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Thoughts.
For some reason, when passing from about fifth grade to sixth grade, American children's interest in science and math plummets. I don't actually have any statistics on this, but it's true, and it matches my personal experiences. I wonder:
1. Is this true across cultural barriers? Do schools in Canada, Europe, and Asia find the same 'puberty dip', or is it for some reason isolated to America? If it's true for some and not others, are there commonalities to school structure or curriculum in those places? Do the places that don't have the dip (if there are any) also have commonalities?
2. Why is it? It could be the introduction algebra for the first time for many of the students. Moving into higher math can be a traumatic thing. It could be the emergence of puberty, and a sudden dearth of time that students /want/ so spend studying math and science, which tend to be the hardest subjects to BS, and thus they dislike them. It could be that the change of school (in America, you typically (but not always) go from elementary school in grades K-5, to middle school 6-8, and all the cliques and routines are shaken up. (A good way to check for this may be to look at schools that don't have this structure, and see if the dip happens the same.) Is it because adolescents are especially open to influence by a culture that increasingly views science, and intellectual pursuits, as elitest and hostile to traditional values? (A check for this might be to divide schools up by prevaling community views on science, education, and intellectual pursuits, and see if children from the most hostile communities do worse or not, and if they do worse than the national average, or just in line with it.) Is it a confluence of two or more of these factors?
3. How do we stop it? Increasingly, the world is becoming one that demands knowledge of science and math. Unskilled labor, and even skilled manual labor jobs are dying, and I predict that in the next three decades, they're going to keep dying as robotic technologies become more common and the trend of globalization continues. There's no use in complaining about the jobs going away, any more than the complaints of buggy whip makers stopped the rise of the car. This is not a century in which we want our children to become /less/ educated, /less/ technically minded, and /more/ fearful of science and math.
1. Is this true across cultural barriers? Do schools in Canada, Europe, and Asia find the same 'puberty dip', or is it for some reason isolated to America? If it's true for some and not others, are there commonalities to school structure or curriculum in those places? Do the places that don't have the dip (if there are any) also have commonalities?
2. Why is it? It could be the introduction algebra for the first time for many of the students. Moving into higher math can be a traumatic thing. It could be the emergence of puberty, and a sudden dearth of time that students /want/ so spend studying math and science, which tend to be the hardest subjects to BS, and thus they dislike them. It could be that the change of school (in America, you typically (but not always) go from elementary school in grades K-5, to middle school 6-8, and all the cliques and routines are shaken up. (A good way to check for this may be to look at schools that don't have this structure, and see if the dip happens the same.) Is it because adolescents are especially open to influence by a culture that increasingly views science, and intellectual pursuits, as elitest and hostile to traditional values? (A check for this might be to divide schools up by prevaling community views on science, education, and intellectual pursuits, and see if children from the most hostile communities do worse or not, and if they do worse than the national average, or just in line with it.) Is it a confluence of two or more of these factors?
3. How do we stop it? Increasingly, the world is becoming one that demands knowledge of science and math. Unskilled labor, and even skilled manual labor jobs are dying, and I predict that in the next three decades, they're going to keep dying as robotic technologies become more common and the trend of globalization continues. There's no use in complaining about the jobs going away, any more than the complaints of buggy whip makers stopped the rise of the car. This is not a century in which we want our children to become /less/ educated, /less/ technically minded, and /more/ fearful of science and math.
no subject
And it's not helped that as you said science is more and more being considered the enemy in the US especialy, by a whole range of groups from the religous to the environmental (although there is an argument to say extremists from the latter are really the former)
But science and maths are just not cool.
no subject
Do you guys see the same sort of dip in interest when kids hit the equivalent of the sixth grade? Do you have the elementary-middle-high school setup? Is algebra introduced at that same time?
I'm reluctant to ascribe to the cultural and poltical label too quickly; the culture has to /come/ from somewhere, and I'm wondering if bad experiences with science and math in the middle school years make people perhaps more likely to view science and scientists as hostile figures, rather than the other way around.
no subject
I didn't notice it so much with science and math (and bear in mind this is going back 20 years almost) It was Rping where suddenly it was the evil geeky thing. Also it was 7th grade, which is where we had the split from junior to senior school.
But yeah it was almost a pronouced switch about when suddenly being a "geek" was a giant tabboo.