non-school factors and math

from the new blog The Common School, written by an anonymous cog in the D.C ed organization scene:

In general the impact that school-based factors have on reading tests scores is significantly lower than the impact that such factors have on math scores and conversely the impact of non-school factors such as parental education levels is much bigger for reading than for math. Given that parents typically interact with their children more through language than through math, it makes intuitive sense that the parental (and peer etc.) impact on language skills would be larger than their impact on math skills.
A Question of Scale

I've been assuming this was true for some time now, but it's nice to see it confirmed by an anonymous cog.

This phenomenon is clearly true for us.

The ITBS has C. reading at a 12.6 level, which is in the 95th percentile.

At school he's reading books at a 5.1 to 6.5 level.

He's acquiring his reading comprehension at home.

His math is at the 88th percentile, and that's with huge amounts of teaching and reteaching at home. Without our help I assume C. would be much lower. He'd probably have the same kind of Verbal-Math gap our friend D's son ended up with. His SAT-V score was 780 or 790; his math, after massive tutoring, was in the low 600s (iirc).

That's an enormous gap, and it's directly attributable to the constructivist pedagogy of the schools he attended. (Think what that score would have been without the tutor.)

Back to Christopher. The ITBS says he's great on fractions -- and, again, ditto. We've spent lots of time directly teaching fractions at home.

On scales measuring skills we haven't worked on (punctuation, "words with affixes," decimals, etc.) he scores lower.

Looking at C's ITBS report, what I see is very high scores in the areas of "home influence," not so great scores in the areas being handled by the school.

Slide and glide.


non-school factors and math
non-school factors, math, and reading