher and higher level abstractions for music; being able to use subtle nuance to relate complicated lines of melody, harmony and counterpoint is one example. Another practical example is how musicians over time develop better models for music itself. There's a natural progression; a novice will struggle to play even a familiar melody on their one instrument, an experienced musician will be able to play it with ease on more than one instrument - even if they have never played it before on that instrument, a master musician will be able to transpose the melody into a different key, rework it, add nuance ... and so on. At the beginning the novice can only model the ordered movement of fingers, but the master is modeling relative pitch changes, fluid timings, potential note substitutions and so on.

I find programming to be similar. With a range that goes from being able to type in a hello world program in a procedural language, to higher-orders of thinking required to model concurrent functional systems and have a see that a tiny defmacro might be the best way to re-work a whole piece. There is a progression, and it's intrinsically mysterious how the mental models work, but it's clear that they come with practice.

Through this lens, "Talent" might best be thought of as "An innate willfulness for practicing" rather than some genetically encoded aptitude for the task at hand. There are many communities where musical education is essentially mandatory, and near enough to anybody can become a good musician if they are required to practice. Some militaries arbitrarily assign soldiers to pipe regiments, treat it as a learnable task, and make them get on with it - and it works.

It may be well worth looking at how music is thought, and seeing if there are any dividends for the educating of programming.

"Children don't know any better so can just learn this way."

This sentence made me think. The image of the brilliant programmer who got his start at the age of 12 has always been, in my mind, proof that some people are born with programming talent and some aren't (not to say they can't develop it).

But what if, the only difference is that someone happened to start programming at a young age because he was interested it for some irrelevant reason, and because he was young, he learned it much more easily, in much the same way kids learn languages more easily than adults.

An interesting idea. In the real world, people's ability is probably a factor of both these things.

Good points. To add a few from my own experience:

>I've come around to thinking that Zed Shaw (as just one example) is right about this. With his "Learn X the Hard Way" books he starts out by basically saying "just type this in" (and don't copy and paste). Don't worry what it does. You'll figure that out later.

That's basically the 10,000hr approach - the earlier you start programming, even at Zed's most basic level, the earler you start rewiring your neurons to do it more efficiently and effectively. For the natural born programmers in the article's study, this isn't necessary, but for that whole other group aren't natural born, I do believe something like this is very necessary if any of them hope to become effective programmers. It's not impossible for them, as the study implies, but does require taking into account how the mind works (which we know now thanks to modern neuroscience), how it is malleable, and then designing an instructional course around that understanding.

Additionally, trying to educate the 'goats', the second group, at the same pace as the 'sheep' is going to fail. It simply takes more effort and more time for their minds to adjust, for things to 'click', for their neural pathways to rewire. Especially when that the thing that is getting rewired is their fundamental need to grok meaning amongst the relatively 'meaningless' rules that programming consists of. They're not a lost cause, but trying to educate them with the same curriculum and pace is.

Finally, the programming instruction should, as you imply, be bottom-up exploratory, not top-down memorize-apply-repeat. Part of the problem may also be that people with weaker working memories have a harder time with the academic approach to learning, even project-based ones. One of my favorite pieces of anecdotal evidence for this is from a story Paul Graham linked from 'Beating the Averages' [0].

So, given that it takes significantly more time and effort for the second group, it is all the more imperative that they start earlier, as early in life as possible. As soon as they can read and type, basically.

And in order to increase the amount of time per day that such students can spend practicing programming, it may also be worth delaying math education, or integrating it with programming education. Something's gotta give. No more pen and paper math, or even calculator math, if possible, rather learn how construct and solve math problems in code.

That may sound extreme, but given where the world is going [1], I think nothing should be off the table when it comes to teaching people, even (especially) the 'goats', to code. Even if they go on to non-programmer jobs, the ability to think both abstractly and concretely simultaneously, and the ability to handle meaninglessness, are both supremely valuable, no matter what you endeavor.

0. http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

I completely disagree.

I firmly believe that either you are born with the ability to be a programmer or you're not. That's not saying that it's good or bad, but I believe a lot of it is just how your brain is configured. It's as innate as the ability to shoot baskets, or throw a football, or as innate as gaining energy when interacting with people (extrovert) vs losing energy when interacting with people (introvert).

Case in point: there are some people who are extremely smart, but don't have the ability to visualize things like a map in their head. I know someone who loves cars, has been into cars since he was a teenager, and loves driving. However, for the life of him, he can't read a map. He's not dumb at all, he's very intelligent and excellent with computers. But he has no ability to visualize things in his head and spin them around. So when he's given instructions on where to go, he needs landmarks, ie. "Turn left at the McDonald's and turn right when you get to the 4th traffic light." He can't process "Go north on Main Street, and then head East along Central Ave."

I believe programming is the same way. There's a type of inner mental gymnastics that you need to do in order to program well, because a lot of the things are very cerebral. Some people just can't do it. I'm not saying that they can't be taught how to program to an adequate level, but the fact that it so goes against the mesh of how their thought process works, it just won't be enjoyable to them. They will never be better than adequate.

Of course, most of us here probably can't picture that, so many of you might think I'm wrong. But put it in another perspective. We can all be taught to throw a football perfectly. But does that mean we'll be any good at it? Probably not. If we don't have the physical ability to throw a football more than 10-15 yards (like me), will it be fun for us? Probably not. But if you were a football player, hanging out with a bunch of other football players, you wouldn't understand why everyone can't throw a football more than 40 yards.

The same goes for Sales. I've come to learn from my friends who are salesmen that the sales cycle is largely algorithmic. So it can be taught. But getting out in front of customers every day, chit-chatting, engaging them, etc, is something that many of us simply aren't built to do. It takes a certain personality type to actually enjoy this. And there are plenty of them that do enjoy this and make vast sums of money. But if I were put in that position, I would hate every second, and would likely get fired.

So yes, programming can be taught, but I truly believe that there is an innate mental configuration that determines whether or not you can digest and learn the information and whether you'll be good at it, and more importantly whether or not you'll actually enjoy it.

Comments like this really undermine what it means when someone is good at something, be it coding, throwing a ball, writing, what have you.

It is not a matter of being born with it. It isn't a matter of being smart.

It is all fucking work. It is never being satisfied. Its trying so hard and getting so pissed off that you throw the ball in the dumpster, that you smash your fist into the keyboard and walk away, that you tear up the papers and throw them in trash. But you always come back, because you won't let it beat you. You have to know how it works. You have to know how they do that thing you saw them do. You want to do it like they do. You want to do it better.

So it isn't pixie dust, it isn't innate ability, it isn't being smart. It is all fucking work.

>So it isn't pixie dust, it isn't innate ability, it isn't being smart. It is all fucking work.

No, it isn't. I knew a girl in high school who worked far harder than I ever did, and had far worse grades (particularly in math and science). She literally spent 2-3 hours every day doing homework and studying, while I spent 15-30 minutes. If you talked to her, she seemed perfectly normal, she just had tremendous difficulty with academic work. While hard work is important, natural gifts make a huge difference.

Could it be the reverse?

That is you didn't have a natural gift, she had a problem learning the way everyone else was?

Just because programming for YOU comes naturally doesn't mean it does for others.

You obviously didn't read what I wrote. The point is that people can always learn to be adequate programmers. But if the experience of programming is so different from the way they process information, that the act of programming is mentally uncomfortable for them, then they will never be great. The discomfort has NOTHING to do with hard work. It's like sales. You could spend your whole life being a decent salesperson but if you hate interacting with people you'll never be a great salesperson that closes multi-million dollar deals. It's as simple as that.

If you can't visualize a map, if your spatial abilities aren't strong, then having to interact daily where you need to do that would be frustrating as hell and you would hate it.

It's a huge stretch to assume someone's proficiency in a field is due to a trait they were born with. We don't even know the extent that your environment affects your brain versus your genes, so there's no way you could know people are born programmers.

When I took cs 100 as a freshman in college, I had never programmed before. I was in the "bottom hump." I would have failed that little quiz if I took it my first semester.

Unlike every other discipline, programming is a completely different way of thinking from what we're exposed to in public schooling. It takes time for your brain to change the way it thinks.

It's not impossible to learn; I learned. It just took me more than one semester of being exposed to something for the very first time. The reason for the two humps are people who have been exposed to programming and those who have not; it's why it appears in intro classes but not in the later ones.

I'm curious how this 'born programmer' thing works.

So you are basically saying there is a gene (or sequence of genes) that predisposes you to programming. Could you elaborate on how that might work?

Twin studies have shown a lot about personality being more genetic that was thought before. But I don't know of any brain studies that have linked knowledge/intellectual capacity to genetics... Do you have a reference?

Or is it literally as you say, just a belief? like "I firmly believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster"

There are many components to cognitive ability. For example, there's the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory that has several different abilities:

  Crystallized Intelligence 
  Fluid Intelligence
  Quantitative Reasoning
  Reading & Writing Ability
  Short-Term Memory
  Long-Term Storage and Retrieval
  Visual Processing
  Auditory Processing
  Processing Speed

This was cut and pasted from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell-Horn-Carroll_theory). If you've taken an IQ test, you'll see that they test various types of cognitive abilities, not just math or logic, but also the ability to rotate objects in your head and visualize them.

I know plenty of people who are "smart" who have a very hard time with that. In addition, I know plenty of people who aren't academically smart, but who are great visualizers. There are many different components to cognitive ability. I have a friend and both he and his father are exceedingly intelligent. My friend's son also is also a gifted child. However, when the son took some cognitive tests, his spacial/visualization scores were average, whereas the verbal and math were off the charts. I don't think that affects whether or not the kid is smart, it's just interesting how cognitive ability is broken up into different measurable areas.

Is it so hard to imagine that computer programming takes a certain subset of cognitive ability that some people, who are considered smart, just don't have? I know a lot of very intelligent people who wouldn't be able to program at all. It's not because they're "dumb", but as I've said, but the way they process information is completely different. You most definitely could develop the skills, however, if their brains are wired a certain way that causes them to be predisposed AGAINST programming, then they won't enjoy it very much at all.

So there is a logical jump in your reasoning.

- Some brain visualisation skills are innate

- Programming (probably?) requires some of those traits.

- JUMP

- "either you are born with the ability to be a programmer or you're not."

What you haven't demonstrated (beyond some weak anecdotes), is that those innate skills can't be taught.

Even if you proved that, you'd then have to prove that developing software, will always involve those skills. E.G. programming in the 60s required a different set of skills to programming now (with some overlap).

Abstract thought. Many people have real problems going from "A is X" to "A is a reference pointing to X" or "A is of class X".

Whether that is genetic is unknown to me, but it strikes me as something that coders have to be good at.

In my experience, the people who "get" programming took it up as a kid. If your first program was written in CS 101, then you will not be a good programmer. I've yet to meet anyone who bucks this trend.

I essentially taught myself how to program after graduating from college.

I took two computer-related courses throughout college because they were prerequisites, one being a CS101 using Pascal and another in my junior year doing assembly language on the 68000, which I did poorly in. I actually thought computers were dumb and was planning on going into electronics, but my senior project ended up being about assembly language programming on a DSP chip, and despite not knowing what I was doing, I actually enjoyed it. So that, coupled with the fact that programming jobs were easier to find than hardware, I spend 2-3 months after college teaching myself how to program, and I've been making my career out of it ever since.

Could you elaborate on why you would think this? Because it seems a bit hard to believe. I mean, the oldest students in your average CS 101 class will be, what, 22? Maybe older if they're non-traditional? The human brain's frontal lobe isn't even completely myelinated at 22. I'm not saying they have the same potential as someone who started at 10, but you make it seem like there's no hope for anyone who didn't start when they were 10.

My comment was perhaps a bit harsh and poorly worded, but I do generally stand by it. The article itself is rather harsh as well, it flat out says "there are those who can program, and those who cannot". In my experience, the people who "can" program, almost always discover it on their own through their own curiosity.

For sure, someone may not discover programming until later in life and my anecdotal evidence can't possibly be all encompassing. But I do find if they haven't discovered programming on their own before taking their first CS course, that is very often a sign that they fall into the "cannot program" category that the article puts forward.

EDIT: even the fourth comment on Jeff's blog basically says what I said: "When I was in college, I remember the students in my classes who had trouble were ones who were entirely new to programming. The rest of us had either been in programming classes previously or had been coding for fun since we were kids."