A swindle in gifted ed?

I saw this curious comment on Joanne Jacobs' post about EPGY becoming Stanford Online High School. Joanne says:

Ray Ravaglia, who still runs the program, told my ex-husband that students didn’t need to be gifted to handle the classes. He put “gifted” in the title so that schools wouldn’t be scared of losing too many students.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. So, have gifted students and their parents spent several thousand dollars a piece being swindled by EPGY? Or was this the kind of comment to make parents feel better about how their student was doing?

If the head of a school tells you that he branded the school falsely and promoted it under false pretenses, does that make you want to have anything whatsoever to do with the school?

My kids are too young for EPGY, but I know plenty of parents in the local gifted ed community who have worked very hard promoting EPGY, even inside their own districts, as a way to get gifted kids what they need. I don't really know what to make of this. Thoughts?

Latest installment on Kerrigan 'Writing to the Point' project - using CONCRETE words

Use words that are not abstract; that can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, felt, weighed, measured, lifted, dropped, moved, etc.
Examples:  child, chair, pencil are concrete; freedom, justice, bravery are not

Read more at Cost of College:  Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ –being CONCRETE

reading kcab and the SAT

re: answering SAT reading questions without reading the passage

kcab has just provided a terrific example of real-world multiple-choice.

On the original thread, where people were offering their answers to the 1983 SAT question, "The author’s attitude toward children appears to be one of," kcab wrote:

LOL, what the heck, I pick E.

Seeing this, my immediate reaction was: Really?

E?

kcab picks E?

I have no idea why I was surprised that kcab picked E. I don't 'know' kcab; we've never emailed off-list, and because I've been somewhat AWOL reading comments for a while now, my conscious perception is that I haven't read enough of kcab's comments to have formed an 'image' of kcab.

Nevertheless, I was surprised. I was surprised, and I felt slightly.... uncertain. I wasn't sure I understood.

My second reaction, which occurred seconds later, was: It's a joke.

"LOL"..."What the heck"...

Funny!

Tonight I find kcab's followup:

While I'm commenting, I'm feeling defensive about the answer I gave to the earlier post. I saw that post as a game, one that wasn't quite right. Since I could see that everyone else had picked A, I thought I'd pick anything other than A in the interest of answer diversity. Probably just as well for me that I've never had information about other students' answers on tests.

I was tickled to see this because I wasn't sure I picked the right answer. Was kcab joking or not? I had made my bet and bubbled my bubble; now I wanted to know.

And there you have it. A satisfying case of multiple choice in real life: a distinctly SAT-like case in which two conflicting choices both strike you as being possible, and only the author (kcab, in this case) knows for sure.

That is what reading is all about.

At least, I think that's what reading is all about. I've spent essentially zero time reading about reading, so I don't know what reading scientists think reading is all about. I may see things differently once I do.

For now, my sense is that texts often present us with more than one possible interpretation -- and that in deciding which interpretation fits best, readers likely use cues I haven't thought about since graduate school. That is to say, readers don't just read the literal meaning of the text; readers also perceive or construct an 'author' -- an implied author -- who is part of the text but not the text, or not the whole text:

"[I]t is a curious fact that we have no terms either for this created 'second self' or our relationship with him. None of our terms for various aspects of the narrator is quite accurate. 'Persona,' 'mask,' and 'narrator' are sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker in the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who may be separated from him by large ironies. 'Narrator' is usually taken to mean the 'I' of the work, but the 'I' is seldom if ever identical with the implied image of the artist."
(Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961) - quoted by Richard Nordquis

I don't know what made me read kcab correctly (or incorrectly), but it strikes me that it may have to do with this second self.

There are other possibilities as well.

Wayne Booth and a different way to prepare for critical reading

First of all, the correct answer to yesterday's SAT reading comprehension question, the question we're asked to answer without reading the passage the question is about, is A: The author's attitude toward children appears to be one of concern for the development of their moral integrity.

C. and Ed read the question two minutes ago and both chose A. (Debbie and I chose A, too.) Ed is sitting here now basically running through Glen's entire line of reasoning, all 5 points. I'm cracking up!

Of course, getting this answer right is no great feat: according to the research summary I found, 83% of subjects in the Katz and Lautenschlager et al study got it right, too, with no more than 7% of subjects choosing B, C, D, or E. 

Glen and Ed didn't have to get as fancy schmancy as they did, either. (I say that with love!) According to Katz and Lautenschalger as quoted by Iri-Noda-San, all any of us had to do to answer this question was to note that:

“[t]he item just discussed is flawed because not a single incorrect choice characterizes a socially appropriate attitude toward children, whereas the correct choice does (p. 304)”.

Wayne C. Booth (or: I wish kids could be English majors again)

I have never actually read Wayne Booth, I am sorry to say. I intend to.

Back in graduate school I knew just enough about Wayne Booth's work to have been deeply intrigued by his notion of the implied author, and to have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what exactly an implied author might consist of inside a movie as opposed to a book.

Last night, after Debbie arrived fresh from her tutoring adventures bearing news of the Katz and Lautenschlager study, I had a eureka moment: the SAT has an implied author.

The SAT has an implied author, and you need to read the implied author as well as the passages to get the answers right. That's what good readers do.

I have been naturally reading the implied author in SAT reading sections, and so has C. I say "naturally" because I do it without thinking about it, and if I do think about it, I don't take it seriously. When C. and I joke about the "grammatically correct" minority questions in the writing section, we're joking.  We don't see ourselves as having (correctly) interpreted a text.

In fact, I rely upon my understanding of the implied author to such a degree that the single most useful piece of advice anyone ever gave me about SAT reading was LexAequita's observation that SAT reading questions are "picayune in the sense that you'd better start thinking like a 13-year old with Asperger's syndrome." On one level, Lex's advice is about the logic of SAT reading questions, but on another level Lex's advice is about the implied author. The implied author is picayune!

(There's an implied author in the math sections, too.)

These days, of course, no one has heard of implied authors and the like; the formal analysis of literature seems to have disappeared from English departments across the land. I search high and low for close readings of the folk tales and fairy tales I'm teaching, and all I find are Marxist analyses and multiple references to menstruation. I am not going to discuss menstruation with a class full of 18 year old boys (and girls) taking developmental composition. Nor with a class full of 18 year old boys and girls taking non-developmental composition, for that matter.

If I knew how to do a close reading of texts, if I knew more than just a smidgeon about functional linguistics, I bet I could crack the test, as opposed to consistently get the answers right without knowing why I consistently get the answers right.

And I wish I had been able to take a class with Wayne Booth. His students obviously loved him.

test prep

Who teaches kids to read the implied author in a text?

Does anyone?

If you're lucky, an English teacher will show your child how to locate main and supporting ideas in nonfiction texts. And there is a strong focus in many precincts upon identifying an author's "biases." David Mulroy writes about the contemporary preoccupation with argument in The War Against Grammar.

But I think that's about it.

I know a student in a neighboring town, who I worked with briefly on SAT reading. He put a great deal of time and energy into preparing for the test, and his writing and math scores both were in the mid 700s by October, but he could not get his reading score above the low 600s.

That never made sense to me. He and I had read together. He was a good reader, and he was smart.

You see kids like him time and again, and people remark on it. The reading test is the one that can't be tutored; that's the rule.

Now I'm wondering if kids are failing to read the implied author.

I'm also wondering whether it would be a good idea to have students purposely take some critical reading sections without reading the passages. Offhand, such an exercise seems like a good way to reveal the SAT's implied author.

The researchers who've looked into this issue seem to take the view that if a test-taker can answer the questions on a reading passage without reading the passage, the test is invalid.

That strikes me as the wrong way to look at it, although I haven't read the papers. In the studies, students who did best answering questions without reading the passage also scored highest on the test itself, and I think it's at least possible that this research reveals more about the nature of strong readers than it does about the SAT. I am now wondering how many questions I answer not on the basis of the passages but on the basis of the tone, style, grammar, and content in the question sections per se.

I don't know the answer to that, but I'd like to.

the question:
The author’s attitude toward children appears to be one of:
(A) concern for the development of their moral integrity
(B) idealization of their inexperience and vulnerability
(C) contempt for their inability to accept unpleasant facts
(D) exaggerated sympathy for their problems in daily life
(E) envy of their willingness to learn about morality


Katz, S., Blackburn, A. B., & Lautenschlager, G. (1991). Answering reading comprehension items without passages on the SAT when items are quasirandomized. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 51, 747-754.
Katz, S., Johnson, C, & Pohl, E. (1999). Answering reading comprehension items without the passages on the SAT-I. Psychological Reports, 85, 1157-1163.
Katz, S., & Lautenschlager, G. (1994). Answering reading comprehension questions without passages on the SAT-I, ACT, and GRE. Educational Assessment, 2, 295-308.
Katz, S., Lautenschlager, G., Blackburn, A. B., & Harris, F. (1990). Answering reading comprehension items without passages on the SAT. Psychological Science, 1, 122—127.
Millman, J., Bishop, C. H., & Ebel, R. (1965). An analysis of testwiseness. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 5, 707-727.
Powers, D. E., & Leung, S. W. (1995). Answering the new SAT reading comprehension questions without the passages. Journal of Educational Measurement, 32, 105-129.
Pyrczak, F. (1972). Objective evaluation of the quality of multiple-choice items designed to measure comprehension of reading passages. Reading Research Quarterly, 8, 62-72.
Tuinman, J. (1973-74). Determining the passage dependency of comprehension questions in five major tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 9, 206-223.

PTSD & SAT

Exactly what I would have predicted:

Given the widespread use and high-stakes nature of educational standardized assessments, understanding factors that affect test-taking ability in young adults is vital. Although scholarly attention has often focused on demographic factors (e.g., gender and race), sufficiently prevalent acquired characteristics may also help explain widespread individual differences on standardized tests. In particular, this article focuses on the role that posttraumatic stress symptoms (PSS) potentially play in standardized academic assessments. Using a military sample measured before and after exposure to war-zone stressors, the authors sought to explain test-taking ability differences with respect to symptoms of PTSD on two cognitive tasks that closely match standardized test constructs. The primary method for this analysis is based on an item response theory with covariates approach. Findings suggest that the effect for PSS is significant on both tasks, particularly for those who experience the highest levels of PSS following war-zone exposure. Findings provide potentially valuable information regarding the nature of the relationship between PSS and verbal and logical reasoning test performance.

[snip]

Previous research on college-age groups suggests that educa- tional attainment is negatively impacted by anxiety disorders (Kessler, Foster, Saunders, & Stang, 1995); however, less is known about the specific effects of anxiety disorders on test-taking ability, particularly from a prospective approach. The current study sheds light on this issue and suggests that after controlling for predeployment PSS and a number of possibly confounding factors, PTSD symptoms adversely affect test-taking ability in study par- ticipants, and that there is a dosing effect in which more severe symptoms are associated with poorer test taking.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Standardized Test-Taking Ability - Leslie Rutkowski et al - Journal of Educational Psychology - 2010, Vol. 102, No. 1, 223–233.

SAT reading question for all you ktm brainiacs

The author’s attitude toward children appears to be one of:

(A) concern for the development of their moral integrity
(B) idealization of their inexperience and vulnerability
(C) contempt for their inability to accept unpleasant facts
(D) exaggerated sympathy for their problems in daily life
(E) envy of their willingness to learn about morality

What's the answer?

bubble this, part 2

wow

I just checked my October SAT scores and discovered that, as Debbie predicted, I apparently failed to answer an entire chunk of questions without knowing it:

Moreover, as Debbie also predicted, the questions I didn't answer were (C. says) on the 2nd Writing Section, which is the last section of the entire 11-Section test.^*

Debbie really has become the expert on the actual, real-world SAT: what it's like to study for it, what it's like to take it, and even what your score means before the College Board tells you what your score means. (I didn't believe her! Every time the subject of my Writing score came up, Debbie would say: "Section 10. You didn't answer all the questions." I thought that was nuts! Of course I answered all the questions! I obsessively checked and double-checked to make sure I answered all the questions! Wrong.)

For the record: omitting four questions while checking and double-checking to make sure you haven't omitted any questions is not a "careless" error.

Omitting four questions while checking and double-checking to make sure you haven't omitted any questions is a maxed-out biology error. Omitting 4 questions in the final section of the test is the same phenomenon as a runner losing her stride at the end of a real marathon going out way too fast from the gate and falling apart at the end of a real marathon, which Ed says happened to the front-runner in the women's field this year.

By the way, in the run-up to the test, it occurred to me that I needed to start running again. I'm thinking aerobic conditioning would have to help. But I didn't do it.

For parents whose kids will be taking the SAT soon, the bubbling issue is major: it's the reason kids need effective test prep. The SAT is too long and has too many problems jammed into too little time and space^** to be considered a test of content knowledge. The SAT tests test prep as well as content knowledge.

High school students need effective test prep for the same reason runners need effective coaching: they need to learn strategy and pacing, especially on the math sections.

I'm a 10
May 4, 2010: mandatory bubbling session
March 8, 2011: bubble this
April 13, 2011: progress report, part 2
May 7, 2011: the return of bubbling errors

^* 10 sections that count towards your score plus 1 experimental section that does not count

^** Too little space: test font size is too small, white space is too small, desktops in testing centers are too small... I may have left something out.

SAT story & apologies for the disappearing act

Wanted to say quickly that I've got at least 4 meaty emails waiting for me, which I'm not getting to because they're vying for attention with a stack of student papers and so far the student papers are winning.

Hoping to get to emails later today!

I shouldn't be writing posts, either, but I had to pass this along.

C. just came into the kitchen and told me this story.

One of the math kids in his class, a kid so good at math that the calculus teacher (this would be the calculus teacher whose class C. has dropped) told him he could "sleep through every class" and get an A, got a 650 on SAT math.

650.

I say that's a benchmark. A gifted math student who takes the SAT cold gets 650.

C. said, "He doesn't care about the SAT. He's going to X University no matter what."

His folks have free tuition at X U.

update: The last two lines above are ironic.

on fracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/magazine/fracking-amwell-township.html

Remarkably good journalism; remarkably scary stuff.

The money would help to pay the taxes on their farms. The land man who came to the Haney home to sell the lease showed pictures of a farm and pasture with a well cap “the size of a garbage can,” Haney said, which she found reassuring. And it didn’t seem as if the drilling would affect their lives much.

Learning more about 'Writing to the Point' - Kerrigan's approach to writing instruction

I first learned about the William J. Kerrigan's Writing to the Point from Catherine.  She had high praise for this book on writing instruction, calling it "brilliant" and attracting my attention with this.

I'm pretty sure a parent can use Kerrigan's book to turn any writing assignment into an OK assignment or even good one.

After years of letting the book collect dust on a shelf, I finally decided to read it and learn the Kerrigan method in detail.  I'm almost halfway through this project, becoming more convinced with each assignment that this approach would work for many students who struggle with writing.  The precision and clarity of the Kerrigan method is refreshing, especially after observing so many different variations on writing instruction that often appeared confusing and distracting.  (Venn diagrams, cloud-charts, math journals and three-page rubrics - I'm looking at you.)

I'm blogging about my journey through Writing to the Point over at Cost of College, and here are the first three installments.

The Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’
Step 3 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’

Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – being SPECIFIC

I welcome any feedback from KTM readers as I stumble along in my project, hoping to learn more about effective writing instruction and to improve my own writing.

Lesson Study Open House @ Greenwich Japanese School

My deepest apologies for such a late post.

The Greenwich Japanese School (GJS), in Greenwich, CT, is hosting a lesson study open house on Friday, 18 November 2011, in case there are folks in this group in the CT area.

There are a few spaces left. Please visit: www.globaledresources.com for the program and information.

If you are interested in attending, please email me (pwangiverson@gmail.com) and Makoto Yoshida (myoshida@globaledresources.com).

Again, sorry for the late notice.

Patsy Wang-Iverson

Statue of Liberty turns 125

Ed's on CNN!

He has a book coming out on the statue in April.

In the meantime, here's Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa.

Another reason to distrust the spiral

We've discussed often how Everyday Math doesn't build to mastery, but spirals through the same topics year after year at a shallow level so students never get enough practice. Teachers and parents are told to "trust the spiral"--if the student doesn't learn the concept this time, they'll learn it next time.

But no one tells the students that.

I hear stories now of children in tears of frustration in first and second grade because they are being asked to "learn" concepts without enough background. These children aren't able to blithely say "oh well". They are crushed at their obvious failure. They feel stupid. They feel miserable. They are learning to hate math and their inability to do it. The assignments aren't meant to be mastered yet, according to the adults. But the spiral won't stop their students' feelings of awfulness.

We can't teach children that math is coherent, reasonable, and learnable with effort this way. Students need to be given concepts of slowly-increasing difficulty, designed so hard work leads to success. It's not just we've robbed them by giving too little chance to build up to complexity. Giving "tastes" of concepts they aren't ready for undermines the "effort is good" message and reinforces you're math-smart or math-dumb, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Why we switched from Chinese to French

Before I started home schooling my 10-year-old daughter last year, she attended the one child-oriented foreign language program our neighborhood has to offer: a once-a-week Mandarin program at the local art center. It's a largely art and play-based program, and, after about three years of it, she'd learned perhaps a couple of dozen words and phrases and a few characters (many of which she'd forget each summer).

When I started homeschooling her, I figured we'd intensify the Chinese instruction one way or another. My Mandarin is quite rusty, but I'd had an intensive year in grad school (following an intensive year with Cantonese in Hong Kong), and I thought learning it with my daughter would be a great opportunity to polish things up and make some new headway, especially with the written language.

A few months later I found myself abandoning this and switching over to French. As a linguist, I do love the idea of exposing myself and others to non-Indoeuropean languages. But the more time we spent on Chinese, the more aware I became of various practical challenges that aren't such an issue with French.

One has to do with available resources (and, of course, my familiarity with what's out there). I've had a long history with French and have long known about French in Action, which is the best available, child-accessible, audio-visual language curriculum I'm aware of for any language. In particular, try as I might, I haven't been able to find anything comparable for young English speakers learning Mandarin. There are a number of software programs out there that purport to teach all sorts of languages (most notoriously, Rosetta Stone), but these, imho, are so highly deficient they they aren't worth bothering with--even if they didn't cost hundreds of dollars.

Then there's the issue of retention. In comparison with French and other Indoeuropean languages, Chinese presents two disadvantages. One is its writing system. Mastering the thousands of Chinese characters required for basic literacy demands hours of daily practice. I've seen first hand how a short hiatus can result in massive forgetting. One simply cannot learn to read anything of substance in Chinese without a long-term commitement to significant daily practice. Another is its vocabulary. Chinese words are especially challenging for English speakers to remember because they bear no resemblance to English words.

So here's how I ended up viewing my options. If my goal is for my daughter to learn a language spoken by billions that may someday become a job-opportunity-expanding lingua franca, or a language whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and written form (though not so much its morpho-syntax) differs greatly from English, and I can commit both her and myself to the hours, days, and years of instruction (or if I don't care about her learning the written form of the language), Chinese is just the ticket. But if my goal is fast mastery and easy retention of a spoken and written language, my daughter is better off with one that uses an alphabet and whose words bear some resemblance to English words.

Which brings me back the original lingua franca. Like other Indoeuropean languages, French shares not only our basic writing system, but also tons of cognates (glace-glacier; sympathique-sympathetic; regarder-regard; to name just a few my daughter has recently observed). This means that English-speaking French learners are immersed in mnemonic devises. The effect of these cognates goes in the other direction as well: learning a Romance language like French enhances one's acquisition of many of the more sophisticated elements of English vocabulary. Cognates aside, French difers from English along the more linguistically interesting dimension of morpho-syntax, arguably at least as much as Chinese does. It therefore presents a nice combination of (1) mutual reinforcement with English vocabulary and an easily-mastered writing system, and (2) morpho-syntactic challenge and a window into some of the morpho-syntactic variability of the world's languages.

Other Romance languages--Spanish, Italian, and, of course, Latin--offer a similar combo. But today's world offers few opportunities for aural/oral practice, and zero real-life conversational opportunities, in Latin. And, much as I'd love to relearn Spanish or learn Italian, I haven't come across anything like a Spanish in Action or Italian in Action. Meanwhile, I'm seeing the tremendous efficacy of Pierre Capretz and his French in Acttion play out daily in the huge progress my daughter has made since last February, which I estimate to be already well over the equivalent of a year of 7th grade French.

perfect score

at Princeton, parked on campus

jobs

Interesting short video at the WSJ.

The video documents a massive loss of manufacturing jobs but doesn't discuss where those jobs went or why.

Ben Bernanke urges soldiers to combat high unemployment

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke took his message about the U.S. economy to military servicemen, making a pre-Veteran’s Day visit to the Fort Bliss headquarters for the Army’s 1st Armored Division and urging soldiers to combat high unemployment by focusing on training and education.
Bernanke's Fed Takes Message to Texas
November 10, 2011

What next?

The chairman of the Federal Reserve advocating small class size and school uniforms?

from the FRBSF: Recent College Graduates and the Labor Market

Haven't read it yet, but here's the link.

I'm a big fan of the San Francisco Fed's Economics Letters.

Goldilocks and the money illusion

the money illusion:

The findings in this paper suggest that money illusion is real in the sense that the level of reward-related brain activity in the vmPFC [ventromedial prefrontal cortex] in response to monetary prizes increases with nominal changes that have no consequence for subjects' real purchasing power.
The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion Bernd Webera, Antonio Rangelb, Matthias Wibralc and Armin Falk - PNAS March 31, 2009 vol. 106 no. 13 5025–5028

In the car just now, Ed and I were talking about the money illusion. Ed pointed out that no one thinks when you've just been given a 3% raise in an environment of 4% inflation, your pay has actually been cut. (I know ktm people would have no problem figuring this out--! But ktm people are not the norm.)

I'm wondering whether good math education and/or the distribution of inflation calculators to one and all would affect the money illusion. I have no idea. Certain cognitive biases, loss aversion,^* for instance, are apparently built-in, but -- the money illusion? Is there something built-in about the money illusion per se?

No time to think it through just now; for the moment I'm going to guess that the money illusion is a specific manifestation of something more fundamental. Which probably means good education and universal inflation calculators would help.

That said, we are stuck with the money illusion, at least for now.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that we need a certain level of inflation for the economy to work. Deflation is bad --  everyone seems to understand that -- but zero inflation is also bad. Inflation is like the porridge in Goldilocks and The Three Bears; it can be too hot, it can be too cold, or it can be just right.

What is just right?

Having spent as much time as I have reading the market monetarists (pdf file), I assume that just right means 2% inflation along with 3% real growth.^*

But of course I don't know.

from the EurkAlert release:

"We had now confronted our test subjects with two different situations", Falk explains. "In the first, they could only earn a relatively small amount of money, but the items in the catalogue were also comparatively cheap. In the second scenario, the wage was 50 per cent higher, but now all the items were 50 per cent more expensive. Thus, in both scenarios the participants could afford exactly the same goods with the money they had earned – the true purchasing power had remained exactly the same." The test subjects were perfectly aware of this, too – not only did they know both catalogues, but they had been explicitly informed at the start that the true value of the money they earned would always remain the same.

Despite this, an astonishing manifestation emerged: "In the low-wage scenario there was one particular area of the brain which was always significantly less active than in the high-wage scenario", declares Bernd Weber, focusing on the main result. "In this case, it was the so-called ventro-medial prefrontal cortex - the area which produces the sense of quasi elation associated with pleasurable experiences". Hence, on the one hand, the study confirmed that this money illusion really exists, and on the other, it revealed the cerebro-physiological processes involved.

and more from the paper:

We used fMRI to investigate whether the brain's reward circuitry exhibits money illusion. Subjects received prizes in 2 different experimental conditions that were identical in real economic terms, but differed in nominal terms. Thus, in the absence of money illusion there should be no differences in activation in reward-related brain areas. In contrast, we found that areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which have been previously associated with the processing of anticipatory and experienced rewards, and the valuation of goods, exhibited money illusion. We also found that the amount of money illusion exhibited by the vmPFC was correlated with the amount of money illusion exhibited in the evaluation of economic transactions.

[snip]

Intuitively, money illusion implies that an increase in income is valued positively, even when prices go up by the same amount, leaving real purchasing power unchanged (1). In this sense money illusion has been interpreted “as a bias in the assessment of the real value of economic transactions, induced by a nominal evaluation” (2). Economists have traditionally been skeptical about the notion of money illusion (3), but recent behavioral evidence has challenged this view (2, 4–6). For example, when asked to rate the happiness of 2 otherwise identical persons who received either a 2% wage increase without inflation or a 5% wage increase with 4% inflation, the majority of subjects attribute happiness on the basis of greater nominal raises, despite lower real raises (2).

[snip]

Our main hypothesis was that areas of the brain that are engaged in the experiencing of rewards (7–9), such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), would exhibit money illusion in the sense of exhibiting a stronger BOLD response for incomes that were higher in nominal terms, but had an identical real value. Activity in these brain regions has been shown to be modulated by the receipt of both primary rewards such as food delivery (10) and more abstract forms of rewards like monetary incentives (9, 11, 12). Recent neuroimaging studies have also shown that the vmPFC is involved in the valuation of goods at the time of decision making (13–15).

[snip]

The importance of this finding derives from the fact that the answer to many classic economic problems depends on whether money illusion exists. For example, money illusion has been put forward as an explanation for the nonneutrality of money, which implies that central banks can affect production, investment, and consumption through changes in monetary policy that have an impact on the inflation rate. Likewise it offers an explanation for the important phenomenon that wages and prices are often downwardly rigid, a leading explanation for involuntary unemployment (17, 18). It is also a potential cause of bubbles in important markets, such as the housing market (19), and of deviations of stock prices from their fundamental values (20, 21). At the firm level, money illusion is important to determine optimal wage policies, which depend much on whether workers care about nominal or real wages (22). Finally, the existence of money illusion is important for the understanding of the relation between income, inflation, and subjective well-being (23). Importantly, even small amounts of money illusion can have substantial effects....

^* And even loss aversion has "boundaries". (pdf file)

^* Because I'm married to a historian, I also assume that "just right" for our time would be not right for another time quite possibly.

anonymous on lefties taking the SAT

Good advice:

Lefties should be particularly vigilant about the chairs/desks. I've heard stories about them having to take long tests on right-handed flip-up deskettes; a true nightmare. I know the registration forms for my grad comps asked lefties to identify themselves, because almost all of the seats in the auditorium had right-hand deskettes. They brought in as many extra lefty ones as they needed. Is there a similar question on SAT registrations?

I have got to find time to write a quick post on working memory.

I believe that the "transmission mechanism" from right-hand desks for left-hand test-takers to reduced performance is working memory blowout.

And see: death by calculator. Death by calculator is a case of working memory blowout.

(The real-world term for working memory blowout problems is cognitive load theory.)

off-topic (somewhat): Scott Sumner on targeting NGDP

Sumner: Nominal GDP Targeting Can Save the Recovery (video interview with Kelly Evans of the Wall Street Journal)

I can't remember when I first became convinced that the Federal Reserve should stop targeting the CPI PCE and start targeting NGDP (the sum of all current dollar spending in the US).

Maybe a year ago?

I bring it up today because the idea has abruptly broken through to the mainstream, and because the state of the economy will determine whether our kids have decent jobs after college (or any job at all), not to mention whether parents will have the money to pay for college in the first place. So now's the time.

I think about NGDP-targeting this way:

1.
The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: price stability and full employment. It is required to pursue both.

Since the crash, we have had unusually low core inflation, lower than average inflation during the Great Moderation, which was 2%. Update 1/10/2012: PCE inflation has averaged 1.37% over the four years 2007-2012.

We have also had a catastrophic collapse in employment, which is not becoming any less catastrophic as the years go by:

This chart shows the percent of the civilian population that is employed. Before the crash more than 63% of the civilian population was employed; since the crash we have bounced between 58 and 59%.

2.
The chart above is, literally, an image of a depression. In it we see employment drop off a cliff, hit bottom (let's hope), and stay there. The chart makes it impossible for me to call the situation we are in a "recovery," a "weak recovery," a "faltering recovery," an "anemic recovery," a "limping recovery," a "recovery experiencing strong headwinds," or any other formulation that includes the word recovery. This is not a recovery. In my book, this is a depression: a minor depression, but a depression nonetheless. It's not getting better, and I don't believe that more 20-year olds acquiring STEM degrees will fix things.

More STEM degrees may or may not be a good idea; better K-16 education (I've expanded my horizons) unquestionably is a good idea.

Neither one is going to fix the chart.

3.
Why is that?

Since I'm not an economist, I have to choose which expert(s) to believe. And, after spending probably a year of my life reading the various explanations of the crash, I'm persuaded by Scott Sumner and the market monetarists, (pdf file) which is not to say anyone else has to be persuaded, obviously. I'm writing an amateur economics post on an education blog just to let you know about market monetarism if you don't already.

I'm convinced the market monetarists are right, and I want our federal overlords policy elites to stop targeting inflation, and start targeting NGDP, as market monetarists recommend.

4.
Wages are sticky -- sticky meaning wages can go up, but not down. (Wages are sticky in one direction.)

I live in a state, New York, where public sector wages are beyond sticky; here in New York, public sector raises are sticky. I'm tuned in to public sector compensation because I've been dealing with my district's budget crisis for a few years now, but wages are sticky across the board in every sector, public and private.

Sticky wages kill jobs. Period. Sticky wages kill jobs because when profits decline, some employees have to be laid off so other employees can maintain their current salaries. In theory, when profits (or tax revenues) fall, wages could fall, too, and everyone would still have a job. Companies would bring in less money in sales, so they would pay less money in compensation, problem solved.

In reality, when profits (or tax revenues) decline, wages stay put. So people have to be laid off.

I have had a front-row seat watching this process unfold here in my town. Where sticky wages are concerned, I don't need experts to explain the world to me. Sticky wages are real, I've seen them, they take away jobs.

Update 1/10/2012: human employees replaced by wolves....

5.
Which brings me to the Fed.

The Bernanke Fed strongly opposes deflation and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

The Bernanke Fed also strongly opposes inflation (the cure for deflation), and appears to think that if low inflation is good, lower inflation is better. It's fine to go to 1.5% "core" inflation (CPI minus food and energy). It's fine to go to 1%. Two percent is a ceiling, not a target. Update 1/102012: The new 'ceiling' appears to be 2.5%.

At some point (where?) inflation is bad because it might turn into deflation.

Also, if you go into recession for 18 months, and "lose" all the inflation you would have had during that period, the Bernanke Fed thinks that's fine.

There is no such thing as an inflation shortfall in the Bernanke Fed, it seems.

6.
Real estate.

Housing prices, overall, are at 1990 levels.

1990.

The Bernanke Fed is a deflation fighter, and yet the Bernanke Fed has presided over a 25% deflation in house prices in just 3 years time.

7.
Given what we've been through, I conclude that neither real estate nor jobs are coming back as long as the Fed continues to target inflation. If the Fed is targeting 2% (or 1%) inflation, and we need 33% inflation (roughly) just to get back to where we were, then we're looking at the new normal. Since I personally see no way jobs can be decoupled from prices, that means jobs don't come back, either. Not for years and years and years.

Update 1/10/2012: Hamilton Jobs Gap Calculator

So I'd like the Fed to stop targeting inflation and start targeting nominal GDP, which includes inflation but is not limited to inflation. The beauty of NGDP is that it combines inflation and employment in one number. Double mandate, single target.

I'll post links to the market monetarist blogs and the various endorsements and counter-endorsements later on. In the meantime, Scott Sumner began his blog, The Money Illusion, in 2009. Within the past month Goldman Sachs published a report endorsing the idea, and Cristina Romer wrote a column agreeing. Brad DeLong and and Paul Krugman have both endorsed; at National Review, Ramesh Ponnoru was an early adopter and advocate.

Update 1/10/2012: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has the easiest-to-understand explanation of why inflation targeting has failed -- and why "level" NGDP-targeting would succeed -- that I've seen so far.

^* I've just this moment Googled a line from Brad DeLong saying 1% is the new 2%.

“Fair Test” Procedures for SAT Da

After my terrible SAT experience last Saturday, I decided to look into whether or not any official rules had been broken.

Turns out there is an official SAT rule guide, The SAT Standard Testing Room Manual, which I think is worth reading before you take an SAT (especially Section A, which is only 11 pages long).

From the first paragraph:

"The SAT Program has established policies and procedures to ensure that all students can test under a uniform set of conditions .... All students are to be protected from disturbance. By strictly following our policies and procedures, you give students the best guarantee of fair testing."

At the time, I felt intimidated to say something to the proctor because I wasn't sure if official "rules" were broken, or whether they were "courtesies" he was forgoing.

And if I had trouble speaking up, I'd imagine it would be even more difficult for a teenager to do so -- especially if he or she isn't even sure about the official rules.

I did speak to the proctor at the first break and told him that lopping off five minutes of our time mid-way through a Reading Section really threw me -- and he responded by saying, "it was the lesser of two evils," which did not leave me inclined to speak up again, when the noise disturbances from other kids who had finished the test in the same gym became so loud that they echoed for our last 4 sections.

Turns out this proctor was wrong.  It was not "the lesser of two evils" to cut off five minutes of our time, mid-section.   In fact there there is an official rule in the manual for this exact situation: "Overtiming: Make no adjustment."

That was just the beginning of the broken rules last Saturday.....

1) The "Visible Clock" Rule:

I have experienced this "visible clock" issue a few times over the course of the 6 SATs I've taken this year (5 different locations). But, "lack of visibility" last Saturday was the least of my problems.

Start with the fact that the proctor inexplicably wrote the time down in the middle of the the Essay Section (after telling us before we started that he had no chalk to do so) -- but he didn't write it in our time zone time -- because, as he later explained to me when I asked, the (non-visible) clock turned out not to be in ourtime zone.

Fine, except that it confused me to see "a time" (but not our time) suddenly appear on the blackboard without explanation.

Also, there were no "regular" time warnings, as mentioned above in the manual -- I'd say they were more sporadic in nature (i.e. "2 minutes," or nothing at all....)

2) Desk Size (Avoid having a "deskette" experience):

To be fair, my deskette last Saturday probably did meet this "official standard" -- but honestly, as a test taker, that's too small for an optimal SAT experience.  12" by 15" holds ONE 8 x 11 test booklet  -- except that there are TWO booklets that need holding when you take the SAT (plus your calculator for math sections, and pencils).

Lack of proper desk space adds a juggle variable to the SAT experience that is distracting, time consuming, stressful, and noisy.  Try to find an SAT location with full desks.

3) Adult Test Takers:

I've experienced "assigned seating" once out of 6 SATs, and the fact of the matter is that I was assigned the front and center seat.  Not sure if that was a coincidence.

4) Timing and Breaks:

I believe this rule was carefully followed at every other SAT that I took this year, which is how I ended up lulled into complacency last Saturday.  I had grown toexpect this rule to be followed, and when it wasn't (starting in Section 3), I was thrown for such a loop I had trouble recovering.  Or maybe I was thrown off when the time mysteriously appeared on the board in a different time zone.  I don't know.  Either way, this "Timing Policy" wasn't followed and it affected me.

5) Reporting Irregularities:

I have no idea whether or not our proctor reported the "timing irregularities" that day.

6) Student Complaints: 

I'm not "a student," but I did have many of these same complaints.

I could continue on with these screen shots of broken rules from last weekend, but instead I'll reiterate that any SAT test taker should read pages 1-11 of  The SAT Standard Testing Room Manual before test day.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project

Does anyone want a STEM career anymore?

As the self-described 99% show the country what a wasteland a liberal arts education is, the current administration says STEM careers will transform (or is it save) America. But there's been a number of articles in the last few days about why American students today aren't choosing STEM careers.
in today's WSJ, Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay, the article opens with this:

Biyan Zhou wanted to major in engineering. Her mother and her academic adviser also wanted her to major in it, given the apparent career opportunities for engineers in a tough job market. But during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Zhou switched her major from electrical and computer engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management. Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University.

"My ability level was just not there," says Ms. Zhou of her decision. She now plans to look for jobs in public relations or human resources.

The NYT had this article, "Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)" (pointed out by Glen a few days ago.)
it states:

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

Why the attrition? Some are the usual suspects: from the WSJ piece again:

For 22-year-old Ms. Zhou, from Miami, the last straw was a project for one of her second-year courses that kept her and her partner in the lab well past midnight for several days. Their task was to program a soda machine. Though she and her partner managed to make it dispense the right items, they couldn't get it to give the correct change.

Such unpreparedness in part explains this (from NYT piece): "Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors." But so does the burnout factor from the death march through calculus, as illustrated by "MATTHEW MONIZ bailed out of engineering at Notre Dame in the fall of his sophomore year...He had scored an 800 in math on the SAT and in the 700s in both reading and writing. He also had taken Calculus BC and five other Advanced Placement courses at a prep school in Washington, D.C., and had long planned to major in engineering....But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’

They quote Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who says it isn't just weak K-12 prep that causes this washout.

"You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

His argument seems to be that the kids at Cal are better prepared than the kids at CSU, so more of them should succeed, if the issue was really k-12 prep. I don't think that gets to the heart of the prep matter though. The kids at Cal, Notre Dame and the like are Used to Succeeding, and they aren't succeeding. This is a huge blow to them, at the same time that the intro courses are often seen as the drudgework to get to the electives, a point made in the NYT article. It feels better to get As in psych than B-s in EE.

Continuing,

Some new students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical engineering is. Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits. By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.

“We’re in a worldwide competition, and we’ve got to retain as many of our students as we can,” Dean Kilpatrick says. “But we’re not doing kids a favor if we’re not teaching them good life and study skills.

So many fall off. And what about the ones who make it?

You work harder for lower grades than your peers, and the payoff is either a) a career path where your employer is constantly lobbying the govt to drive down your pay by increasing immigration, or b) a career path where you front load all of your risk onto a low probability lottery ticket to the world of academia just as the higher ed bubble is bursting.

Not depressing enough? Read Arnold Kling's "What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?" Kling suggests high unemployment now is structural, coming from a new phase of an economic transition away from plentiful high paying white collar jobs, just as prior restructuring moved away from plentiful high paying blue collar jobs.

Using the latest Census Bureau data, Matthew Slaughter found that from 2000 to 2010 the real earnings of college graduates (with no advanced degree) fell by more in percentage terms than the earnings of high school graduates. In fact, over this period the only education category to show an increase in earnings was those with advanced degrees.
The outlook for mid-skill jobs would not appear to be bright. Communication technology and computer intelligence continue to improve, putting more occupations at risk.

For example, many people earn a living as drivers, including trucks and taxicabs. However, the age of driver-less vehicles appears to be moving closer.

Another example is in the field of education. In the fall of 2011, an experiment with an online course in artificial intelligence conducted by two Stanford professors drew tens of thousands of registrants. This increases the student-teacher ratio by a factor of close to a thousand. Imagine the number of teaching jobs that might be eliminated if this could be done for calculus, economics, chemistry, and so on.

So much for that lottery ticket to academia...but what about the private sector? Kling says:

...the main work consists of destroying someone else's job. Garett Jones has pointed out that the typical worker today does not produce widgets but instead builds organizational capital. The problem is that building organizational capital in one company serves to depreciate the organizational capital somewhere else. Blockbuster video adversely affected the capital of movie theaters, Netflix adversely affected the capital of Blockbuster, and the combination of faster Internet speeds and tablet devices may depreciate the organizational capital of Netflix.

The second challenge is the nature of the emerging skills mismatch. People who are self-directed and cognitively capable can keep adding to their advantages. People who lack those traits cannot simply be exhorted into obtaining them. The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class. Instead, if the trend documented by Autor for the period 1999-2007 were to continue, most of the new jobs would be low-end service jobs, for which competition will tend to keep wages low.

He goes on to posit some possible futures. He's not optimistic.

update: Kling link fixed. Thanks, ChemProf!

the other Chinese student

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/10/25/i-fought-for-18-years-to-have-a-cup-of-coffee-with-you/ (translation)

Here’s a question I pose for my white collar friends [in Shanghai]: what if I never graduated from middle school, and had become a migrant worker? Would you sit down for a cup of coffee with me at Starbucks? The answer, unequivocally, is that you wouldn’t

.

As you might know, college students from China's big cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan...) apply to American colleges in a flood of high scores and intimidating talent, even socially. Typically, the quintessential undergraduate Chinese student I might meet at the University of Virginia might say, play Chopin and Debussy, have read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, eat twenty-dollar sushi dinners daily, and in general, spend money outrageously, yet he or she will be well-read on the the ancient revered Four Classics as well as Harry Potter.

There are those who dress fobbishly, but there are many who dress with both a kind-of-unique yet canned style borrowed from the latest trends in Shanghai or Tokyo or something. Personally, the kids from Wuhan come closest to my hipster sense of aesthetics, but the kids from Shanghai are far too materialistic, accentuate their class differences, and generally snub me. (And in my experience, Chinese parents from Shanghai are the prim-and-proper quantitative finance type who would only pursue an art for its social prestige and not for its own sake. But I am only stereotyping to represent the breadth and diversity of applicants.)

Yet despite all this progress, 900 million people in the rural provinces have been left in the dust. The opposite of affirmative action exists in China: not only are the rural primary and secondary schools of horrible quality, constantly understaffed and undersupplied, and rural students less likely to afford the piano lessons and the tutoring and art lessons that a kid in Shanghai might enjoy throughout his childhood -- when applying to college, a kid who somehow comes out on par with the those in the cities will still face discrimination on the sole fact that he comes from the provinces. Imagine that if China used the SAT, a promising kid from the provinces would need a score of 2250 to be placed over an average city resident with a score of 1850, despite the fact that the provinces' own averages are much lower.

In such a case, I wouldn't mind if our financial aid system granted some of these exceptional rural students a chance to enter the University, perhaps replacing just a handful (out of dozens) of the somewhat-conceited Shanghai students that the University might admit each year (yes just for Shanghai only, out of the thousands of students from China that apply to our school). Students from Shanghai, if rejected from our University, can go to some other college to make their future; the bright rural students that can't get admitted into college in their own country are stuck with nowhere else to go. Such a move would be Jeffersonian, after all.

the reluctant Machiavellian teacher

http://www.disciplinehelp.com/teacher/

117 behaviours, plus some pretty interesting analyses (registration required to read all of them but is free), and how to remedy them, and it seems pretty useful for newly-recruited TFA teachers shoved into a classroom and the like but have to deal with a few problem students who ruin it for everyone else eager to learn. The site breaks down each behaviour by "causes" or "needs" and suggests effective ways of remedy, and mistakes to avoid. In short, it suggests ways for a teacher to quickly gain control of a problematic situation, but in a subtle manner, without being unprofessional.

Teachers (or new talented ones at least) didn't join to be a Machiavellian, but perhaps for new teachers in some low-income districts it would be a necessary evil in order to be able to do the sort of thing they joined the corps for, infusing their students with passion and all of that. And many of the tips are rather insightful -- there are apparently promising ways to even make any troublemaker a potentially really productive student.

(-- and of course, I'm still a hopeful undergrad TFA applicant)

wrong turn

from the Instructor's Notes to The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford, Alyssa O'Brien, and Lisa Dresdner:

In his essay “Structure and Form in Non-Narrative Prose,” Richard Larson explains what he sees as the three categories of paragraph theory: paragraphs (1) as expanded sentences, governed by comparable syntactical forces; (2) as self-contained units of writing with their own unique principles; and (3) as parts of the overall discourse, informed by the strategies a writer chooses for the overall piece. 

Reading this passage, my reaction is: Interesting!

And: Help is on its way.

Any one of these theories of the paragraph sounds as if it might be very useful to me in teaching college freshmen how to write a 5-paragraph English paper.

Unfortunately, Larson is not findable on Google, and there's no more to be learned from Lunsford, who buries Larson and his ilk in her next paragraph:

Today, partially as a result of the poststructuralist and feminist critique, scholars are challenging conventional paragraph norms. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V. N. Volosinov notes that “to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing.” Beginning with this provocative insight, Kay Halasek’s book A Pedagogy of Possibility [the Amazon results, not the book] shows the ways in which composition textbooks have traditionally taught the paragraph in strictly traditional ways, as unified, coherent, and tightly linear. But Halasek works to redefine the paragraph as dialogic, as a negotiation among writer, audience, subject, and other textual elements that surround it. Most important, Halasek insists, is for instructors of writing to understand that the process of producing “unified,” “cohesive” paragraphs calls for ignoring, erasing, or otherwise smoothing out a diversity of discourses and voices. Thus teaching students to be aware of this process not only illuminates a great deal about how “good” paragraphs get constructed but also introduces them to a philosophy of language that is not based on current traditional positivism or objectivism.

Even if I agreed with the sentiments expressed in this paragraph, which I don't, the words "to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing" tells me absolutely nothing about what to do in class next Tuesday.

Then there's this:

Today theorists are questioning the ideologies surrounding practices of quotation. An early critique of such practices appears in the work of Bakhtin and Volosinov, who question the ways in which quotation perpetuates a view of language as the property of a radically unique individual rather than as a set of socially constructed systems.

and this:

Volosinov, Valentin N. “Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech.” Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. Here Volosinov mounts a powerful critique of quotation practices, revealing the ways they are inevitably embedded in ideology.

The Everyday Writer costs $57.99 on Amazon.

headlines you don't want to see

Bridge deemed safe despite low rating
Rivertowns Enterprise Volume 36, Number 32 October 28, 2011

Ed was contemplating this front-page headline over breakfast the other morning.

He says what is means is the bridge is not safe, but they're hoping it doesn't collapse during the daytime.