gut feelings

My copy of Gerd Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings arrived yesterday, and today I've found an interview with Gigerenzer in the TIMES science section.

Interesting passage on school quality:

In the 1990s, I was living in Chicago, where there are high dropout rates from the high schools. People often asked, “Is there a way to know which school has the lowest dropout rate?” There existed data measuring different cues of school performance: the pay of teachers, the number of English-speaking students in a class, things like that.

I wondered: could one feed these into a computer, analyze them and obtain a prediction on which high school produced the fewest dropouts? We did that. And we were astonished to find that computer-based versions of Franklin’s bookkeeping method — a program that weighed 18 different cues — proved less accurate than going with the rule of thumb of “get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information.”

Q: What was the “one good reason” that got you the right answer?

A: Knowing which school had high daily attendance rates. If two schools had the same attendance levels, you needed one more cue — good writing scores — and then you could ignore the rest.

Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility
by Claudia Dreifus

Interesting.

Writing instruction is probably the single most labor-intensive form of teaching, so..... high writing scores as a measure of school quality may in fact be a measure of teacher (and student?) effort.

Our high school apparently has fantastically high attendance rates, which the principal once offered as evidence that they were doing something right. I remember thinking that made sense.

Low writing scores, though. At least, the scores on the first year of the SAT writing section looked low to me. Ineffective writing instruction has been a perennial parent complaint.

I suspect that with the loss of the middle school math chair and the adoption of Trailblazers we'll see math scores decline, too, unless parents and students can find a way to make up lost ground in high school. I don't know much about the math teachers there, but the word on them ranges from "pretty good" to "very good." Still, I don't see how a high school teacher, no matter how good she is, is going to teach fractions, decimals, percents, and algebra 1, algebra 2, & geometry.