Thoughts.

[pyrephox]

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.

Comments

[usekh.livejournal.com]

I am probably not the best one to ask, being a geek and all :) To be honest I think it is mostly social. These are geek things and most adolescents would rather lose a limb than be considered a geek.

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.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

Sure we do! They can then be a permanently oppressed underclass.

I for one welcome our new technocratic overlords. Especially if they'll give us a new season of Survivor.
[/sarcasm]

[the-fool76.livejournal.com]

Huh, never seen that myself, but then I have a very unusual educational background. I can say that in the private school I went to at that time there were probably as many people interested in math as any of the other subjects.

Though I did note during my brief stint in public school right before it that there was a definite lacking in the interest in math among the students. I can't say I blame them though. It was as if the class was taught in such a way as to specificaly suck any and all interest from the subject.

I first learned my math skills in a montesory school. The style of learning there was very much hands on. There were no teachers standing in front of a class and lecturing. We had all sorts of 'toys' that we used to visualy and tactily see how the numbers interacted. We literly played around with the numbers.

Having seen how math is delt with in the majority of schools and comparing that with how I learned it, Its no wonder to me that come HS most kids just give up on it. Its boring, dull, and like you said, you can't just BS your way through it.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

In reflecting, I truly don't believe we're going to ever reach the point of death of unskilled labor, simply because somewhere it will ALWAYS be cheaper to pull a human off the street than to install a robot to do the job. I can not see McDonald's going to fully robotic cashiers, for instance. Well, maybe McD's. But not a smaller, more local chain.

There's also the relatively unskilled labor jobs that require human interaction: and until we have a solid and powerful AI (that I haven't been able to take a sledgehammer to), we'll always need folks who can take phone calls, and such.

[holyprophetril.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. In my experience, that never really happens in Singapore. (For one, the math curriculum is faster by one or two years.) Culture is...very math/science focused, on the grounds that if you do math or science it's definitely profitable, as opposed to a degree in philosophy or literature or something like that. I suspect it has some element of social pressure involved.

Token Chinese non-China response, if that helps! Though I think China is around the same, too, everyone there is ridiculously good at math compared to the west.

They say it has to do with linguistic factors, too - english counts it as 'twelve, thirteen, fourteen', while chinese does it 'ten-two, ten-three, ten-four'. Apparently they asked kids to count out twelve blocks, and the chinese kids did it with a group of ten and two, while the kids who did english did it with, well, one group of twelve. Etc.

[(Anonymous)]

It's boredom. Most US math curricula teach practically no new material in grades 6 through 8. You get fractions in fifth, and then nothing challenging until Algebra in 9th. Me, I was in the enriched math class in 6th grade and then skipped up to Algebra in 7th - so I gained interest in math while everyone else was losing theirs.