I heard this on the radio this morning and thought it was interesting:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/npr.php?id=164793058

Would love to know what others think.

That is a very interesting article/radio show segment!
I think Americans absolutely do think that a child's success is simply due to intelligence and not due to effort. I have heard it played the other way too- that in many Asian cultures, the parent thinks that every child can ace every test if they just try hard enough, not accounting for the role intelligence or learning disabilities, etc. plays in success. Probably the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.

I liked the article. Thank you.

I've always thought this to be a necessary part of instruction, and I've used it with DS7 as much as possible. It's one of the reasons I'm probably going to use Art of Problem Solving with him soon.

I did enjoy the article, thanks.

What concerns me about my son is that he accomplishes so much without putting much effort into it. I worry that he's NOT learning to struggle. About a year ago, he took a belt test for martial arts and failed. I was actually glad that he failed so that he'd have to work to pass it the next time. I think sometimes gifted kids don't develop much of a work ethic because everything comes so easily to them.

When he was younger, it was easier to work with him and present him with activites to help him learn to work at something. As he has gotten older, though, it has gotten harder, both because of time contraints and because of his own attitudes and willingness to be directed by Mom.

Also, it is hard to praise him for things that he achieves without much effort. For example, at a recent piano competition, he earned a "superior" ranking. Even he said "I didn't work enough on this to get that ranking". So, how to praise for effort instead of accomplishment.

I can see a lot of sides to this story.


Yes, I agree completely. Here's an example of the two two extremes. But based on what I read, I wonder if the study was oversimplified.


Caveat: I'm not sure what they mean by "impossible." Impossible as in, "division by zero is impossible?" Or "it was a tensor calculus problem, which is effectively impossible for six-year-old kids?" Also, did anyone ask for help or look in classroom math books? Was this allowed? The article doesn't say.


If the American kids gave up just because they "hadn't had this," then maybe they gave up too easily. If the Japanese kids kept plugging away just because it's what you're supposed to do, then maybe they didn't know when to quit. But the article doesn't show the problem, so it's impossible to know if it was over their heads by just a bit, over their heads a lot, or was actually unsolvable. Giving up would be the correct strategy for a bunch of first graders presented with tensor calculus, whereas plugging away would have been appropriate if it had been a basic multiplication problem.

Example: I have a question that needs to be studied via statistical analysis. I think I know the overall answer, but I can't be sure, so I'm going to pay some statisticians at a local university to help me. I'm not giving up; I'm recognizing that sometimes it's better to consult people who have expertise that I don't. People do this all the time. So when do kids learn when to ask for help?

Alternatively, I once worked with a guy who would fold when he was presented with something outside his narrow comfort zone. This was very frustrating for the people around him.

Err. I seem to have my reviewer cap on today.

Repeating Iucounu's quote:

I completely agree with this. Like many children discussed here, DS found school to be quite easy.

When he showed an interest in chess, we encouraged it in part because this is an activity where we knew he would have to struggle. While strong for his age, he mostly plays adults at his skill level which means he ends up losing about half the time, which I think is good for him (even though he doesn't). His reward comes from eventually beating these opponents consistently, as his skills improve.

We also encourage him to play sports with other kids in the neighborhood, even though that is a distinct area of weakness for him (he inherited my lack of coordination!).

Thanks Val -
I agree that I would need to understand more about the study to conclude that the "impossible problem" study supports the idea that there are differences in persistence versus differences in other factors - like self-assertiveness.

But I do think that a few ideas are very worthy of consideration here... the one that I have been "struggling" with lately is, "what do I tell my child about her own abilities" and how might that explanation shape her future learning? Last week dd7 came home from school and asked where she got her ability from - mom or dad? She both assumed she had special ability and she assumed it was genetic. She has been asking me a lot of these types of questions lately so I am assuming it might be the hot topic on the playground. "You get your ability from your dad" vs. "you know so much because you love to read and you read a lot more than other kids" are two very different answers - both of them with quite a bit of truth to them. This is further complicated by the fact that I have one kid who is very typical in her ability...so I almost want to downplay the genetic part and emphasize the hard work and practice part for all.

I also like the idea (wearing my teacher hat now) of teaching students how to struggle - to reward struggle, to show how a student might struggle and then master a concept. I admit, that when I ask a question or have someone come to the front of the class I will call on the student that I think knows the correct answer... and, if a student gets it wrong, I fairly quickly call on another student instead of forcing someone to explain their thinking until they arrive at the right answer. I might re-think that. There is such value in that.

As for the idea that a very smart kid might not have enough opportunities to struggle - I have not found that. Even if school is a breeze, there are other struggles - with "managing emotions" as I like to call it in my house or with running (a particular challenge for my oldest). It might be helpful to conceptualize those things as opportunities to learn how to struggle.

mom123, I saw a reference here a few months ago for Carol Dweck's Mindset book that gets into some of this sort of issue. I found the book interesting if somewhat repetitive in her examples.

I saw things I was saying incidentally that would lead down that low drive path. I've tried to shift to words like potential and interest.

Thanks Zen - I'll check it out. What we tell our kids about themselves is so important in how they ultimately will come to view themselves. I would love for them to think of themselves as being smart - but seeing themselves as both smart and hardworking is probably even better.

I am not sure where I fall on the spectrum of having them think there are things that they are naturally good at and things they are not naturally good at vs. things they have worked at and things they must just work harder, for longer, at.

I doubt it. Kids test their self-perceptions against reality, and what you tell your children about themselves is more likely to affect how they view *you* in the long run.

I wonder why people think it is more pro-social to believe one's accomplishments are due to effort rather than ability. Believing the former can cause you to regard less-accomplished people as lazy.

Ai don't get what they're saying. Anything you teach someone is just beyond what they know how to do now. Is it because one way show ases the incremental effort to learn and the other tries to present a 'whole to part ' lesson that they show off the end results and fill in the gaps? (or) Are they trying to say tht Japan raises the bar higher than we do?

sounds like another verse of nclb. i googled
Absolutely nothing. The teacher teaches at the middle level of the class in a mixed level class as Japan considers itself an egalitarian society and everyone is kept in the same class regardless of ability (in public schools) and treated equally. Slower kids might go to juku to keep up with classes and gifted kids might find their classes too boring or slow, and take extra classes or attend juku to keep stimulated. If classes are too easy for them its possible they will drop out or stop attending classes.
Paul will know more about this than I due to the amount of time spent in Japan, but kids will go to a certain high school based on their academic ability (or lack thereof). That seems to be about as far as it goes.

and their system is not flexible enough to acomidate kids who could do something better with their time

<>

source:
google + What does Japan do with their gifted students?
http://forum.gaijinpot.com/archive/index.php/t-16778.html

The "impossible problem" thing rang a bell, and indeed I'd read about it in Stevenson and Stigler's book The Learning Gap (which is quite interesting). In it, they write:

So I think this isn't something we're likely to find in the published literature: it sounds as though they did a pilot for something that might have turned into a full study, and abandoned it as described.

On the next page of the book, they describe a different study that was carried out, though, in which American and Japanese children were asked to solve as many problems as possible in 20 mins. The American children attempted many more questions than the Japanese ones, but correctly solved a much lower proportion of them, getting a lower score overall.

As for what the impossible task could have been, I think if I were designing it, it might be something like this:

Find a number x (integer or fraction) such that x^2(x-3) = 3(x-1).

(Depending on the age of the children you might spell out the equation in terms of "the number multiplied by itself" etc. - provided the children can add and multiply fractions, they can attempt this, and provided they do not know enough algebra to have encountered or invented the rational zeroes theorem, they can't prove that there isn't one. They can get tantalisingly close, though, which might well keep them trying!)

The book I landed at when googling this, The Teaching and Learning of Mathematics at University Level: An ICMI Study
edited by Derek Holton, has a list of beliefs about mathematics that it says have been documented in American children, including:

This is key, I would suggest: it's not so much that the American children are lazy, more that they have simply never met the concept of a maths problem they can't solve quickly. The Schoenfeld reference supporting this is

Schoenfeld, A. H. (1988). When good teaching leads to bad results: the disasters of "well-taught" mathematics classes. Educational Psychologist 23(2) 145-166.

Which thanks to the wonders of google we can find here. It looks to me like a must-read paper... but I have to get on with the day job now!

Thank you for this link - the article is extremely interesting.

The odd thing is, 1) I don't like Everyday Math, 2) I can easily agree with this article, and 3) trying to fix the problems exposed in the article seems to lead to EM.

I wonder if it may just come down to the fact that arithmetic and mathematical (logical) thinking are only loosely related- in the same way as reading and history. You can certainly use each in teaching the other, but the learning goals are very different. I absolutely want my kids to experience mathematical discovery, but I'm not convinced that multidigit multiplication is an algorithm I want them to have to figure out on their own.

It seems there may be something profound here. Maybe more thought will bring it to the surface.

Heh, I had this same thought. I've TAUGHT EDM, and don't like it generally or for mathy kids specifically, but there are certain aspects of it that are... well... TRYING to address issues that existed in "traditional" math curricula. I'd argue that they don't do it well, that they then ignore a lot of important stuff in the process, and that the sum result is a poorer math education, BUT...

Let's take long division. The partial-quotients method is a pain in the butt to actually use on any functional level. It does, however, guide not-quite-struggling-but-not-quite-getting-it kids through the process of manipulating bigger numbers using division and multiplication. It is, IMHO, a good things to sit and puzzle over and struggle with to really understand what's going on when you're dividing multi-digit numbers if you don't already have a conceptual idea as to what's going on. It's fiddly. It builds conceptual understanding of how numbers fit into other numbers, and how numbers multiply, and how the two are connected. If I had an otherwise math-OK kid who was struggling to understand exactly why big numbers behave the way they do when divided, or why an answer that's off by a factor of ten was incorrect ("this answer doesn't make sense because blah blah blah...")

BUT. BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT. It's not an effective way to actually divide. When I taught EDM, I watched my students, who I knew darn well were capable of dividing, laboring through the partial-quotients method. I taught them "traditional" division in a half hour, and because they all had a good understanding of how it worked, it just clicked. EDM, and I say this as someone who is not a huge fan as a teacher or parent, uses things that could be decent "learning process" tools, but just... doesn't go any further. If the learning is in the struggle, that's all well and good, but after students have wrestled with concepts and emerged victorious, there needs to be a moment where the students sit back, assess what they learned in that struggle, and then attain mastery.

EDM, in its spiraling "wisdom," never seems to get there. The kids wrestle with something (in this case dividing larger numbers), gain a bit of understanding, and then are whisked on to the next topic. So now you've got a group of kids who have an understanding of how to divide multi-digit numbers (hopefully), but haven't been guided to the point where they can use that knowledge.

"Exploring," aka fiddling around or struggling with the numbers or whatever else you want to call it, is a good thing. EDM just doesn't follow up that fiddling with a nice "now you understand what's going on, let's take a few days and learn an easy, fool-proof way to get this done." <-- All this and many, many other issues I have with the curriculum, of course.