asian vs jews iq intelligence
This
same pattern of relative Asian and Jewish performance on aptitude exams
generally appears in the other major states whose recent NMS
semifinalist lists I have located and examined, though there is
considerable individual variability, presumably due to the particular
local characteristics of the Asian and Jewish populations. Across six
years of Florida results, Asian students are more than twice as likely
to be high scorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with the
disparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. The relative advantage
of Asians is a huge factor of 5.0 in Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in
Illinois Asians still do 150 percent as well as Jews. Among our largest
states, only in Texas is the Asian performance as low as 120 percent,
although Jews are the group that actually does much better in several
smaller states, usually those in which the Jewish population is tiny.
LinkAs
noted earlier, NMS semifinalist lists are available for a total of
twenty-five states, including the eight largest, which together contain
75 percent of our national population, as well as 81 percent of American
Jews and 80 percent of Asian-Americans, and across this total
population Asians are almost twice as likely to be top scoring students
as Jews. Extrapolating these results to the nation as a whole would
produce a similar ratio, especially when we consider that Asian-rich
California has among the toughest NMS semifinalist qualification
thresholds. Meanwhile, the national number of Jewish semifinalists comes
out at less than 6 percent of the total based on direct inspection of
the individual names, with estimates based on either the particularly
distinctive names considered by Sailer or the full set of such highly
distinctive names used by Weyl yielding entirely consistent figures.
Weyl had also found this same relative pattern of high Jewish academic
performance being greatly exceeded by even higher Asian performance,
with Koreans and Chinese being three or four times as likely as Jews to
reach NMS semifinalist status in the late 1980s, though the overall Asian numbers were still quite small at the time.[56]
asian gifted iq performance
This evidence of a massively disproportionate Asian presence among
top-performing students only increases if we examine the winners of
national academic competitions, especially those in mathematics and
science, where judging is the most objective. Each year, America picks
its five strongest students to represent our country in the
International Math Olympiad, and during the three decades since 1980,
some 34 percent of these team members have been Asian-American, with the
corresponding figure for the International Computing Olympiad being 27
percent. The Intel Science Talent Search, begun in 1942 under the
auspices of the Westinghouse Corporation, is America’s most prestigious
high school science competition, and since 1980 some 32 percent of the
1320 finalists have been of Asian ancestry (see Appendix F).
Given that Asians accounted for just 1.5 percent of the population in
1980 and often lived in relatively impoverished immigrant families, the
longer-term historical trends are even more striking. Asians were less
than 10 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad winners during the 1980s, but rose
to a striking 58 percent of the total during the last thirteen years
2000–2012. For the Computing Olympiad, Asian winners averaged about 20
percent of the total during most of the 1990s and 2000s, but grew to 50
percent during 2009–2010 and a remarkable 75 percent during 2011–2012.
The statistical trend for the Science Talent Search finalists, numbering
many thousands of top science students, has been the clearest: Asians
constituted 22 percent of the total in the 1980s, 29 percent in the
1990s, 36 percent in the 2000s, and 64 percent in the 2010s. In
particular science subjects, the Physics Olympiad winners follow a
similar trajectory, with Asians accounting for 23 percent of the winners
during the 1980s, 25 percent during the 1990s, 46 percent during the
2000s, and a remarkable 81
DEVIATION IQ AND RATIO IQ
a ratio IQ of 190+ becomes a deviation IQ of 168+;
a ratio IQ of 200+ becomes a deviation IQ of 174+;
a ratio IQ of 200+ becomes a deviation IQ of 174+;
She has an IQ of 160–174 being 200–203 in ratio IQ.
At
age one, she was able to speak simple sentences and identify letters on
flash cards. At age two, Edith knew the entire alphabet. By age 4.5
four, she read straight through volume one of the Encyclopedia
Britannica (?), and by age 5 had read through the entire set.
Impressive
but a deviation IQ 200 should be learning calculus, multiple languages
and even abstract algebra at ages 2 through 5 teetering on the PhD
level. Like Subourno Bari, Kim Ung Yong etc. It is possible to peak
later though (Gabriel See clear a graduate textbook in a few days at age
7) but it didn't as far as I know.
Poor Chinese in Britain vs British born IQ STUDENTS SOCIO ECONOMIC
Pupils of
Chinese descent from disadvantaged homes are almost three times as
likely as white working class pupils to get five good GCSEs, a study
shows.
The analysis suggests a poor child’s chances of achieving at school depends heavily on their ethnicity.
Across
all disadvantaged pupils, white British children had the poorest
performance at the age of 16 last year – with only 28 per cent getting
good grades, according to the Sutton Trust, an education think tank.
In comparison, 74 per cent of similarly hard-up Chinese children got good grades – making them the highest-achieving group.
rural chinese iq
Would it be too hypothetical to argue that the inability to do no better
than seventh-grade math at age seventeen argues for an individual IQ
somewhat below 100? On the recent international test of
thirteen-year-olds noted in Chapter 5, in which mainland Chinese
students were scoring 80 on seventh-grade math tests compared to the
U.S. 55, and given these often rural Chinese were scoring at about 101
IQ even with an as yet undeveloped educational system, the above
estimate for an average U.S. intelligence may not be far off the mark.
china vietnam imperial colonial colonization
The Imperial Chinese tributary system (Chinese: 朝貢體系) was the network of
trade and foreign relations between China and its tributaries, which
helped to shape much of East Asian affairs. Contrary to other tribute
systems around the world, the Chinese tributary system consisted almost
entirely of mutually-beneficial economic relationships,[1] and member
states of the system were politically autonomous and, in almost all
cases, independent as well.[2] Through the tribute system, which
facilitated frequent economic and cultural exchange, the various
dynasties of Imperial China "deeply influenced the culture of the
peripheral countries and also drew them into a China-centered, or
'sino-centric', international order."[3] The Imperial tributary system
shaped foreign policy and trade for over 2000 years of Imperial China's
economic and cultural dominance of the region, and thus played a huge
role in the History of Asia, and the History of East Asia in
particular.[4]Recently, some scholars have argued that it is misleading
to think of a millennial tribute "system," rather than a loose set of
expectations and precedents; they suggest that the system flourished
only in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.[5]
pisa 2015 not comparable methodology east asia
Falls in Asian high-flyers' math scores could simply be down to switch to computer tests
According to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study from 2015, the global top-ranked performers in maths have all seen falls in the percentage of their pupils achieving high test scores in the subject over the previous three years.
That apparent decline in the ability of East Asian maths superpowers to stretch the brightest could have wider implications. Schools in the US and the UK have invested heavily in emulating the Asian maths “mastery” approach.
But now Andreas Schleicher, the official in charge of Pisa, has said that this fall may not be due to a drop in the performance of these Asian powerhouses. He said he was looking into whether the decline could be explained by the fact that Pisa used computers for the main tests for the first time in 2015.
In other words, data that is clearly presented as “comparable” in the study may not be comparable at all.
The admission has led critics to question the whole reliability of Pisa and to call for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which runs the study, to be more open about its limitations.
According to the 2015 Pisa study, all six of the top-ranked systems in maths with comparable data saw falls in the percentages of their pupils with top levels of attainment in the subject, compared with the previous 2012 study.
South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong experienced respective declines
of 10, 9 and 7 percentage points in the proportions of students with the
ability to select and evaluate appropriate strategies for complex
problems. Singapore, Japan and Macao also saw drops.
China, the other top-ranked performer in maths, had no comparable data as it entered only as Shanghai in 2012.When asked why he thought these education superpowers had all dropped in performance, Mr Schleicher admitted they might not have done so at all. The OECD education director suggested that the move to computer-based tests might be the reason.
“Further analysis is needed to establish the causes of decline in the share of top performers in some of the highest-performing countries,” he said.
He said although the study had ensured that, “on average”, pupils taking paper- and computer-based tests scored the same, that might not be true for some groups of high-performing pupils.
“It remains possible that a particular group of students – such as students scoring [high marks] in mathematics on paper in Korea and Hong Kong – found it more difficult than [students with the same marks] in the remaining countries to perform at the same level on the computer-delivered tasks,” he said.
“Such country-by-mode differences require further investigation – to understand whether they reflect differences in computer familiarity, or different effort put into a paper test compared to a computer test.”
But there is no mention of that possibility alongside the data in the report showing the change in the percentage of top-performing students between 2012 and 2015. The report clearly says the data is “comparable”.
The possibility that the change to computer tests could have made a general difference is covered elsewhere in the study, but then largely discounted.
Pasi Sahlberg, an expert in global education reform, said that Mr Schleicher’s admission could have wider implications.
“It raises new questions about the reliability of the [Pisa] test
itself,” he said. “Students’ measured literacies in reading, mathematics
and science should not depend on how they are measured, if the scope of
testing remains the same.”
iq sociological factors china
In “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” I examined the pattern of IQ scores for various European peoples as presented by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and the Wealth of Nations and noted the considerable evidence for a large socio-economic influence. In nearly all cases, impoverished, rural populations seemed to exhibit far lower IQ scores than affluent, urban ones, even when the populations compared are genetically indistinguishable. Furthermore, these lower IQs often rise rapidly once conditions improve, in what might be called a “Super-Flynn Effect.” However, this strong relationship between wealth and nominal IQ seems to disappear when we examine East Asian populations. A few decades ago, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and even Japan had extremely low per capita GDPs relative to those of America or Europe, yet almost all their tested IQs were around 100 or higher, comparable to those of the wealthiest and most advanced European-derived nations. In many cases, their incomes and standards of living were far below those of the impoverished nations of Southern and Eastern Europe, yet they showed no signs of the substantially depressed performance generally found in these latter countries, whose IQs were usually in the 88–94 range. This can be seen in the table below. For consistency, all these results are drawn directly from Lynn/Vanhanen, and include their Flynn and other IQ adjustments up and down, several of which seemed rather large and arbitrary, with the GDP obtained from the World Bank, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) unless indicated by an asterisk. Much of this economic data is somewhat uncertain and should be used only for rough comparative purposes. A wide range of additional IQ results from these same countries are found in their 2006 sequel, but these lack testing-date information, making it impossible to compare with income levels or discern historical trends, and they anyway seem to fall into the same range. This clear pattern of East Asian IQs remaining almost unaffected by depressed socio-economic conditions had also occurred when such ethnic populations lived as small minority groups in America. Whereas in the early decades of the 20th century schoolchildren whose families had immigrated from Southern and Eastern Europe tended to have very low tested IQs, often in the 80–85 range, most studies of that era showed that children from Chinese-American and Japanese-American immigrant backgrounds had IQs similar or even superior to the white mainstream population, despite their much lower socio-economic backgrounds. One possible explanation of this striking result might be that these East Asian test results actually were artificially depressed due to relative deprivation and that once this condition was alleviated, Asian scores would rapidly rise by the same amounts as had those of various European-origin groups in different periods, perhaps 10–15 points. But this would imply that the fully-adjusted mean IQ scores of East Asians might approach the 120 range, and this seems unlikely, since affluent, well-educated present-day Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea show no evidence of mean IQs so high. Indeed, the most obvious aspect of the East Asian IQs shown in the table below is that they bear almost no relationship to the wealth of the countries at the time the testing was performed. For example, Japan in 1951 was desperately poor, and its real per capita GDP rose tenfold during the 40 years that followed, but its IQ rose just a couple of points. Similar huge rises in income without significant rises in IQ occurred in South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. The 2006 sequel by Lynn and Vanhanen provides numerous additional IQ reports from East Asian countries, but they all continue to fall into this same general range of scores. Furthermore, Asian-Americans living in the United States these days are generally affluent, but although they perform very well in school, their tested IQs do not have a mean anywhere near 120. The most plausible inference from these decades of accumulated data is that the IQs of East Asian peoples tend to be more robust and insulated against the negative impact of cultural or economic deprivation than those of European groups or various others—a truly remarkable finding. This might be due to cultural factors of some type, or perhaps certain aspects of East Asian spoken or written languages. But a fascinating possibility is that this IQ robustness may have a substantially genetic component. This would be somewhat similar to various physiological findings in recent years. For example, health studies in America have repeatedly shown that individuals of East Asian ancestry tend to have significantly longer life expectancy and lower rates of illness than most other American ethnic groups, and this effect seems independent of other environmental or dietary inputs and persists even after controlling for socio-economic factors. Over one hundred years ago, The Changing Chinese by A.E. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, provided copious anecdotal evidence indicating greater Chinese resistance to illness and injury and perhaps even an ability to survive on more meager food rations. Certainly these sorts of traits might be expected to have undergone strong selection in a country such as China, whose huge population had lived many centuries at the absolute Malthusian edge of starvation. With regard to mental traits, decades of testing have established that the intelligence subcomponents of East Asians and Europeans are somewhat different in structure, with East Asians being relatively stronger in spatial ability and Europeans stronger in verbal ability. Since these differences are also found in East Asians raised and acculturated in America and other Western countries, they seem to have a large genetic component. Although this particular result was less well established at the time, the general notion that different groups might have differing relative strengths in particular abilities was the centerpiece of Howard Gardner’s famous “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” publicized in his 1985 book Frames of Mind, which has received widespread attention in media and educational circles over the last couple of decades. Although the precise genetic basis of the differing East Asian and European skews in mental ability has not been determined, some corresponding physical traits have already been localized in recent genetic studies, notably skin color. Both Northeast Asians and Northern Europeans tend to have relatively pale skin, presumably due to the evolutionary pressure they experienced to synthesize maximal amounts of Vitamin D under weak sunlight during the thousands of years they lived in northern latitudes. But in the last decade, we have discovered that the particular genetic mechanisms that they evolved to block melanin production and produce lighter skin are dissimilar, having developed via entirely different mutational pathways. To the extent that East Asian IQs are indeed far less vulnerable to negative socio-economic factors than those of other racial groups, recognizing this fact might make it far easier for us to admit the important role that such environmental influences might play in determining the nominal IQs of other populations.
china catches up the u.s. in science
TOKYO China now ranks as the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, matching the U.S., according to the Japan Science and Technology Agency. And with U.S. President Donald Trump planning a major spending cut for the sciences, China could well take the sole lead. Dipping into the global database of scientific theses, the agency took the top 10% of the most-referenced studies in each field and determined the number of authors who were affiliated with the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, China or Japan. China ranked first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering. The U.S. led the way in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine. China's progress was especially pronounced in computer science. While the country accounted for only 3% of the most-referenced studies in 2000, the figure had surged to 21% by 2015. It has also had the fastest supercomputer in the world since 2013, and the two fastest in 2016. The country is also rapidly catching up in physics, a field long dominated by the U.S. China is spending more than $6 billion to build the world's largest particle accelerator, which could put it at the forefront of particle physics. The country's advances were made on the back of heavy government spending and an extensive campaign to attract talent. China's public and private spending on research was double Japan's in 2014, and is fast approaching the U.S. tally of $460 billion. The country is making efforts to bring home Chinese researchers who trained abroad, and to connect with overseas talent through overseas study programs and temporary placements. "I was not expecting China to overtake the U.S. in many fields," said Yuko Ito at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. Despite winning Nobel Prizes for three straight years, Japan came in at fifth or sixth place in many fields. Even in chemistry, where the country has excelled, Japan ranked fifth. Though 17 Japanese have won Nobel awards this century, most of their main studies were done over 30 years ago
grey matter asians more bigger brains
According to a new study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Zoology, the answer may, in fact, lie with Darwinian selection in East Asian populations, reported South China Morning Post.
The study, published in the journal Human Genetics late last month, posits that genetic mutations have led to bigger brains in the group due to natural selection. Such preference was notably missing in Europe or Africa.
Findings revealed that the East Asians’ average cranial capacity (the volume of the interior of the cranium) was 1,415 cubic centimeters, which was bigger than the Europeans’ which was averaged at 1,362 and 1,268 for Africans.
Other similar studies that followed also supported such findings but none could explain why.
The gene is unique since its genetic mutations in humans are relatively new, and was only triggered after our ancestors left Africa around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
After isolating and comparing CASC5 mutations in different groups, the researchers found a “high frequency” of four mutations that increased the brain size among East Asians. Compared with Europe or Africa, mutations (growth) are much rarer.
“Precisely why this occurred is not entirely clear,” they added.
The scientists, however, points out that the drivers behind such change are still unclear for the time being. While theories exist, Su admits that such would just be speculation at this stage.
Su, however, clarified that the size difference does not account for any intellectual advantage of the Asian brain over others.
“Scientific research has found no evidence, none at all, to support the existence of intellectual difference among races,” he said.
Further investigation to substantiate such observation, however, is required, according to Su.
“The Darwinian selection may still be going on today, but I think the brain size difference among races will eventually disappear due to the widespread genetic exchange occurring around the world today,” he said.
brain efficiency
Mental chronometry
Mental chronometry measures the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response by the participant. This reaction time (RT) is considered a measure of the speed and efficiency with which the brain processes information.[145] Scores on most types of RT tasks tend to correlate with scores on standard IQ tests as well as with g, and no relationship has been found between RT and any other psychometric factors independent of g.[145] The strength of the correlation with IQ varies from one RT test to another, but Hans Eysenck gives 0.40 as a typical correlation under favorable conditions.[146] According to Jensen individual differences in RT have a substantial genetic component, and heritability is higher for performance on tests that correlate more strongly with IQ.[147] Nisbett argues that some studies have found correlations closer to 0.2, and that the correlation is not always found.[148]Several studies have found differences between races in average reaction times. These studies have generally found that reaction times among black, Asian and white children follow the same pattern as IQ scores.[149][150][151] Rushton & Jensen (2005) have argued that reaction time is independent of culture and that the existence of race differences in average reaction time is evidence that the cause of racial IQ gaps is partially genetic instead of entirely cultural. Responding to this argument in Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett has pointed to the Jensen & Whang (1993) study in which a group of Chinese Americans had longer reaction times than a group of European Americans, despite having higher IQs. Nisbett also mentions findings in Flynn (1991) and Deary (2001) suggesting that movement time (the measure of how long it takes a person to move a finger after making the decision to do so) correlates with IQ just as strongly as reaction time, and that average movement time is faster for blacks than for whites.[152] Mackintosh (2011), p. 339 considers reaction time evidence unconvincing and points out that other cognitive tests that also correlate well with IQ show no disparity at all, for example the habituation/dishabituation test. And he points out that studies show that rhesus monkeys have shorter reaction times than American college students, suggesting that different reaction times may not tell us anything useful about intelligence.
chinese janitors outpeform children of doctors in america
The latest analysis of international math
scores will have some disturbing news for Canadian professionals
spending loads of cash on tutoring and enrichment for their kids: Their
offspring were outmatched by the children of janitors in Shanghai.
Ever since the PISA exam scores were announced in December, parents and education experts have been fretting over Canada’s 13th-place ranking in math.
But when parental education is taken into account, it turns out the
children of the country’s doctors and lawyers fall even further in the
rankings: They placed 22nd when compared to their similarly advantaged peers around the world.
Canadian students with parents working in
the least-skilled jobs, such as cleaners and couriers, may have
answered, on average, fewer questions correctly than the better-off
students in their class. But when ranked against their global peers,
they did much better – placing 10th. (One caveat: The sample size of
students by category varied between countries, sometimes significantly –
Leichtenstein, for instance, recorded a very small number of students
from this group, so wasn’t counted.)
The good news: Canada has one of the most equal-opportunity education systems in the world, according to the OECD study.
“We do a very good job, and put a lot of energy, into being average,” says Miles Corak,
an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, who studies
equality. “This is good because in not letting the least advantaged kids
– in terms of family resources – fall behind, we have an overall higher
score, and frankly in the long run, a more inclusive society.”
At the same time, Corak observes, “average is increasingly not good enough.”
The
2012 rankings of the PISA exams – which tests 15-year-olds in 64
countries in math and reading – raised alarms in Canada because students
had continued a nearly decade-long drop in math scores, falling out of
the top 10.
The latest study shows
that, generally, kids from more advantaged backgrounds outperformed
their less well-off counterparts, especially in math. But global
comparisons were revealing. In Shanghai, which came first in
international scores and where 15-year-olds outperformed all countries
in every category by parental education, students from the least-skilled
families were good enough to place 10th among all students with
professional or managerial parents – significantly ahead of teens in
countries such as Canada, Britain and the United States.
The
study reveals an important story hidden within the overall rankings.
For instance, while Finland outranked Germany overall in average math
scores, this was because the Scandinavian country has low inequality in
its education system. By contrast, while German students with parents
working in manual occupations performed “very poorly,” the study found
that the children of professionals in Germany were among the highest
achievers in the world.
The studies
concludes that the fact that “students in some countries, regardless of
what their parents do for a living, outperform children of professionals
in other countries shows that it is possible to provide children of
factory workers the same high-quality education opportunities that
children of lawyers and doctors enjoy.”’
Since
the December results, there has been a lot of debate about the validity
of comparisons of diverse countries, such as Canada, to more cities
such as Shanghai, the financial centre of China. The fact that China’s
results are divided up by city-region on the PISA scores has been
controversial, as this Brown Center on Education column points out,
even though the head of PISA has stated in previous years that rural
results, which are not released by China, are in line with the public
results.
Many education experts have
pointed out that the high scores of Asian countries are capturing a
“shadow education” in which the vast majority of students, even those
from low-income families, participate in private tutoring in addition to
regular classes. (The Shanghai results also include a smaller
percentage sample of all the 15-year-olds in the city, many of whom
don’t attend public schools because of passport-type licensing system
for families called “hukou” that restricts access to certain municipal services.)
But
experts have also noted a key difference in the learning culture of
places such as Shanghai, where achievement is consider to be the result
of work, and North America, where achievement has tended to be
considered more based on ability.
And
for all the caveats, these results should spark a discussion about
Canada’s math rankings that step outside the narrow domains of classroom
and curriculum. When the average janitor’s son in Shanghai outperforms
Canadian students with every advantage, it’s time to take a hard look at
the big-picture cultural messages our kids are getting about
resilience, grit, and the achievement to be found in hard work.
CHINA DOMINATION IN SCIENCE
China joins US as top influencer in science
Heavy spending and hunt for talent rapidly raising nation's profile
June 13, 2017 9:00 am JST
TOKYO -- China now ranks as the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, tying with the U.S., according to the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
The agency took the top 10% of the most referenced studies in each field, and determined the number of authors who were affiliated with the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, China or Japan. China ranked first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering. The U.S., on the other hand, led the way in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine.
Despite winning Nobel Prizes for three straight years, Japan came in at fifth or sixth place in many fields.
China's progress was especially pronounced in computer science. While the country accounted for only 3% of the most referenced studies in 2000, the figure had surged to 21% by 2015. It has also had the fastest supercomputer in the world since 2013, and the two fastest in 2016.
China is also rapidly catching up in physics, where the U.S. has long dominated. It is spending more than $6 billion to build the world's largest particle accelerator, which could put it at the forefront of particle physics.
These advances were made on heavy spending by Beijing and an extensive campaign to attract talent. China's public and private spending on research was double Japan's in 2014, and is fast approaching the American tally of $460 billion. It is making efforts to bring home Chinese researchers who trained abroad, and to connect with overseas talent through study abroad programs and temporary placements.
"I was not expecting China to overtake the U.S. in many fields," said Yuko Ito at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. With U.S. President Donald Trump planning a major spending cut for the sciences, China is expected to become an even larger player.
http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Science/China-joins-US-as-top-influencer-in-science
Heavy spending and hunt for talent rapidly raising nation's profile
June 13, 2017 9:00 am JST
TOKYO -- China now ranks as the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, tying with the U.S., according to the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
The agency took the top 10% of the most referenced studies in each field, and determined the number of authors who were affiliated with the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, China or Japan. China ranked first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering. The U.S., on the other hand, led the way in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine.
Despite winning Nobel Prizes for three straight years, Japan came in at fifth or sixth place in many fields.
China's progress was especially pronounced in computer science. While the country accounted for only 3% of the most referenced studies in 2000, the figure had surged to 21% by 2015. It has also had the fastest supercomputer in the world since 2013, and the two fastest in 2016.
China is also rapidly catching up in physics, where the U.S. has long dominated. It is spending more than $6 billion to build the world's largest particle accelerator, which could put it at the forefront of particle physics.
These advances were made on heavy spending by Beijing and an extensive campaign to attract talent. China's public and private spending on research was double Japan's in 2014, and is fast approaching the American tally of $460 billion. It is making efforts to bring home Chinese researchers who trained abroad, and to connect with overseas talent through study abroad programs and temporary placements.
"I was not expecting China to overtake the U.S. in many fields," said Yuko Ito at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. With U.S. President Donald Trump planning a major spending cut for the sciences, China is expected to become an even larger player.
http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Science/China-joins-US-as-top-influencer-in-science
SAT SCORES AND ACHIEVEMENTS
On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but
bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far
ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for
him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University,
where Stanley taught. Even that wasn't enough. Having leapfrogged ahead
of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the
FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.
Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.
Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes. When that plan failed, Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol as an undergraduate.
Stanley would affectionately refer to Bates as “student zero” of his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study's ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.
“What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”.
With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers1, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence. Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth — which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams. Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.
Such results contradict long-established
ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through
practice — that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of
the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability
has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or
environmental factors such as socio-economic status. The research
emphasizes the importance of nurturing precocious children, at a time
when the prevailing focus in the United States and other countries is on
improving the performance of struggling students (see ‘Nurturing a talented child’).
At the same time, the work to identify and support academically
talented students has raised troubling questions about the risks of
labelling children, and the shortfalls of talent searches and
standardized tests as a means of identifying high-potential students,
especially in poor and rural districts.
“With so much emphasis on predicting who will rise to the top, we run the risk of selling short the many kids who are missed by these tests,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist in Toronto, Canada, who co-founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College in New York City. “For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them 'gifted' or 'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine a child's motivation to learn.”
“In a sense, that brought Julian's research full circle, since this is where he started his career as a professor,” Benbow says as she nears the university's psychology laboratory, the first US building dedicated to the study of the field. Built in 1915, it houses a small collection of antique calculators — the tools of quantitative psychology in the early 1950s, when Stanley began his academic work in psychometrics and statistics.
His interest in developing scientific talent had been piqued by one of the most famous longitudinal studies in psychology, Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius3, 4. Beginning in 1921, Terman selected teenage subjects on the basis of high IQ scores, then tracked and encouraged their careers. But to Terman's chagrin, his cohort produced only a few esteemed scientists. Among those rejected because their IQ of 129 was too low to make the cut was William Shockley, the Nobel-prizewinning co-inventor of the transistor. Physicist Luis Alvarez, another Nobel winner, was also rejected.
Stanley suspected that Terman wouldn't have missed Shockley and Alvarez if he'd had a reliable way to test them specifically on quantitative reasoning ability. So Stanley decided to try the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now simply the SAT). Although the test is intended for older students, Stanley hypothesized that it would be well suited to measuring the analytical reasoning abilities of elite younger students.
Benbow and other talent-development researchers offer the following tips to encourage both achievement and happiness for smart children.
In March 1972, Stanley rounded up 450
bright 12- to 14-year-olds from the Baltimore area and gave them the
mathematics portion of the SAT. It was the first standardized academic
'talent search'. (Later, researchers included the verbal portion and
other assessments.)
“The first big surprise was how many adolescents could figure out math problems that they hadn't encountered in their course work,” says developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, then a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. “The second surprise was how many of these young kids scored well above the admissions cut-off for many elite universities.”
Stanley hadn't envisioned SMPY as a multi-decade longitudinal study. But after the first follow-up survey, five years later, Benbow proposed extending the study to track subjects through their lives, adding cohorts and including assessments of interests, preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. The study's first four cohorts range from the top 3% to the top 0.01% in their SAT scores. The SMPY team added a fifth cohort of the leading mathematics and science graduate students in 1992 to test the generalizability of the talent-search model for identifying scientific potential.
“I don't know of any other study in the world that has given us such a comprehensive look at exactly how and why STEM talent develops,” says Christoph Perleth, a psychologist at the University of Rostock in Germany who studies intelligence and talent development.
“SMPY gave us the first large-sample basis for the field to move away from general intelligence toward assessments of specific cognitive abilities, interests and other factors,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association in Washington DC.
In 1976, Stanley started to test his second
cohort (a sample of 563 13-year-olds who scored in the top 0.5% on the
SAT) on spatial ability — the capacity to understand and remember
spatial relationships between objects5.
Tests for spatial ability might include matching objects that are seen
from different perspectives, determining which cross-section will result
when an object is cut in certain ways, or estimating water levels on
tilted bottles of various shapes. Stanley was curious about whether
spatial ability might better predict educational and occupational
outcomes than could measures of quantitative and verbal reasoning on
their own.
Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally overlooked in school-based assessments.”
Although studies such as SMPY have given educators the ability to identify and support gifted youngsters, worldwide interest in this population is uneven. In the Middle East and east Asia, high-performing STEM students have received significant attention over the past decade. South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore screen children for giftedness and steer high performers into innovative programmes. In 2010, China launched a ten-year National Talent Development Plan to support and guide top students into science, technology and other high-demand fields.
In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities.
At first, the efforts were on a case-by-case basis. Parents of other bright children began to approach Stanley after hearing about his work with Bates, who thrived after entering university. By 17, he had earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and was pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content.”
The SMPY data supported the idea of
accelerating fast learners by allowing them to skip school grades. In a
comparison of children who bypassed a grade with a control group of
similarly smart children who didn't, the grade-skippers were 60% more
likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to
get a PhD in a STEM field6.
Acceleration is common in SMPY's elite 1-in-10,000 cohort, whose
intellectual diversity and rapid pace of learning make them among the
most challenging to educate. Advancing these students costs little or
nothing, and in some cases may save schools money, says Lubinski. “These
kids often don't need anything innovative or novel,” he says, “they
just need earlier access to what's already available to older kids.”
Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children — that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps. But education researchers generally agree that acceleration benefits the vast majority of gifted children socially and emotionally, as well as academically and professionally7.
Skipping grades is not the only option. SMPY researchers say that even modest interventions — for example, access to challenging material such as college-level Advanced Placement courses — have a demonstrable effect. Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities8.
Despite SMPY's many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement. “We don't know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won't,” says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “Intelligence won't account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important.”
Some insights have come from German studies9, 10, 11 that have a methodology similar to SMPY's. The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid-1980s, found that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits — such as motivation, curiosity and ability to cope with stress — had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family, school and peers, also had an impact.
The data from such intellectual-talent searches also contribute to knowledge of how people develop expertise in subjects. Some researchers and writers, notably psychologist Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author Malcolm Gladwell, have popularized the idea of an ability threshold. This holds that for individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise. But data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis (see 'Top of the charts'). A study published this year12 compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25 times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate.
But some of the work is controversial. In North America and Europe, some child-development experts lament that much of the research on talent development is driven by the urge to predict who will rise to the top, and educators have expressed considerable unease about the concept of identifying and labelling a group of pupils as gifted or talented13.
“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews. “A low test score tells you practically nothing,” she says, because many factors can depress students' performance, including their cultural backgrounds and how comfortable they are with taking high-stakes tests. Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It's far better, Dweck says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking.
“Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are and hungering for approval,” says Dweck. “They work hard to learn more and get smarter.” Research by Dweck and her colleagues shows that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation at school, get better marks and have higher test scores14.
Benbow agrees that standardized tests should not be used to limit students' options, but rather to develop learning and teaching strategies appropriate to children's abilities, which allow students at every level to reach their potential.
Next year, Benbow and Lubinski plan to launch a mid-life survey of the profoundly gifted cohort (the 1 in 10,000), with an emphasis on career achievements and life satisfaction, and to re-survey their 1992 sample of graduate students at leading US universities. The forthcoming studies may further erode the enduring misperception that gifted children are bright enough to succeed on their own, without much help.
“The education community is still resistant to this message,” says David Geary, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who specializes in mathematical learning. “There's a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn't be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids.”
Although gifted-education specialists herald the expansion of talent-development options in the United States, the benefits have mostly been limited so far to students who are at the top of both the talent and socio-economic curves.
“We know how to identify these kids, and we know how to help them,” says Lubinski. “And yet we're missing a lot of the smartest kids in the country.”
As Lubinski and Benbow walk through the quadrangle, the clock strikes noon, releasing packs of enthusiastic adolescents racing towards the dining hall. Many are participants in the Vanderbilt Programs for Talented Youth, summer enrichment courses in which gifted students spend three weeks gorging themselves on a year's worth of mathematics, science or literature. Others are participants in Vanderbilt's sports camps.
“They're just developing different talents,” says Lubinski, a former high-school and college wrestler. “But our society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents.”
And yet these gifted students, the 'mathletes' of the world, can shape the future. “When you look at the issues facing society now — whether it's health care, climate change, terrorism, energy — these are the kids who have the most potential to solve these problems,” says Lubinski. “These are the kids we'd do well to bet on.”
Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.
Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes. When that plan failed, Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol as an undergraduate.
Stanley would affectionately refer to Bates as “student zero” of his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study's ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.
“What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”.
With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers1, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence. Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth — which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams. Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.
Source: K. Ferriman Robertson et al. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 346–351 (2010).
“With so much emphasis on predicting who will rise to the top, we run the risk of selling short the many kids who are missed by these tests,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist in Toronto, Canada, who co-founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College in New York City. “For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them 'gifted' or 'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine a child's motivation to learn.”
Start of a study
On a muggy August day, Benbow and her husband, psychologist David Lubinski, describe the origins of SMPY as they walk across the quadrangle at Vanderbilt University. Benbow was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when she met Stanley in a class he taught in 1976. Benbow and Lubinski, who have co-directed the study since Stanley's retirement, brought it to Vanderbilt in 1998.“In a sense, that brought Julian's research full circle, since this is where he started his career as a professor,” Benbow says as she nears the university's psychology laboratory, the first US building dedicated to the study of the field. Built in 1915, it houses a small collection of antique calculators — the tools of quantitative psychology in the early 1950s, when Stanley began his academic work in psychometrics and statistics.
His interest in developing scientific talent had been piqued by one of the most famous longitudinal studies in psychology, Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius3, 4. Beginning in 1921, Terman selected teenage subjects on the basis of high IQ scores, then tracked and encouraged their careers. But to Terman's chagrin, his cohort produced only a few esteemed scientists. Among those rejected because their IQ of 129 was too low to make the cut was William Shockley, the Nobel-prizewinning co-inventor of the transistor. Physicist Luis Alvarez, another Nobel winner, was also rejected.
Stanley suspected that Terman wouldn't have missed Shockley and Alvarez if he'd had a reliable way to test them specifically on quantitative reasoning ability. So Stanley decided to try the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now simply the SAT). Although the test is intended for older students, Stanley hypothesized that it would be well suited to measuring the analytical reasoning abilities of elite younger students.
Nurturing a talented child
“Setting out to raise a genius is the last thing we'd advise any parent to do,” says Camilla Benbow, dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. That goal, she says, “can lead to all sorts of social and emotional problems”.Benbow and other talent-development researchers offer the following tips to encourage both achievement and happiness for smart children.
- Expose children to diverse experiences.
- When a child exhibits strong interests or talents, provide opportunities to develop them.
- Support both intellectual and emotional needs.
- Help children to develop a 'growth mindset' by praising effort, not ability.
- Encourage children to take intellectual risks and to be open to failures that help them learn.
- Beware of labels: being identified as gifted can be an emotional burden.
- Work with teachers to meet your child's needs. Smart students often need more-challenging material, extra support or the freedom to learn at their own pace.
- Have your child's abilities tested. This can support a parent's arguments for more-advanced work, and can reveal issues such as dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or social and emotional challenges.
“The first big surprise was how many adolescents could figure out math problems that they hadn't encountered in their course work,” says developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, then a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. “The second surprise was how many of these young kids scored well above the admissions cut-off for many elite universities.”
Stanley hadn't envisioned SMPY as a multi-decade longitudinal study. But after the first follow-up survey, five years later, Benbow proposed extending the study to track subjects through their lives, adding cohorts and including assessments of interests, preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. The study's first four cohorts range from the top 3% to the top 0.01% in their SAT scores. The SMPY team added a fifth cohort of the leading mathematics and science graduate students in 1992 to test the generalizability of the talent-search model for identifying scientific potential.
“I don't know of any other study in the world that has given us such a comprehensive look at exactly how and why STEM talent develops,” says Christoph Perleth, a psychologist at the University of Rostock in Germany who studies intelligence and talent development.
Spatial skills
As the data flowed in, it quickly became apparent that a one-size-fits-all approach to gifted education, and education in general, was inadequate.“SMPY gave us the first large-sample basis for the field to move away from general intelligence toward assessments of specific cognitive abilities, interests and other factors,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association in Washington DC.
JHU/Gado/Getty
Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth in the 1970s.
Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally overlooked in school-based assessments.”
Although studies such as SMPY have given educators the ability to identify and support gifted youngsters, worldwide interest in this population is uneven. In the Middle East and east Asia, high-performing STEM students have received significant attention over the past decade. South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore screen children for giftedness and steer high performers into innovative programmes. In 2010, China launched a ten-year National Talent Development Plan to support and guide top students into science, technology and other high-demand fields.
In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities.
On the fast track
When Stanley began his work, the choices for bright children in the United States were limited, so he sought out environments in which early talent could blossom. “It was clear to Julian that it's not enough to identify potential; it has to be developed in appropriate ways if you're going to keep that flame well lit,” says Linda Brody, who studied with Stanley and now runs a programme at Johns Hopkins focused on counselling profoundly gifted children.At first, the efforts were on a case-by-case basis. Parents of other bright children began to approach Stanley after hearing about his work with Bates, who thrived after entering university. By 17, he had earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and was pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content.”
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society.”
Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children — that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps. But education researchers generally agree that acceleration benefits the vast majority of gifted children socially and emotionally, as well as academically and professionally7.
Skipping grades is not the only option. SMPY researchers say that even modest interventions — for example, access to challenging material such as college-level Advanced Placement courses — have a demonstrable effect. Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities8.
Despite SMPY's many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement. “We don't know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won't,” says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “Intelligence won't account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important.”
Some insights have come from German studies9, 10, 11 that have a methodology similar to SMPY's. The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid-1980s, found that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits — such as motivation, curiosity and ability to cope with stress — had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family, school and peers, also had an impact.
The data from such intellectual-talent searches also contribute to knowledge of how people develop expertise in subjects. Some researchers and writers, notably psychologist Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author Malcolm Gladwell, have popularized the idea of an ability threshold. This holds that for individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise. But data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis (see 'Top of the charts'). A study published this year12 compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25 times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate.
But some of the work is controversial. In North America and Europe, some child-development experts lament that much of the research on talent development is driven by the urge to predict who will rise to the top, and educators have expressed considerable unease about the concept of identifying and labelling a group of pupils as gifted or talented13.
“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews. “A low test score tells you practically nothing,” she says, because many factors can depress students' performance, including their cultural backgrounds and how comfortable they are with taking high-stakes tests. Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It's far better, Dweck says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking.
“Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are and hungering for approval,” says Dweck. “They work hard to learn more and get smarter.” Research by Dweck and her colleagues shows that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation at school, get better marks and have higher test scores14.
Benbow agrees that standardized tests should not be used to limit students' options, but rather to develop learning and teaching strategies appropriate to children's abilities, which allow students at every level to reach their potential.
Next year, Benbow and Lubinski plan to launch a mid-life survey of the profoundly gifted cohort (the 1 in 10,000), with an emphasis on career achievements and life satisfaction, and to re-survey their 1992 sample of graduate students at leading US universities. The forthcoming studies may further erode the enduring misperception that gifted children are bright enough to succeed on their own, without much help.
“The education community is still resistant to this message,” says David Geary, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who specializes in mathematical learning. “There's a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn't be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids.”
Although gifted-education specialists herald the expansion of talent-development options in the United States, the benefits have mostly been limited so far to students who are at the top of both the talent and socio-economic curves.
“We know how to identify these kids, and we know how to help them,” says Lubinski. “And yet we're missing a lot of the smartest kids in the country.”
As Lubinski and Benbow walk through the quadrangle, the clock strikes noon, releasing packs of enthusiastic adolescents racing towards the dining hall. Many are participants in the Vanderbilt Programs for Talented Youth, summer enrichment courses in which gifted students spend three weeks gorging themselves on a year's worth of mathematics, science or literature. Others are participants in Vanderbilt's sports camps.
“They're just developing different talents,” says Lubinski, a former high-school and college wrestler. “But our society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents.”
And yet these gifted students, the 'mathletes' of the world, can shape the future. “When you look at the issues facing society now — whether it's health care, climate change, terrorism, energy — these are the kids who have the most potential to solve these problems,” says Lubinski. “These are the kids we'd do well to bet on.”
ASIAN SAT SCORE
This Brookings Report
highlights the continuing gaps in performance on the SAT and similar IQ
tests among racial groups. Former Economics Professor Mike McPherson
also gets a mention. Key chart:
Several Ephs tweeted out a link to the related New York Times story:
Full analysis left as an exercise for the reader! Comments:
1) About 2/3s of Williams students score above a 1400 combined. Speaking very roughly (and using hand-waving as my statistical estimation method of choice), whites and Asian Americans have about the same raw numbers in this pool. (There are, of course, many more white than Asian 17 year-olds in the US, but the whites do much worse on the SATs (and most other IQ tests)). So, why is the ratio of whites to Asians among Williams students almost 4:1? This suggests that Williams might discriminate against Asian-Americans in admissions. Now, there are many other plausible explanations other than discrimination which might explain this, mainly involving student/family preferences. But there is an interesting Record article (or senior thesis!) to write about this topic.
2) The ratio of Asian-Americans (74) to African-Americans (43) in the class of 2020 is not quite 2:1. But the ratio of students with Williams caliber SAT scores between these two groups is at least 20:1. The only thing that could possibly explain this discrepancy is massive preferences for African-Americans (relative to Asian-Americans) in Williams admissions. Taking another hand-waving guess, I would estimate that at least 70 of the Asian-Americans scored higher on the SAT/ACT than at least 40 of the African-Americans. In other words, the two distributions probably have almost no overlap, looking something like:
That couldn’t cause any problems on campus, could it? Below is an example of the sorts of “conversations” that students with radically different SAT scores have at Williams.
Several Ephs tweeted out a link to the related New York Times story:
“Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution,” the two authors note. In math, for example,There should be a way to combine this data with what we know about college admissions and applicant preferences to get a more up-to-date estimate of racial distribution of SAT scores at Williams. Start with the latest available Common Data Set (pdf):
among top scorers — those scoring between a 750 and 800 — 60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian.Translating those percentages into concrete numbers, Reeves and Halikias estimate that
in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos.
Full analysis left as an exercise for the reader! Comments:
1) About 2/3s of Williams students score above a 1400 combined. Speaking very roughly (and using hand-waving as my statistical estimation method of choice), whites and Asian Americans have about the same raw numbers in this pool. (There are, of course, many more white than Asian 17 year-olds in the US, but the whites do much worse on the SATs (and most other IQ tests)). So, why is the ratio of whites to Asians among Williams students almost 4:1? This suggests that Williams might discriminate against Asian-Americans in admissions. Now, there are many other plausible explanations other than discrimination which might explain this, mainly involving student/family preferences. But there is an interesting Record article (or senior thesis!) to write about this topic.
2) The ratio of Asian-Americans (74) to African-Americans (43) in the class of 2020 is not quite 2:1. But the ratio of students with Williams caliber SAT scores between these two groups is at least 20:1. The only thing that could possibly explain this discrepancy is massive preferences for African-Americans (relative to Asian-Americans) in Williams admissions. Taking another hand-waving guess, I would estimate that at least 70 of the Asian-Americans scored higher on the SAT/ACT than at least 40 of the African-Americans. In other words, the two distributions probably have almost no overlap, looking something like:
That couldn’t cause any problems on campus, could it? Below is an example of the sorts of “conversations” that students with radically different SAT scores have at Williams.
asian SAT SCORE
You're probably curious about how you stack up against average SAT scores. But what is an average SAT score? There are lots of different ways to look at average SAT scores. How many types of averages are there, and which averages are important for you?
We'll discuss official results for all these questions—and more—and tell you which SAT average scores actually matters for your future.
So what is the average SAT score? That really depends on which group of people you're looking at. We'll look at national averages, averages by gender, by ethnicity, by family income, by high school type, and by state.
National SAT Average Score
For the new 2016 SAT, the College Board calculated SAT score percentiles for two groups: all 11th and 12th grade students (Nationally Representative Sample Percentiles) and college-bound students who typically take the SAT for the last time as 11th- or 12th-graders (SAT User Percentiles).For the Nationally Representative Sample, the national average SAT score was:
- Evidence-Based Reading and Writing: 510
- Math: 510
- Total: 1020
- Evidence-Based Reading and Writing: 543
- Math: 541
- Total: 1083
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Average SAT Scores by Gender
Interestingly, the College Board also calculated the average SAT score by gender. These averages are based on college-bound members of the Class of 2016 who took the old SAT, which had three sections and was scored out of 2400:|
Gender |
Reading |
Math |
Writing |
Total |
|
Male |
495 |
524 |
475 |
1502 |
|
Female |
493 |
494 |
487 |
1479 |
As you can see, males outperform females on math by 30 points, while females exceed males on Writing by 12 points.
According to a statistical significance test (t-test), the difference in math scores is considered extremely significant (in technical terms, the P value is less than 0.0001, meaning roughly that it is very unlikely this difference is due to chance).
The difference between genders in math test scores has been explored by academic researchers and has been a controversial topic. It should be a goal of the educational system to close this achievement gap between genders.
For reference purposes, I’ve also converted these averages (rounded to the nearest actual score option—so 493 would be rounded to 490) to new SAT scores (out of 1600) using official score conversion charts.
|
Gender |
New Math |
Evidence-Based R+W |
New Total |
|
Male |
550 |
540 |
1090 |
|
Female |
520 |
550 |
1070 |
Average SAT Scores by Ethnicity
When registering for the SAT, the College Board allows students the option to specify their ethnicity. Most students do share their ethnicity, and the College Board has reported the average SAT scores across ethnicity. Again, these are scores on the old version of the test:|
Ethnicity |
Number Taking |
Reading |
Math |
Writing |
Total |
|
American Indian or Alaska Native |
7,778 |
468 |
471 |
447 |
1386 |
|
Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander |
196,735 |
529 |
602 |
534 |
1665 |
|
Black or African American |
199,306 |
430 |
425 |
415 |
1270 |
|
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander |
2,371 |
432 |
438 |
423 |
1293 |
|
Hispanic, Latino, or Latin American |
355,829 |
448 |
453 |
436 |
1337 |
|
White |
742,436 |
528 |
533 |
511 |
1572 |
|
Two or More Races, non-Hispanic |
28,460 |
511 |
505 |
488 |
1504 |
|
Other |
20,604 |
496 |
518 |
491 |
1505 |
|
No Response |
84,070 |
451 |
501 |
452 |
1404 |
|
Total |
1,637,589 |
494 |
508 |
482 |
1484 |
nuclear weapons korean war
In interview with Jim G. Lucas and Bob Considine on 25 January 1954, posthumously published in 1964, MacArthur said,
Of all the campaigns of my life, 20 major ones to be exact, [Korea was] the one I felt most sure of was the one I was deprived of waging. I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days.... I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria.... It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved south to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes.... For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt."[110]
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