http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.htm
Is There a 'Tiger Mother' Effect? Asian Students Study Twice as Many Hours, Analysis Finds

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The [Tiger Mother] hullaballoo prompted Valerie Ramey, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, to ask: What did the data have to say?

Chua's book, said Ramey, struck a nerve in part because of the stereotype of Asian academic success. And statistics back up that stereotype. The most recent academic test scores from the Program for International Student Assessment show that four of the world's five top-scoring countries are Asian countries. (Finland is the non-Asian exception). In California, Asians represent 12 percent of high school graduates, but one-third of admissions to the University of California and almost half of all undergraduate admissions to UC San Diego.

And why does this matter? Doing better in school, Ramey said, still leads to better financial outcomes over the long haul: High school performance is an important determinant in admission to college, and going to college significantly raises one's income. The income gap between college and high school graduates, Ramey added, has been widening since the 1980s, and the latest U.S. Census figures show that Asians as a group are much more likely to have college degrees and also have much higher household incomes.

To begin to answer the question of whether Asian parents and children were behaving differently, Ramey analyzed the American Time Use Survey. A project of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the survey measures the time use of thousands of individuals from 2003 to 2009 based on time diaries. It includes data on individuals ages 15 and older, so Ramey concentrated her analysis on the time use of high school students, college students and parents.

Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree.

The average Asian high-school student does not fit every aspect of Chua's prescription for her daughters, Ramey discovered. In particular, the average Asian student spends no more time practicing and performing music, about the same amount of time watching TV, and more time playing on the computer. But Asians do spend less time on sports and socializing than any of the other ethnic groups. The biggest difference, though, is in time spent working at a job: White students spend 5.8 hours per week on average, and Asian students spend only 2.4 hours.

Ramey next wondered: Do Asian students "coast" once they escape the grips of their Tiger Moms? The gap is not so extreme among fulltime college students, Ramey said, but it is still the case that Asian students spend more time studying: 15-plus hours per week in comparison with white students who spend a little over 10 hours per week, and with black and Hispanic students who spend less time.

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13 hours a week is less than 2 hours a day, which I do not consider excessive. The paper discussed is at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Tiger_Mothers.pdf .

Except that when you assume that the study hours shouldn't be averaged over summer vacation, it goes up. 13*52/36 school weeks = nearly 19 hours a week during the school year.

I was complaining about the spelling busyhomework taking DD8 3 hours (after I did a big chunk of it for her) this week, and that it would have taken her at least 5 hours to do the parts she was capable of finishing independently, and my (Asian) coparent said "When I was a kid, we had 3 hours of homework every night! And if the teachers didn't assign that much, your parent would assign it instead!" Except that she didn't, because her parents cared nothing for academics, and she went to school in the US starting in 5th grade, and all the stories she tells about high school involve cutting class.

My response was that she was welcome to make DD do 3 hours of homework a night if she wanted to be the homework parent, but that she had to manage to get the homework and snack / dinner and personal hygiene all done between DD arriving home at 4:15 (or 5:45 on Tuesday swim days, or 6:15 on Thursday swim days) and going to bed at 8:30. And that if she chose to keep DD up late to get more work done, she would need to be the get-her-on-the-bus parent, too, because I'm unwilling to deal with dragging an exhausted kid out of bed.

I would agree that three hours of homework a night might be a bit much for an 8 year old. The study in question was looking at high school and college students, not 8 year olds, and 19 hours a week still averages out to less than three hours a day, since we are including the weekends. I think that is a very reasonable workload that would certainly allow for some extracurriculars.

For college students, certainly. A full course load at college has 15 classroom hours a week, and you're expected to do much of the work outside class. Heck, going by the 2-hours-out-for-each-hour-in, a college student "ought" to have 30 hours a week of out-of-class work, and full-time college comes out to 45 hours of time per week. Note that the high end of actual work in college appears to have been about 15 hours of class and 15 hours of homework / studying, so only 30 hours a week of total time.

High school kids have 6 hours a day / 30 hours a week of in-class work, and an extra 19 hours a week of homework / studying takes them up to 49. I can't come up with any logic whereby high school ought to be a 46% heavier workload than college, or whereby 14-18yos ought to be more capable of handling that workload than 18-22yos.

My Chinese friends also put their kids in "Chinese School" for some subjects, mostly math and Mandarin. These are 2-4 hours per week as well.

In my other post about my HS friends, all dropped sports or one major interest in their HS years to focus on studies.

20% of my kids' public school here in california are Asian.
Here is an observation I noted last week when volunteering in his third grade class. They were doing worksheets about money (which I complained about in an earlier post- they are in THIRD GRADE!). Anyway... There are 4 Asian kids in his class- 2 Vietnamese, 2 Chinese (plus a Korean boy who just dropped out of the sky from Korea- he spokes no English yet so I'm not including him here).
2 kids were born here and 2 were raised here since babies.
They were all 4 excellent at math (2 girls, 2 boys). However, they had to do problem sets that required intuitive thought- they had to come up with the least number of coin combinations to make, say, 91 cents. 2 did not understand the directions and freaked out even though I explained it and even did two of the problems for them. The other two couldn't get it- they all could add up to 91 cents using 91 pennies or something like that, but they couldn't think of 3 quarters, 1 dime, a nickel, and a penny.
The other, non-Asian students did.
I thought that was so fascinating- they are not from the same countries, etc.
The Asian kids I know do lots and lots of extra homework, Kumon, etc. There are few Asians in our cub scout pack, none in the musicals my kids do, 100% asian with our piano concerts... It's pretty typical; I guess it works for them.

I've seen those problems, and have never had the slightest idea even how to start going about them.

I realized just now that they're saying "count back the change for a 9 cent purchase paid for with a dollar bill." And that's trivial - a penny makes 10, a nickel is 15, a dime is 25, 3 quarters makes a dollar.

I don't think it's an Asian thing. Maybe a literal-mindedness thing. The only reason it occurred to me that that's how you solve it is that DD's teacher taught them how to count back change this past week as "something most grownups don't know," and DD knew I knew how to do it from cashiering in college.

Although it may not be an Asian thing, it was very interesting that all of the Asian kids were very good at math (adding/subtracting) yet all could not problem solve. Even when shown how to do it, they could not catch. Other, non-Asian kids who were weaker at math caught on.

Just out of curiosity, how are you supposed to do it? What method did you show them? (I ask primarily because I can't think of any method of doing it other than as a counting-back-change problem, and I know DD had that kind of problem as a first grader, long before they had subtraction or counting back change.)

Hmmm- well, I suggested: Start with the biggest coins. So if you had to make 91 cents- let's say, a fifty cent piece and 25 cent piece; that's 75 cents, so you need 16 more. How do you make 16? A dime, a nickel,a peny. You could do 3 nickels and a penny but that's more coins, not fewer.
I've always been good at problem solving, LOL. Anyway... some of the kids just picked it up right away... (my son did at least).

Extending a sample size of 4 Asian kids into an Asian stereotype? Wow........ I personally know of several Asian kids who solved this type of problem at age 5, without any help whatsoever. Being good in 3rd-grade math, should at least be about knowing how and when to use addition and subtraction, and more......., instead of merely doing addition and subtraction as a mechanical process, which can even be done by sight at age 3. Those Asian kids you mentioned don't fall into this category of "being good in math". And most likely, they will have trouble pretty soon in learning to do long-form division, which would follow a similar line of reasoning as this type of problem.

The Wikipedia article on this is good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-making_problem
Notice that it's a design feature of the particular coin system of the US that the "greedy algorithm", always picking the largest coin that will fit in the amount left to make, will work, and it is not obvious that the coin system has this useful property. The people who jumped at the solution provided by the greedy algorithm in these particular cases - how did they convince themselves and other people that they'd actually solved the problem, i.e. that there couldn't be a smaller set of coins that would add up to the same amount? It's not as hard to prove that an individual solution is optimal as it is to prove the general case, of course, but it still needs to be proved in each case (if you haven't either proved, or I suppose been given permission not to prove, the general case). Did they do it?

It wouldn't surprise me if the students who did less well at this problem were actually showing better mathematical understanding, i.e., understood more about what they needed to do to solve it!

The "greedy algorithm" would work when, every higher-value coin is an exact integer multiple of every lower-value coin, then in this case, each higher-value coin can represent an exact number of each lower-value coin, and consequently the higher the value, the less number of coins necessary. This is only an elaboration of the concepts of integer multiplication in probably grade-2 math, which shows that the "greedy algorithm" would work for the sets of coins {1c, 5c, 10c, 50c} or {1c, 5c, 25c, 50c}.

Now for the mixture of 10c and 25c, (a) "greedy algorithm" would work at or above, 5* 10c= 2* 25c= 50c, because of the concepts of integer multiplication again; and (b) "greedy algorithm" would also work below 50c for the set of coins {1c, 5c, 25c}, because of the concepts of integer multiplication yet again, with the modification that every pair of 5c canbe replaced by one 10c.

So the entire line of reasoning is within the concepts of integer multiplication, i.e. if those kids have really mastered grade-2 math, let alone already in grade 3, they should have no problem in understanding or even discovering the "greedy algorithm" on their own.

I didn't say that a proof wasn't in principle accessible to them; I said that it wasn't obvious. In particular, if the students in question didn't indicate that they were going through some such proof - and surely, previous posters would have remarked on it if they had - then I don't believe they had a proof in mind. (In fact, if your kids go to a school where many 3rd graders would be capable of producing one, I expect many people here would be envious!)

Admittedly, now that I reread the earlier post, I see that some of the students described as being weak at problem-solving apparently didn't understand what they were being asked to do, which speaks against my hypothesis that they might actually have had a better understanding of the problem than those who leapt at an algorithm and (I surmise) didn't engage with the question of why their algorithm worked.

Incidentally, DH pointed out to me that the UK's pre-decimalisation coin system had the property that the greedy algorithm did not always work.

OK, I follow how that's done, but without an explicit explanation of how to do it, I don't think I'd have ever come up with it.

Given that the Wikipedia entry on "greedy algorithm" itself says "Greedy algorithms mostly (but not always) fail to find the globally optimal solution," I'm not sure I see any value in teaching it as a rote problem-solving technique to kids, other than as a parlor trick that coincidentally happens to always work with US coins.

Well... that may be true, but if you don't know how to solve a packing-type problem - or, come to that, a problem of any other kind where it isn't clear how to solve the whole problem, but you can compare possible next steps and see which makes most progress in some sense - a greedy algorithm is a jolly good place to start. If nothing else, thinking about how such an approach can fail may give you insight into the problem. For giving change specifically, it works for pretty much any modern system of coins; the fact that it didn't work for UK pre-decimalisation is an anomaly.

Discussed this with DS and his main contribution was amusement at the name. He couldn't believe that a greedy algorithm was really so called because it's greedy, rather than because it was invented by someone called Grede!

As I illustrated in my earlier message, the entire line of reasoning is within the concepts of integer multiplication in probably grade-2 math. So the label of "being good in math" and especially for the kids already in grade 3, should only be reserved for those knowing how and when to apply such concepts in different types of problems. And even more so, because this is a gifted forum and presumably we may steer the discussion toward gifted kids.

Then how do I know at least several Asian kids can solve this type of problems at age 5, without any help whatsoever? Simply because I asked them to explain after arriving at the correct answers. They may not have illustrated the line of reasoning as I did in my earlier message, although in a more clumsy 5-year-old manner. But as long as they can point out that each higher-value coin, can represent an exact number of each lower-value coin, and consequently the higher the value, the less number of coins are necessary, then they have implicitly discovered the "greedy algorithm" on their own. And incidentally, these kids have been studying grade-3 math at the age of 5 and apparently have mastered grade-2 math.



I suppose we may accept as fact that most 3rd-graders don't master grade-2 math at all, and many people here supplement their kids with more advanced curriculum, than merely depend on the school.

From a math perspective, the line of reasoning behind solving problems, is far more important than the mechanical process. This is one reason that some people avoid Kumon, because of the excessive repetitions. Many people even find Saxon overly redundant. But from a practical perspective, everybody can learn how to use coins, without really understanding the math involved.