Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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Upvoted because the issue is important and there are intelligent people to discuss the issue here. I regret that the article's key factual statement is "Testing does not motivate engagement, passion, creativity and innovative thinking," without any evidence to back that up. There is no suggestion in the article where to look around the world to find an example of a school system with differing practices that motivate engagement, passion, creativity and innovative thinking. There is a huge research base on science education (it is considered an important national priority in many different countries) all around the world, but the submitted article doesn't discuss what good practice looks like.

The TIMSS study is another international study to look at for information about science education in various countries. Most studies of education policy suffer from the same defect of not having a truly experimental design:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that is, most of those studies don't have random assignment of students to treatment and control groups, but rather look for correlations between academic performance and other observations, with nothing in the study design being able to give assurance of causation.

Science textbooks used in the United States have long been very lousy,

http://www.textbookleague.org/

and as I have had a chance to see science textbooks from other countries, particularly Taiwan, China, and Russia, I hazard the guess that improving textbooks in the United States would help more learners learn science more successfully. General improvement of teaching technique along the lines discussed in another current HN thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2960085

would probably also be helpful, but the policy incentives needed to improve teacher performance are not easy to come by in the United States.

After edit: To answer a question asked in another comment below the submitted article, scientific illiteracy is an important public policy issue because scientific illiteracy in a democratic republic results in voters voting for stupid policies because they don't understand science. The reason to know science isn't just to get a job, but to be a more thoughtful citizen and voter.

To answer a question asked in another comment below the submitted article, scientific illiteracy is an important public policy issue because scientific illiteracy in a democratic republic results in voters voting for stupid policies because they don't understand science.

If this is the case, why don't we strip the scientifically illiterate of the right to vote, or perhaps give their votes a lower weight? Similarly, we could rejigger our immigration policies to raise the average level of scientific knowledge (e.g., deport all low skill immigrants, eliminate family reunification immigration, and give immigration preferences to engineers).

If our main purpose in increasing education is to improve the signal/noise ratio in the electoral process (rather than preparing people for more productive jobs), it seems far cheaper to reduce noise than to increase the signal.

Note: I'm not advocating this policy, I'm merely asking why it isn't a cheaper way to achieve the stated goal.

For the right to vote: Because rather than bringing science into politics, it would bring politics into every facet of science. Funding large amounts of science via politically-based processes has done a good job of that as it is but this would make it orders of magnitude worse.

And what happens when the official government position on a bit of science, upon which your voting rights rest, turns out to be wrong because science, in its capacity as an ever-changing best-current-snapshot of our best guesses has moved on? Oh, and it turns out it is in the best interests of some interest group to keep it wrong just the way it is, because otherwise it might let entire battlefield states sway the other way in the next major election because more of the "wrong people" will now accidentally get that question correct on the next voter survey. Not to mention creating the ultimate "teaching to the test" situation for the voters.

Interesting question, BTW.

For immigration: Isn't that actually our official, legal policy? I don't think we officially import low-skill immigrants. We unofficially do it, wink-wink nudge-nudge.

Because rather than bringing science into politics, it would bring politics into every facet of science.

Simple solution: stick to non-controversial science. There is plenty of it, after all. Focus on atoms and molecules, electricity, archimedes principle, newtonian motion/gravitation, things like that.

It is quite possible to test basic understanding of science without delving into areas where political/religious/tribal beliefs cause cognitive dissonance (e.g., vaccinations, racial disparities in intelligence, evolution).

Even better, one could merely test the ability to follow scientific inference on the basis of hypothetical experiments. That would make it more difficult to "guess the teacher's password".

I don't think we officially import low-skill immigrants.

The majority of immigrants to the US come in under family reunification visas.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?id=1...

I stand corrected on immigration.

I thought of that approach to the science problem, but I just don't think you can hand the big "disqualify voters en masse" stick to the political world and not expect them to use it. It absolutely would start out as you describe, but the pressures to exploit the non-scientific views of any of the major political orientations would just be too strong, and any attempt to fix those problems with further rules cause their own problems. (The first one that leaps to mind is "kick out any question that 60% of the population doesn't get right", but I can still play a lot of nasty political games within that constraint.)

No, US does it officially. One tenant of American immigration is that all countries around the world should be equally represented. US has a diversity quota, which is essentially a lottery, which is purely dependent on luck.

On the other hand, if you are "individual with exceptional ability", but were born in India/China, too bad, we cannot admit you without long wait times of 5+ years.

Thus, while US might provide amnesty (in future) to lot of low skilled labor, it hardly shows any enthusiasm for admitting entrepreneurs or skilled people.

"Testing does not motivate engagement, passion, creativity and innovative thinking"

Obviously there are a lot of different types of testing. But I think Alfie Kohn does a pretty good job covering the literature of competition, intrinsic motivation, standardized testing, etc. Obviously each different style of test has its own strengths and weaknesses, but if we are talking about the types of tests that are most commonly used in school today then I think the statement is generally accurate.

"most of those studies [of educational policy] don't have random assignment of students to treatment and control groups"

There are several different types of studies used in education. The studies that don't have random control groups are just as useful as the ones that do, they just tell us different things. E.g. compare the psychology research in Alfie Kohn's books with the research in Riordan's book Equality And Achievement. Completely different types of research, but both are essential for determining education policy.

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