From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 11 2002 - 18:51:11 MST
This is established fact:
It is well known that East Asian students consistently surpass their British
and American counterparts at maths.
[Hermit: And British children do significantly better than US children -
except for US children of Asian extraction. (AAAS data)]
This is opinion:
The difference is so great that it cannot solely be the result of superior
discipline, motivation or teaching; it must also reflect the nature of their
languages. The vocabulary of the international language will no doubt be
influenced by such findings."
Here is a different opinion, mine:
The reason that students of Asian extraction tend to do do well (even when
they live in the US) and even when the <em>don't speak an Asian
language</em> is that:
their parents recognize the importance of mathematics and ensure that their
children grasp and drill in mathematics science while American children are
watching television, playing games and taking feel-good, no effort subjects.
The effect of this can be seen not only in the hours spent on doing maths
and science homework [http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/condition98/c9837d05.html]
but also in rules for television use. I don't know of any Asian family that
does not have rules for "TV time". Yet here are some statistics on US
television use. [http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/condition98/c9837d04.html]
A second major difference is that Asian education systems are designed to
continuously challenge and test children to teach them how to think and to
ensure that they comprehend what they are learning. American schools tend
not to drill children (they want maths to be easy) or to test them (they
don't want IQ 80 Johnny to feel disavantaged). The relative worth of these
very different family environments and didactic methods become very clear in
the first year of undergraduate studies where entrants at Asian universities
are expected to qualify for advancement (and will generally leave the
University if they do not) while vast numbers of American children fail
mathematics 101 courses and in consequence redo their first year. Frequently
more than once.
While I am not sure whether the following tests have been performed in the
US, careful analysis of South African university entrants with failing maths
grades reflected that there was almost invariably some fundamental
deficiency caused by having missed a key concept early in their schooling
and having never comprehended the subject from that point on - causing all
subsequent schooling to be wasted (Wits and UniStellenbosch).
Pre-undergraduate remedial teaching for "Previously and Currently
Disadvantaged Students" was introduced in an attempt to correct this
problem. The remedial program consists of a one year bridging course
provided by the universities, where the entire 12 year school syllabus (from
counting to calculus) is taught in a time period of 3 months to two years
using instruct (explain the concept), drill (make sure they recognize it
when they see it), test (make sure they understand and can apply it) cycles.
Students advance at their own pace and have to complete each prerequisite to
a suitable level of proficiency before they may advance to the next level.
Engineering students, even those who had not taken more than 5 years of
school mathematics, passing through this program tended to score an average
of 25% to 35% better than their peers from "good" conventional schools. This
has resulted in an ever increasing number of non-Disadvantaged Students also
enlisting into the bridging program and in consequence, the quality of
teaching in Engineering Schools operating these programs has been greatly
improved.
Based on some tutoring (based on a program developed by my sister) I have
provided to the children of friends (here in the US) I would suggest that US
universities have a similar problem, and that the reintroduction of annual
examinations is not going to be sufficient to resolve the issue. What is
needed is a system such as described above - not more fiddling with the
environment or some "new" language (which I suggest would further
disadvantage the students as South African experience was that home language
teaching was much more successful than 2nd language teaching).
As Bertrand Russell put it (paraphrased from memory), what is needed is
notions, not notations.
Regards
Hermit
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