Think-Thank-Thunk

There’s an interesting discussion going on right now over at Freakonomics about whether or not grades in school are a good predictor of future success.

The discussion centers around these five premises:

1. The definition of success is elusive.
2. How do you measure the validity of grades?
3. Most middle schools and high schools put so much emphasis on homework versus actual understanding that they are measuring behavior and compliance far more than what has been learned.
4. Creativity and creative people tend to mess up metrics at each level.
5. Any research I could find was done at some university which tended to bias results using university metrics of success.

Its a good discussion with some smart participants. Some of it makes me bristle a bit, but I guess that’s healthy. I particularly enjoyed this quote:

If you look at those who have commonly advanced our thinking, our abilities, our technologies, and our economy (through business sense), many did poorly in schools, yet they persisted. The persistence may have been the critical element, and it would have perhaps been lost had they been encouraged more.

So does this mean we need more of those mediocre middle school and high school teachers acting as the forge to both create the worker bees we need, as well as the best [and most successful] by trying to destroy them?

A new brain study suggests that children under the age of 8 aren’t really able to learn from their mistakes. This Dutch study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, illustrates that younger brains learn differently.

The brains of adults and 12- and 13-year-olds are more strongly activated by negative feedback, but the brains of eight- and nine-year-olds barely registered it and instead were triggered much more strongly by positive feedback.

Scientists conducting the study were surprised at the results. “We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well. Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?”