Competing Memory Issue

Six months into this SAT project, and I've repeatedly experienced that learning something new only sticks, until I learn something else new. Very frustrating.

Reminds me of my daughter who tells me that it's very hard for her to get good grades in every subject at the same time. (I get it now, deeply.)

There's a new study from Beth Israel researchers about this competing memory issue:

For the last 100 years, it has been appreciated that trying to learn facts and skills in quick succession can be a frustrating exercise,” explains Edwin Robertson, MD, DPhil, an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and BIDMC. “Because no sooner has a new memory been acquired than its retention is jeopardized by learning another fact or skill.

....and a possible new solution:

TMS is a noninvasive technique that uses a magnetic simulator to generate a magnetic field that can create a flow of current in the brain......They discovered that by applying TMS to specific brain areas, they were able to reduce the interference and competition between the motor skill and word-list tasks and both memories remained intact.

On a related note, I have started working with a Cognitive Psychologist on my working memory. Yesterday's appointment: IQ test.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project)

Practice Makes Perfect (But only Briefly)

Sustained practice makes the kind of perfect I'm looking for.

More inspiration from Daniel Willingham:

When we refer to "practice," it is important to be clear that it differs from play (which is done purely for one's own pleasure), performance (which is done for the pleasure of others), and work (which is done for compensation). Practice is done for the sake of improvement. Practice, therefore, requires concentration and requires feedback about whether or not progress is being made. Plainly put, practice is not easy. It requires a student's time and effort, and it is, therefore, worth considering when it is appropriate.

(cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

Throwing Curves: New Posts

While Catherine is away, check out new posts at Throwing Curves.

gone fishing

I'm in Chicago 'til next Wednesday - see you then!

Rich Beveridge on pre-calculus

Rich Beveridge writes:

I suppose that my experience with Pre-Calculus curriculum began in Steve Patterson’s Pre-Calculus class at Briarcliff High School in the 1981-82 school year. Pre-Calculus always stuck out in my mind because it was the only math course that was completely locally developed. Algebra I, II, and Geometry all had Regents exams and the Calculus course was AP Calculus.

I remember studying Conic Sections, Polynomial Long Division and Synthetic Division, the Rational Roots Theorem (and its proof), elementary Discrete Math (permutations, combinations and binomial probability), Polar Coordinate graphing and hand calculating Riemann Sums at the end of the year. I took the College Board Math Achievement Test II (now the SAT Subject Test Math II) after completing the Pre-Calculus course so I recently looked at some current sample questions and saw these same topics – Analytic Geometry, Permutations & Combinations, Synthetic Division, Functions, Sequences & Series.

During the 1999-2000 school year, I taught Pre-Calculus at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield, Maine. The school was using the Chicago Series text Functions, Statistics and Trigonometry for their Pre-Calculus course. I know that some teachers like the Chicago Series and FST in particular, but I didn’t really get much use out of the textbook, and began to supplement. Standard textbooks can be supplemented quite easily because the order and difficulty level of the topics is often similar. I found that the Chicago Series was very difficult to supplement and just began to create separate materials for the students. I collected these assignments in a binder and showed this to the University of Maine math department when I was interviewing for an adjunct position the following year (yeah - I didn’t stay at MCI very long – they were sticklers for using the approved textbook). I taught as an adjunct at UMaine for two years before beginning their MA program in Math.

I'm hoping Rich will write more posts for us.

summer reruns

I just came across this old post by Ken DeRosa!

Apropos in this summer of SAT math prep.

Maybe PWN will tell us what level of difficulty this problem would be rated on the SAT. I'm thinking 3 or possibly 4, and it would be a 4 only because a lot of students haven't taken algebra 2.

Lewis M. Andrews on why suburban schools don't change

How is it that intelligent and motivated parents, many sacrificing financially to afford homes in the most expensive suburbs, end up as uncritical supporters of a public school system...?

IN THEIR HEARTS, says University of Missouri political science professor J. Martin Rochester, many suburban parents know something is wrong. When he interviewed 250 executives of leading corporations for his book on suburban education (Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on Excellence), most believed their local schools suffered from programs that are "diluted, distracted, and diffused from the basic mission of education."

The problem, he concluded, is that over decades suburban schools have developed effective techniques for promoting ideas that support the convenience of teachers and administrators, while excluding information and research that would require a change in policies, practices, and personnel.

It starts at the top with boards of education composed largely of busy volunteers, who over-rely on the guidance of superintendents, and goes all the way down to the interactions between teachers and individual parents. When suburbanites join school curriculum committees, for example, they are rarely presented with all sides of an issue and seldom informed of all the relevant research. Critical parents, Professor Rochester found, "end up being demonized as right-wingers or troublemakers."

Other writers who have studied the academic deficiencies of suburban schools reach a similar conclusion. When EducationNews.org columnist Barry Garelick examined the inability of three Maryland districts to successfully incorporate a superior math curriculum from Singapore, he found that teachers skillfully used vague technical jargon and inflexible rules to discredit aspects of the program that required them to learn new skills.

As suggested by the title of his book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, Stanford professor emeritus Larry Cuban finds suburban educators eager to spend public money on the latest technology to create a "leading edge" aura, yet rarely willing to take advantage of its academic potential. "Curricula, teaching methods, and schedules [could] all be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students," says Cuban, and "coursework from the most remedial to the most advanced can be made available to everyone...(but educators take) action to prevent technology from transforming American education."

Dr. Armand Fusco, a retired Branford, Connecticut school superintendent who has written and lectured widely on the deficiencies of suburban districts, sees similar problems: "It's one thing for parents to intuit a problem, quite another to do anything about it when educators with advanced degrees flash their credentials and have glib answers for every question."

Superintendents, for example, will always brag that their local public school students perform just as well on state mastery tests as students in neighboring affluent suburbs. What they neglect to mention is that any mediocre suburban school will appear successful, just so long as it is surrounded by other mediocre suburban schools and their average test scores are higher than those of nearby urban districts.

Dr. Fusco believes that the federal No Child Left Behind law had it right when it sought to measure the performance of individual schools, but it was aimed at demographic groups least able to do anything about the results. "What's needed is data that makes it clear to suburbanites just how badly served their own children really are."
Meet the Suburban Parents

Lewis M. Andrews on suburban schools and tutors

One telling indicator of the low quality of suburban schools is the rise of tutoring. In 2008, PBS's Nightly Business Report estimated professional tutoring to be a $4 billion industry that year, concentrated in the suburbs, with a 10 percent estimated annual growth rate.

Even this figure does not take into account either the common off-the-books arrangements with moonlighting teachers or burgeoning Internet options. With small online providers like Colorado-based e-Tutor seeing revenue jump from $180,000 in 2009 to a quarter million in 2010 despite the recession, the Kaplan online university division of the Washington Post has launched its own reading and math programs for elementary and middle school students.
Meet the Suburban Parents

Mike Petrilli on suburban parents

When I think about my aspirations for my boys (ages 3 and 1), I take as a given that they will do fine academically. Maybe that’s naive, but I just assume that they will end up going to a good college, find interesting work, and so forth. What I want for them is to enjoy the ride along the way: Make close friends, have plenty of time for play, learn to be part of a team (athletic or otherwise), tap into their artistic nature, spend as much time outdoors as possible. These inclinations led my wife and I to pick a Waldorf preschool for their early years. We’re not sure we’ll stick with such an “alternative” approach over the long term. But I surely don’t want my boys anywhere near a “testing factory.”

[snip]

But with a degree of affluence comes a degree of luxury. Confident that their kids will do OK academically and vocationally, I bet that many upper-middle class parents want to reach for something more: Emotional health, spiritual fulfillment, a sense of social responsibility. And thus the frills that Lewis derides (like all manner of extra-curricular activities) become quite important. And as for the test scores–well, who cares if they are really, really high or just really high?

Understanding upper-middle-class parents

Good enough is good enough.

Mike Petrilli is an Executive Editor of Education Next and an Executive Vice President of the Fordham Foundation.

and see:
decline at the top
nominally high-performing schools

school board member responds to Petrilli

Mike Rose writing at Flypaper:

...it sorta sounds like you’re making a “schools are academically good enough” argument.

I’m a former school board member from an affluent district. We spent – and continue to spend – lavishly on millon dollar artificial turf football fields, band, pottery kilns, and so on. Students take cultural trips to musical events, museums, and plays. The 23 buildings are fairly new, energy efficient, and freshly painted and carpeted. The district spends approximately $1000 per participant on athletics. Overall the kids and parents seem satisfied.

But we have no gifted and talented program. Our AP participation is below other socio-economically similar districts. ACT scores are in the 98th percentile for Michigan public schools, but are not particularly impressive when compared to non-publics, or the International Academy (a public consortium), whose students have similar socio-economic status. The ACT scores of Michigan schools overall are not particularly impressive (I know… an entirely different debate!).

They do very little scholarship counseling.

Our graduates get accepted into good universities, and do get scholarships. However, anecdotally, parents (and graduates) talk of needing to take remedial classes once they get to college. Some bomb out and drop out, heading back to community college for a year or two. It’s anecdotal because the district makes no effort to obtain or analyze matriculation reports.

And the scholarships earned in the district pale by comparison to non-publics and neighboring “high performing” districts.

By the yardstick you’ve offered… I too should be happy because I’m sure my kids will get into a good college, and be in a culturally rich environment, and have friends. But will it be their “first choice” college? What sort of scholarship opportunities will be available to them, and more significantly, what opportunities will NOT be available to them in this competitive world? Will they need to take that now infamous fifth year of college because they weren’t quite ready?

Did they have to take that entry level science class that could’ve been skipped had the school encouraged them to take an AP exam? Did they miss out on the FREE college credit they might’ve earned had the school encouraged them to take that AP exam?

Oftentimes parents don’t realize that their children have lost or diminished opportunities until it’s too late… the child has the diploma, and they find themselves challenged by obstacles that were created years ago by the school.

And how would parents know they’re not getting all they can get? Our district has a full time PR person to toot the horn. “Your kids are getting a top-notch education… just ask us and we’ll tell you!” As you are well aware, education is a complicated topic, and most parents don’t have the time or resources to investigate or challenge school assertions.

help desk - fiscal multiplier

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary taxation. The posterior yields modestly positive short-run multipliers around 0.52 and modestly negative long-run multipliers around -0.42. The multiplier is sensitive to the fraction of transfers given to credit-constrained households, the duration of the zero lower bound and the capital. The stimulus results in negative welfare effects for unconstrained agents. The constrained agents gain, if they discount the future substantially.
Fiscal Stimulus and Distortionary Taxation
Thorsten Drautzburg, Harald Uhlig
NBER Working Paper No. 17111
Issued in June 2011
NBER Program(s): EFG

I'm confused about the concept of the fiscal multiplier.

I've read explanations characterizing the multiplier as a simple multiple: if the multiplier is 1.5 and the government spends $1 million, then the net spending beyond that $1 million is $500,000.

1.5 x 1,000,000 = 1,500,000

But that's not right, is it?

What does a multiplier of .52 actually mean in terms of what the public spends beyond the amount the government spent?

highly selective colleges redux

[O]btaining unbiased estimates of the return to college quality is difficult due to unobserved characteristics that affect both a student’s attendance at a highly selective college and their later earnings. In particular, the same characteristics (such as ambition) that lead students to apply to highly selective colleges may also be rewarded in the labor market. Likewise, the attributes that admissions officers are looking for when selecting students for college may be similar to the attributes that employers are seeking when hiring and promoting workers.

Early research attempted to overcome this omitted-variable bias by controlling for observed student characteristics, such as high school grades, standardized test scores, and parental background (see, for example, Monks 2000 and Brewer and Ehrenberg 1996). More recent research has tried to overcome the bias created by unobserved variables through a variety of techniques. Hoekstra (2009) uses a regression discontinuity design that compares the earnings of students who were just above the admissions cutoff for a state university to those that were just below it. He finds that attending the flagship state university results in 20 percent higher earnings five to ten years after graduation for white men, but he does not find an effect on earnings for white women.
Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data
Stacy Dale, Alan B. Krueger
NBER Working Paper No. 17159
Issued in June 2011

I'm not sure how Dale and Krueger interpret the finding of 20% higher earnings five to ten years after graduation in (white male) students who just made the cut-off versus students who just missed it.

I assume they would expect to find that the students who made the cut-off applied to a more selective group of colleges than the students who just missed the cut-off, but I don't know.

highly selective colleges and lifetime earnings

following up on Who gains from attending a highly selective college? :

...[T]he average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended...

Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data
Stacy Dale, Alan B. Krueger
NBER Working Paper No. 17159
Issued in June 2011

Assuming I'm following the argument, Dale and Krueger are saying that when you account for unmeasured factors such as a student's level of ambition, the selectivity of a school has no effect on the earnings of white children raised by educated parents. In other words, more ambitious students file more ambitious applications; they apply to more highly selective schools than do students who are less ambitious. Same SAT scores, different set of college applications.

I think.

I can email a copy of the article to anyone who'd like to read.

also from the paper:

The high selectivity of the colleges within the C&B [College and Beyond Survey] database make it particularly well-suited for this analysis, because the majority of students that attend selective colleges submit multiple applications, which is necessary for our identification strategy. In contrast, many students who attend less selective colleges submit only one application, because many less selective colleges accept all students who apply. For example, according to data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, only 46 percent of students who attended college applied to more than one school.

and:

Nearly two-thirds of the 1976 cohort and 71 percent of the 1989 cohort submitted at least one additional application (in addition to the school they attended). For both cohorts, of those students submitting at least one additional application, over half applied to a school with a higher average SAT score than that of the college they attended, and nearly 90 percent of students were accepted to at least one additional school. Of those accepted to more than one school, about 35 percent were accepted to a more selective school than the one they ended up attending. The data for black and Hispanic students (shown in columns 2 and 4) are similar, though blacks and Hispanics were somewhat more likely than students in the full sample to be accepted to at least one additional school, and to be accepted to a more selective school than the one they attended.

who gains from attending a highly selective college?

Is the Ivy League Worth It?
July 1, 2011, 12:13 PM ET
Christopher Shea | WSJ

Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data (pdf file)
Stacy Dale, Alan B. Krueger
NBER Working Paper No. 17159
Issued in June 2011

from the abstract:

We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero.

Not having read the paper, I don't understand how controlling for average SAT score of the colleges students applied to, as opposed to simply controlling for SAT scores of the students, makes a difference.

I'm going to download and take a look.

off-topic - vegetables make you thin

Seriously.

They do.

Vegetables make you thin.

I'm starting to see fruits and vegetables (and legumes) the way people used to see diet pills back when it was legal for housewives to take amphetamines to lose weight: eat your vegetables, fruits, and beans, and you can eat anything else you want and still stay thin.

The reason you can eat anything else you want and still stay thin is that you don't want to eat as much as you do when you're not eating beaucoup fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Fruits, vegetables, and legumes are natural appetite suppressants.^*

Here's more evidence:

[R]esearchers from Penn State gave 20 men and 21 women casseroles made with varying amounts of purée — a strategy popularized by the cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld, who has encouraged parents to sneak vegetables into foods like spaghetti.

But in the Penn State study, the goal wasn’t to trick people into eating vegetables. Adding the purée bulked up the dish and resulted in fewer calories per serving. (You can see two of the recipes developed by the researchers here.)

In a macaroni and cheese recipe from the researchers, for instance, the cheese sauce is made with skim milk, reduced-fat cheese and one cup each of puréed cauliflower and puréed summer squash.

The diners were fed the casseroles during different visits. They ate pretty much the same amount of food during each visit and reported no differences in flavor or enjoyment. But when they were served the casseroles made with puréed vegetables, they ate 200 to 350 fewer calories a meal.

“We’ve been able to change recipes a lot, even baked goods, and we’ve been doing it for preschool kids and adults,” said Barbara Rolls, director of Penn State’s laboratory for the study of human ingestive behavior. “We had a huge effect on energy intake. We’re adding cups of veggies to recipes and people don’t even notice.”

Other research by Dr. Rolls, author of the popular diet series Volumetrics has shown that eating soup or salads before a meal can also curb the appetite and result in eating fewer calories over all.

But the stealth-vegetable approach allows diners to eat the same amount of favorite foods without ingesting as many calories.

[snip]

“We offered a Tex-Mex casserole, and we could get away with adding the vegetables much more easily,” she said. “Once you put in those spicy flavors, they mask other changes in calorie density and vegetable content. The people were totally unaware we were adding lots and lots of veggies.”

While the best option is to purée vegetables and add them to home-cooked meals, Dr. Rolls said she hoped the food industry would respond by offering more convenient canned and frozen vegetable purées and more foods bulked up with vegetables
Adding Food and Subtracting Calories
by Tara Parker-Pope
May 2, 2011, 5:03 pm

my rules:
animal fat makes you eat more
plant foods make you eat less



The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals
by Missy Chase Lapine

^* I'm not sure plant foods are natural appetite suppressants; it's a 'working hypothesis.' I'm 99% certain palmitic acid makes you eat more.

Richard I and Orange Math on Jeanette, or Jeannette, as the case may be

Richard I says:

My eyes were attracted to the fact that her name is spelt in two different ways. Maybe all this innnvennnntinnnng is goinnnnng to her head?

Of course maybe the n-gon to her head instead?

And here's Orange Math:

I guess I'll cite Jeanette whenever I use that formula. The rule really helps. I tried using a protractor.

Steve H has some questions, too.

Errors on Report Card?

We just got my son's report card and there are numbers on it that don't match up. Our high school uses i-Parent so that parents can get immediate feedback. I like it. We can see and validate all of the homework and test scores. I see no errors in those numbers, and grades are calculated to many decimal digits. However, there seems to be some sort of problem translating those numbers into whatever computer system our high school uses for reporting grades. Interestingly, his final course grades look correct, but some are mathematically incompatible with the quarter grades on his report card, and they don't match i-Parent. Of course, the final grades are rounded off so there is a limit to what correct means. I-Parent just records the grades for each quarter. It does not include the midterm and final tests or try to calculate a semester or yearly final grade. However, the formula for semester grades is simple; 40% for each quarter and 20% for the midterm or final. Semester 1 and 2 grades are averaged to get the final grade for the course.

Have others run into grading calculation or reporting issues? I'm paranoid now because I see numbers that don't match or add up. Final grades are rounded so I can't check to see if they agree with my calculations, and the class rank is based on a weighting scheme that might use rounded grades rather than the the real numbers. They did not include a weighted rank number on the report card, so I couldn't check that. I sent off an email to the guidance department, but I don't know if anyone is there during the summer.

Students will make and investigate mathematical conjectures

from New York state Education Department Geometry standards (pdf standards):

Now that Jeanette has finished inventing the rule to find the measure of an angle in a regular n-gon, maybe she'll have time to invent the wheel.

help desk - variables and expressions

from Glencoe Algebra 1 Skills Practice (pdf file):

the difference of 17 and 5 times a number

How do you write this?

17 - 5n

I don't think I've seen a number problem worded that way.

do students learn to read from beginning to end?

from the math and reading thread, EM reports:

I have in fact encountered quite a few SAT students who quite literally don't understand what it is that they're reading.

It has nothing to do with them not producing a particular answer that a teacher has arbitrarily deemed "correct" but rather is a result of their inability to unpack complex syntax, infer meanings that aren't literally spelled out for them, and, astonishingly (at least I was astonished the first time it happened - now I've been desensitized), to read an entire sentence from beginning to end, paying attention to every word, rather than "skimming" it in such a way that they only pick up random words that bear no apparent relationship to one another. If asked to summarize the gist of a reading in their own words, they're often completely lost.

Did I mention that some of these kids have attended elite Manhattan private schools since kindergarten?

At least from what I've seen, the problem isn't as bad as most people think. It's actually a lot worse.

I assume some of the problem can be attributed to balanced literacy reading instruction, which teaches students to move their eyes around the text as they seek clues to help them decipher unknown words. But I don't know, of course.

Thoughts?

Must get palisadesk on the case---!

Here is Arthur Whimbey making the same observation.

'the most important fact about IQ'

Garret Jones slides (pdf file) 
National IQ and National Productivity:
The Hive Mind Across Asia (pdf file)
Garett Jones
Center for Study of Public Choice
Department of Economics
George Mason University
January 2011
[Published in Asian Development Review, June 2011]

sitters

Susan Cain's op-ed in today's Times reminds me of Katharine's book:

But shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that prizes extroversion. Children’s classroom desks are now often arranged in pods, because group participation supposedly leads to better learning; in one school I visited, a sign announcing “Rules for Group Work” included, “You can’t ask a teacher for help unless everyone in your group has the same question.” Many adults work for organizations that now assign work in teams, in offices without walls, for supervisors who value “people skills” above all. As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. Studies show that we rank fast and frequent talkers as more competent, likable and even smarter than slow ones. As the psychologists William Hart and Dolores Albarracin point out, phrases like “get active,” “get moving,” “do something” and similar calls to action surface repeatedly in recent books.

Yet shy and introverted people have been part of our species for a very long time, often in leadership positions. We find them in the Bible (“Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?" asked Moses, whom the Book of Numbers describes as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.”) We find them in recent history, in figures like Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust and Albert Einstein, and, in contemporary times: think of Google’s Larry Page, or Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling.

In the science journalist Winifred Gallagher’s words: “The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor ‘Paradise Lost’ was dashed off by a party animal.”

We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20 percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the sidelines (sometimes called “sitters”) while the other 80 percent are “rovers” who sally forth without paying much attention to their surroundings. Sitters and rovers favor different survival strategies, which could be summed up as the sitter’s “Look before you leap” versus the rover’s inclination to “Just do it!” Each strategy reaps different rewards.

IN an illustrative experiment, David Sloan Wilson, a Binghamton evolutionary biologist, dropped metal traps into a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The “rover” fish couldn’t help but investigate — and were immediately caught. But the “sitter” fish stayed back, making it impossible for Professor Wilson to capture them.

[snip]

Next, Professor Wilson used fishing nets to catch both types of fish; when he carried them back to his lab, he noted that the rovers quickly acclimated to their new environment and started eating a full five days earlier than their sitter brethren. In this situation, the rovers were the likely survivors. “There is no single best ... [animal] personality,” Professor Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.”

[snip]

...sitter children are careful and astute, and tend to learn by observing instead of by acting. They notice scary things more than other children do, but they also notice more things in general. Studies dating all the way back to the 1960’s by the psychologists Jerome Kagan and Ellen Siegelman found that cautious, solitary children playing matching games spent more time considering all the alternatives than impulsive children did, actually using more eye movements to make decisions. Recent studies by a group of scientists at Stony Brook University and at Chinese universities using functional M.R.I. technology echoed this research, finding that adults with sitter-like temperaments looked longer at pairs of photos with subtle differences and showed more activity in brain regions that make associations between the photos and other stored information in the brain.
Once they reach school age, many sitter children use such traits to great effect. Introverts, who tend to digest information thoroughly, stay on task, and work accurately, earn disproportionate numbers of National Merit Scholarship finalist positions and Phi Beta Kappa keys, according to the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, a research arm for the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator — even though their I.Q. scores are no higher than those of extroverts. Another study, by the psychologists Eric Rolfhus and Philip Ackerman, tested 141 college students’ knowledge of 20 different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that the introverts knew more than the extroverts about 19 subjects — presumably, the researchers concluded, because the more time people spend socializing, the less time they have for learning.

THE psychologist Gregory Feist found that many of the most creative people in a range of fields are introverts who are comfortable working in solitary conditions in which they can focus attention inward. Steve Wozniak, the engineer who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is a prime example: Mr. Wozniak describes his creative process as an exercise in solitude. “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me,” he writes in “iWoz,” his autobiography. “They’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone ... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?
By SUSAN CAIN
Published: June 25, 2011

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking




Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School

Susan Cain's blog

Bonnie on college student reading skills

from the Headsprouts thread:

Reading comprehension is a huge problem for my college students. The introductory CS textbooks are written using vocabulary and a sentence complexity that is way beyond them. I wish I had a better sense of their actual reading skills so I could do some vocabulary work with them. The gasstationwithoupumps blog has posted links to some excellent material on teaching students how to read technical material that I think I may use next semester.

"people love pizza"

Math lovers of the world unite

Envision or Math in Focus?

query from Peter Meyer

Any thoughts?

Newhart

Headsprouts reading comprehension program

abstract:
Teaching learners how to comprehend text remains a largely unsuccessful attempt in our school system. Drawing from the fields of learning sciences, education, instructional design, and performance improvement, we designed, tested, revised, and released to schools and homes an interactive online program that reliably teaches flexible, widely applicable reading comprehension strategies to children. This article describes the analysis and design processes involved in the development of such a program.
Comprehension by Design: Teaching Young Learners How to Comprehend What They Read (pdf file)
Marta Leon, PhD; Victoria Ford Hirofumi Shimizu, PhD; April Heimlich Stretz Jay Thompson Melinda Sota; Janet S. Twyman, PhD T. V. Joe Layng, PhD

Reading this tonight!

More Connected Math Woes, This Time in Pennsylvania

The Riverview School District enrolls about 1,100 k-12 students in Oakmont and Verona Boroughs, Pennsylvania.

From an online news blog, the Plum-Oakmont Patch

The Riverview School Board meeting on Monday had the largest attendance in years, according to school board members. Parents filled the high school library, and in a citizen comment session that lasted two hours, they discussed their concerns about the middle school Connected Mathematics 2 program.

The parents had a lot of familiar things to say:

Among the parents' concerns were the group work involved, the participation aspect of the class, the frequency of testing and the combination of students at different math levels in the same classroom.

Parent Joseph Knapp said his son struggled in the class because of the way it was structured.

"I, unfortunately, found the Connected Math program to be an unorthodox way of teaching students," he said. "It seemed like the students taught themselves, in theory.

"They have groups where they figure out problems and are encouraged to come up with the ideas on their own. I thought that was ridiculous. In sixth and seventh grades, you need instruction."

Parent Tim Lazor said his son usually did very well in math class until he took the class this year. Lazor said he doesn't think the program has the support of the students or the teachers who are teaching it.

"I don't think the teachers bought into this," he said. "That's a critical component.

Eight years to find a new curriculum?

Superintendent Charles Erdeljac said district officials had been looking for a way to improve the math curriculum for about eight years. He said to participate in the Math and Science Partnership of Southwest Pennsylvania, the district would have to implement Connected Math 2 or MathScape—the only two programs with the National Science Foundation's "stamp of approval."

Scores declined?

When asked by parents about Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Scores, principal Jay Moser said the scores of last school year's seventh graders dropped by 9 percent, according to primary figures from the state department of education.

Hmmn I guess math is different in small-town Pennsylvania.

Erdeljac said district officials are going to continue to monitor the program and data associated with it to ensure it is a good fit for students.

"On the one hand, we have to have fidelity to the program as it's intended to be taught, but on the other hand, we're Riverview," he said. "We need to find out how this program can be most successful here at Riverview…we're still in the process of making this program Riverview's Connected Math program."

gaps

From the reading and math, math and reading comments thread:

Erica writes:

You can tell C. that I beat him: 220 point gap between CR and math (800/580), and I actually knew a couple of people with even larger gaps (800/560, 800/490!).

Independent George wrote:

I scored a 420 on my Writing achievement test (waaaay back in 1994). I had a 720 on the SAT-Verbal, and a 5 on the AP English test, but I scored 420 on the writing test.

C. has a friend who got an 800 on reading and a 550 on math.

He's still only at 670 on writing, which is equally ridiculous! (Ridiculous because he's losing his points on the grammar section.) Erica's going to shape him up.

reading and math, math and reading

via Marginal Revolution:

To an economist, the most important fact to know about mental abilities is that across large populations, different mental abilities are positively correlated.1 In other words, people who are above average in arithmetic tend to perform above average in vocabulary tests, block puzzles, as well as in memorizing lists of numbers and then repeating them in reverse order. This positive correlation conflicts with the commonsense view that abilities are negatively correlated, that for instance while some people are good in math, others are good in verbal tasks.

This positive correlation is at the heart of the psychological concept of intelligence. Quantitatively, it is at the heart of psychometric methods that extract a principal component from a broad variety of mental ability subtests. This principal component is formally called g, or the g factor. Lay persons, and most routine psychological research, refer to IQ instead of g, but it is worth keeping the concept of g in mind. Across thousands of studies on the correlation across mental abilities across populations, no one has yet found a reliable negative correlation.

This fact should strengthen our priors when we come across new mental tasks and we ask ourselves, “Will high IQ groups be better than average at this new mental task?” For every mental task so far that involves any level of sophistication, the answer has been yes.
National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia
Garett Jones
January 2011
[Published in Asian Development Review, June 2011]

Serendipity!

Since last Thursday, I've been trying to explain to C. that a 190-point gap between your reading score & your math score is ridiculous. Ridiculous because a 190-point gap between a reading score & a math score is not consistent with the way a person's brain is built. On IQ tests, everything goes with everything; if you're good on one task, you're good on another.

C's math scores, I keep telling him, like my math scores when I was his age, are a measure of the math teaching and math curriculum he's had, not of his innate ability to do math. His math tutor told him the same thing this morning, but C. claimed later not to have heard. So I was in need of fresh ammunition, and now here it is.

I love the internet.

SAT grammar rules from Erica Meltzer

Complete SAT Grammar Rules

If we didn't have the SAT to prep for, C would never have learned what terms like pronoun case or pronoun antecedent meant. I'm convinced C. is going to develop more quickly as a writer because of it.

Hack the SAT on the writing section

Hack the SAT on tutoring the writing section:

The grammar portions [of the SAT writing test are far more important [than the essay]. And they're very easy to prepare for. In fact, there are only a handful of grammar rules that the SAT loves to test, and they repeat them over and over. So if you can just memorize the rules that we'll lay out in this section, you'll find that the actual test won't be that much of a challenge. During test prep, scores on the writing section tend to increase most reliably, and by the most number of points.
Hack the SAT by Eliot Schrefer
p. 159

I believe it.

Last week I skimmed an SAT roster for our high school from a couple of years back. I saw no 800s on math, one 800 on reading, and four 800s on writing. (Not sure how many students in that group -- perhaps 125?)

I think that's consistent with Schrefer's observation that the writing section is easiest to coach.

Parents pessimistic about their children's future

In the spirit of some comments here discussing the troubling trends of today's work environment, I posted on Cost of College about the concern parents are feeling for their children's economic future.

…only 41 percent of parents surveyed think that kids will have a better standard of living. It’s a major tectonic shift in our national belief system, but given the events of the past decade, it’s not that shocking.

sleep

Last summer I learned that heat and math don't mix.

Yesterday I learned that heat, humidity and no sleep are catastrophically incompatible with a timed 25-minute math section in the Blue Book.

Sitting outside in the heat and humidity, not consciously feeling the effects of a short night's sleep, I missed: 6 questions out of 20. Six. All of them rated E (for Easy) or M (for Medium).

I answered question 20 correctly. Question 20 is the one tutors tell you not to even attempt unless you're trying for an 800. That I could do.

Number 19, I got right, too.

But the question where all you had to do was read the y value on the y axis --- no. Got that one wrong.

Or the question where you were supposed to find the absolute value of the sum of two negative numbers. Wrong again.

For years I've been reading about all the bad things that happen to people who don't get enough sleep. Sleep loss causes inflammation; sleep loss causes weight gaint; sleep loss screws up your memory; etc., etc, etc.

After yesterday, I'm a believer:

When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours. That means just 2.5 percent of us require less than 7 hours of sleep a night to feel fully rested. That's 1 out of every 40 people.

When I ask people in my talks how many had fewer than 7 hours of sleep several nights during the past week, the vast majority raise their hands. That's true whether it's an audience of corporate executives, teachers, cops or government workers. We've literally lost touch with what it feels like to be fully awake.

Great performers are an exception. Typically, they sleep significantly more than the rest of us. In Anders Ericcson's famous study of violinists, the top performers slept an average of 8 ½ hours out of every 24, including a 20 to 30 minute midafternoon nap some 2 hours a day more than the average American.

The top violinists also reported that except for practice itself, sleep was second most important factor in improving as violinists.
Sleep is more important than food.
Tony Schwartz

Regents inverse function question

at JD2718

Cost of College - new blog

I have a new blog - Cost of College.

"A blog about the various costs that we face in the years BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER college. Focus is on the financial as well as the academic factors, with an eye for exploring the trends in higher education that may profoundly affect our lives in the coming years."

Today's post is about taking student loan obligations very seriously.

You can discharge your student loan obligation . . . if you die or become quadriplegic

help desk - Dr. Chung

I think the solution manual may be wrong on this one.

I'm a huge fan of John Chung's SAT Math, btw. This is the first time I've encountered an answer that struck me as wrong.

source: Dr. John Chung's SAT Math

SAT Compare Two Passages

They're the most excruciating for me.

There is a method, and apparently it works for me as I'm getting better, and they are becoming less painful by the day.

(cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Katharine Beals on King James

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

While the other translations are also confusing here and there, there are a number of things that make the KJB sentence especially so.

1. The placement of the semi-colon suggests that the biggest break is between the first clause and the rest of the sentence. But there really shouldn't be a break between it and "and also after that." Cf the oddity of: "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that."

2. What does the "when" clause modify: "those days", or "after that", or both? (The disruptive placement of the semi colon does not help in sorting this out)

3. Is "and they bare children to them" part of the when-clause? Semantically, this would make the most sense. But the immediately preceding comma, the overt subject ("they") and the change from present to past tense (from "came" to "bare"), make this interpretation more difficult. Cf:

"when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and bore children to them."

3. The tense change seems to serve no purpose other than to obfuscate.

4. What follows, as far as I can tell, is a comma splice. "the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown" should either be its own sentence, or should be conjoined to what precedes it by "and."

5. Why "the same" instead of "they"?

6. An additional comma could reduce the additional obfuscation at the end: "which were, of old, men of renown"

This seems to me to be a classic case of iconicity in language: using linguistic form iconically to express or alter content. (onomopeia is another example). Here, the obfuscating punctuation, syntax, and morpho-syntax may serve to lend an aura of mystery to what might otherwise seem (to the writers of old? or the translators of new?) to be too straightforward for a religious text.

It would be interesting to see the original Hebrew, which, according to what little I've read, involves less embedding and more simple parataxis (sentences connected with "and"). That still leaves plenty of room for obfuscation.

Many other religious texts and/or translations, from what I know of them, rely heavily on an obfuscation that is partially linguistic (Zen koans?)

I've suspected the same thing of certain philosophers (Kant, Hegel) and a number of postmodernists as well.

My preference is for maximum linguistic clarity: the best messages, however mysterious, should shine rather than fade away when viewed in the light of a well-written sentence.

Genesis 6 1-4 Jerusalem Bible

the King James version:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

the Jerusalem Bible version:

Sons of God and daughters of men
When men had begun to be plentiful on the earth, and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the daughters of men, saw they were pleasing, so they married as many as they chose. Yahweh said, 'My spirit must not for ever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh; his life shall last no more than a hundred and twenty years'. The Nephilim were on the earth at that time (and even afterwards) when the sons of God resorted to the daughters of man, and had children by them. These are the heroes of days gone by, the famous men.
Genesis 6: 1-4

The Jerusalem Bible passage is just as mysterious as the King James, but I'm not straining to decipher the pronoun referents.

winner-take-all schools redux

more from the conversation re: public versus private school on College Confidential:

cpt of the house writes:

The fundamental reason for my sending my kids to a private school is that I could see that they got more opportunities for high level academics, sports, music and a lot of other things as compared to their highly regarded high school. Now some kids were able to get those same goodies at their public schools, and that is a wonderful thing. I did not enjoy those years of paying that tuition and if our public school, or any public school in the area could have provided the benefits that the privates could, I would have jumped on it. But they did not. I had kids who could not get into AP programs at our county school districts, but got into them in the private schools and got all 4s and 5s on the tests.

and:

Now in our case, we were taking chances since our kids were not the top grade academic kids in K-12 that are at these private schools and were in the bottom half and even quarter of their class in high school. They needed every bit of positive push we could give them....they would not have had those advantages and choices from our public school. They would not have gotten into the top classes there that are gate kept (I checked), they could not get the number of ECs in terms of performing arts, and they would not have gotten the athletic opportunities. Their peers would not have been the kids who were assuming they were going to go to college as our high school is very diverse in socio economic situations and since they would not be in the classes where college is the main goal.

This is what Paul Attewell documented in his study of elite public high schools. Kids who are capable of earning 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams are tracked out of the most advanced courses.

Paul Attewell's Winner-Take-All in bullet points
The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to Educational Stratification. Paul Attewell. Sociology of Education, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 267-295

public versus private high school

interesting discussion at College Confidential

I was struck by this observation:

One thing that I feel was so worth while at that private school where I sent my kids was the Composition course. Every Monday starting with freshman year until the end of first semester of senior year, they have to write an essay on what is usually an unannounced subject. THey have to handwrite the essay in those old blue books used for final exams at colleges. Those essays are scrutinized and corrected and graded. The student then has a chance to rewrite the essay--in class during the week to better the grade. So no out of school help is available for that part of the grade, and the kids really do learn to write. Sometimes a general topic is given and the kids have to research a subject and can bring a page of notes and cites to use for the essay, but still, the exact question is not known.

What makes this work are dedicated teachers who read and grade those essays. One thing I despised about our public school experience were teachers who did not follow up on corrected papers and tests. They would mark off the answers, sometimes not even reading the work carefully, and then just hand back the paper, If they bothered to look in their wastepaper basket, they would find those returned papers for the most part, thrown in there. The kids would learn nothing from the assignment. X School teachers read every single answer and would make the kids redo what they showed they did not know. But that is not always the case for even private schools. The top privates, the selective ones with the top reps tend to offer this as a matter of course.

And here's a parent talking about Rice:

I want to share with you the experience I had going to the last commencement for Rice, a Catholic all boys school in Harlem run by the Christian Brothers. The CB are a dying breed, their extinction accelerated by the priest scandals, and this school never did make any money. The school graduated a group of all African American young men from Harlem, none of them deemed smart enough to be accepted to any of the top magnet schools the NYC city offers to its brightest students. The graduation rate of this school is remarkable, given who goes there, and nearly every single one of those kids is going to college, even more remarkable when you look at the stats for inner city AA young men. Now this is not a school that most middle class folks would want for their kids, but when you look at the accomplishments for those young men, given what the alternatives are, the result are phenomonal. I do not support school vouchers, but this a case that really makes me pause, and would the type of exception that I would support.

I personally know a number of young men who graduated with my son. They did not do well in the NYC high school lottery, so their parents, came up with the money to send them to a Catholic high school. It was a difficult 4 years for these families, who even with discounts and transportation vouchers found it very difficult to go to this school that often required transportation transfers to attend. Some of the kids lived in far away boroughs. They were NOT the brightest or best by any public or private school standards. But every single one of them are going to college with enough merit/financial aid to make it work. I talked to the mom of one who told me that less than half her sons' peers who did not get into the great NYC magnet schools are going to college and if they are, are going to community colleges or at best the CUNYS maybe. What a difference in results.

King James

On the subject of reading and grammar (see here and here), I've been trying to read the Bible -- the whole Bible, start to finish -- for 3 years now.

When I asked C's freshman religion teacher which Bible to read, he said that while the King James edition was the one I should read, the Jerusalem Bible was the one I could read.

He was right.

Why is the King James version so difficult? I'm sure Katharine can tell us, and I hope she will.

For now, my sense is that the problems come down to unfamiliar grammar combined with unfamiliar idiom:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

I don't know what this passage means.

First of all, I don't know what the word giants means in this context. Were the giants the sons of God?

I'm not sure. I don't know how the words and also after that connect the subject of the first independent clause to the subject of the second independent clause: how do the words and also after that relate giants to sons?

Next question: if the sons of God are the giants, are the giants half-God, half-man? (That can't be right, can it? This is the Bible, not The Odyssey.)

The expression came in unto the daughters is unfamiliar, but I can figure it out from context.

As to grammar, the pronouns are an obstacle and have been in virtually every passage I've read:

...when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown...

They refers to the daughters of men; them refers to the sons of God; the same refers to the children;  and which also refers to the children. I think. If this passage appeared on the SAT, it would be wrong on grounds that the pronoun antecedents are unclear.

In Abraham Lincoln's day, I gather, children were taught to read using the King James Bible, so presumably the pronoun antecedents were clear enough to readers back then. But the King James has different grammatical rules than the ones we're used to, and that's the problem.

If you don't know grammar, you can read the words, but you can't read the text.

PSAT Math

Since my son gets to take the PSAT test as a sophomore in October, I thought that it would be a good place to start. Taking into account the warnings of "imposter" questions, I decided to get some real tests. Unfortunately, they are not offered by the College Board anymore, so I had to get them through Amazon. I got them the other day, and I thought I would share my initial impressions.

First, the real questions are so enlightening compared to a 3rd party PSAT test book I bought. The questions on the test are simple, ... but speed and accuracy are very critical. In the first section, you have 20 questions to answer in 25 minutes. Even though some questions are trivial, it still takes you time to read the question, check to make sure you are not jumping to conclusions (that it really is that simple), and then fill in the bubble. It's one thing to do this informally, but if you try to simulate a real test situation, the seconds slip by very quickly, and the pressure to rush increases.

Second, some of the questions go out of their way to try and trick you into the wrong answer. In one question, you find x+y, but they ask for the average of the two numbers. One answer is x+y and another is (x+y)/2. Clearly, the test is not just about your knowledge of math. I think there were 3 out of 20 questions where they went out of their way to mislead you.

Third, there are certain things you need to know very quickly, like the ratios of the sides of a 45-45-90 triangle and a 30-60-90 triangle. It's not good enough to know the Pythagorean Formula or to find the answer with trig. The formula is too slow and trig gives you the result in decimal, when the answer is in radical form.

One test example was to find the height of a equilateral triangle with a side length of 8. Right now. Fast. With trig, you get 8*sin(60) = 6.928, but the answer is in radical form. With the formula, you get sqrt(64 - 16) = sqrt(48). Quick, what is the reduced radical form? Your brain might start to freeze before you find 4*sqrt(3).

You really need to be able to immediately write down any other side of these common triangles given any one of the sides. One would like to use simple concepts and mathematical understanding to solve many things, but that's not what the test is all about. The test is all about saving seconds. I only finished it with about 3 minutes to spare.

I know this is nothing new to SAT wonks, but I hope to share some of the math shortcuts I find.

The Miseducation of America

I STILL haven't had a chance to read her book, but found these videos very informative!

Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they’re told.

SAT Critical Reading & Writing Tips

I've started keeping track the SAT lessons that might be helpful to others. The first posts are Critical Reading and Writing tips from my meeting with Erica Meltzer.

The list will be stored here: Solutions

UPDATED with clarification that this example is merely to point out what to look for when reading these sentences for errors.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

the problem

Even though the Singapore method has won acclaim from researchers, no large urban or suburban school system in the United States has fully embraced it.
D.C.’s Bruce-Monroe school faces challenges as it tries Singapore math method
By Bill Turque, Published: June 6
Washington Post

That is the problem.

When was the last time a large urban or suburban school system embraced methods that have won acclaim from researchers?

Speaking of acclaim from researchers, I opened up my latest issue of Direct Instruction News and spotted the name of the elementary school in my town: the very same elementary school two of our kids attended ... and there it was, inside the pages of a publication about Direct Instruction ----

I was gobsmacked.

Turns out the BOCES program housed inside the school is using SRA programs.

A person on the DI list says some of the BOCES programs have been using SRA programs for 5 years now!

Martha Kolln on new verbs and old

Most of our verbs -- all except 150 or so -- are regular, as are all the new verbs that we acquire. For example, here are two recent acquaisitions:

I faxed a letter to you yesrerday.
I have e-mailed the invitation to our reunion.

Understanding English Grammar 8th edition
Martha Kolln and Robert Funk
p. 68

I guess people can stop worrying about the weird new words being created by texting teenagers.

The new verbs are lots more regular than the old ones.

Excellent SAT Critical Reading and Writing blog

I've spent the last few days picking through every nook and cranny of The Ultimate SAT Verbal blog. I'd say it's the most extensive and accurate SAT Critical Reading and Writing advice I can find.

Any other SAT site suggestions?

(cross-posted on the Perfect Score Project)

men and women and spatial rotation

Abstract: The largest consistent sex difference in human cognition is found on mental rotation tests, which require participants to compare pictures of three-dimensional objects and decide whether they depict the same object or different objects. Across cultures, males score up to one standard deviation higher than females. We administered two standard rotation tests to 123 participants and found that these higher scores likely do not reflect superiority in the process of mental rotation per se, but rather in other aspects of task performance. Our results show that males decide more accurately when two objects are different, a situation in which women are more likely to claim incorrectly that they are the same, and that individual differences in confidence are responsible for part of the male advantage found on this test, whereas differences in spatial encoding ability are not. These results have implications for evolutionary theories of sex differences in spatial cognition.
Christopher F. Chabris: Selected Publications
Hooven, C.K., Chabris, C.F., Ellison, P.T., Kievit, R.A., & Kosslyn, S.M. (2008). The sex difference on mental rotation tests is not necessarily a difference in mental rotation ability. Submitted for publication. PDF file of manuscript

Years ago, I read an article that said Mozart had written 72 drafts of one composition.^*

That struck me as the difference between a genius and a near-genius: the genius can still hear the wrong note after 71 drafts.

I don't understand the difference between spatial encoding ability and deciding that two objects are different. I assume the article will clear that up.

^* 72 or thereabouts

SAT Gender Gap

The College Board Trend Report shows boys scoring higher in math than girls.

I have to believe this is cultural rather than wiring.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project

SAT Critical Reading -- What's the Most Effective Way to Improve?

I've just started to look deeply into the SAT Critical Reading section. I often find SAT reading passages to be arduous (putting it generously).

My informal poll left me with the impression that it's not easy to move a Critical Reading score.

Daniel Willingham says Critical Reading strategies can help, but are more of a trick than a skill.

That said, I had a game changing meeting with Erica Meltzer the other day and will be following this up with a post about the strategies she taught me, which I passed on to my son who was very appreciative and said it made that section much better.

In the meantime, you can read her post about How to Study for SAT Critical Reading.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project)