For this assignment, listen to the Prologue, Act 1 and Act 2 of the This American Life episode #474 called Back to School. If you have a smartphone or tablet, the easiest way to listen to this, and all the other radio shows for the class, is to download the This American Life app. Once you have the app you can quickly find shows (by title or episode number) and listen right then and there. You can also go to the website www.thisamericanlife.org and search on episode number. I've found it for you here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/back-to-school click on launch player and listen to the show.
How does this chapter on language and intelligence, and our previous chapter on learning tie into what you heard in this show? According to what you know about the scientific aspects of language, intelligence, and learning as presented in your textbook, how can our public education system be improved?
Provide the psychology terms you used in your response at the bottom of your comment.
Explore!
This episode of This American Life was interesting because it addressed both the issues of people in poverty and their social circumstances affecting their ability to learn, and the issue of methods of teaching and how they aren’t conducive to every learning type. What the episode showcased was the issues facing schools with the rising standardization of testing and how this practice is marginalizing students who are ill-equipped to deal with this type of testing, specifically students with stressful home lives, and how they are so stressed out, they have a hard time paying attention and learning. This relates to the chapters because the chapters address how language and intelligence are both developed and how certain environments help or hinder that development. It also relates to learning (from the previous chapter) because it addresses how these different environments can affect how children and teenagers learn and to what degree they will achieve success. For instance, in the show, Kewauna was raised in a less than ideal situation, where she was constantly stressed. Because of this, she failed to develop the proper non-cognitive skills to function well in the real world, especially in school. Because of the near-constant stress of her home life, she was constantly distracted and less likely to learn than she would have been had she been brought up in a household where she felt safer. The radio show addressed this issue time and time again, and stressed the importance of a safe environment to flourish in.
The topic of standardized testing is one that is near and dear to my heart. I am poised to become a high school teacher, and will soon be at the heart of the controversy regarding the usage of these tests. I am strongly opposed to standardized testing, partially because it’s no way to accurately measure the effectiveness of teachers, but also because it causes unnecessary stress to students, many of whom are of a certain intelligence that makes taking standardized tests difficult, due to either a predisposition to writing or difficulty comprehending questions or due to basic, common test anxiety, which is usually amplified by these type of tests. Students aren’t meant to learn by robotically memorizing facts and being tested on their memory, not their knowledge. They also promptly forget all that they’ve “learned” after these tests, because they’ve taken the test and they no longer have any motivation to learn. I also dislike standardized tests due to the fact that teachers are evaluated based on the students’ scores. Like This American Life pointed out early on in the interview, it is unrealistic to expect that teachers can raise a student’s score by one arbitrary level in one year. There are far better things to evaluate teachers on, and though it may be slightly more labor intensive and maybe more expensive, it is worth it for the school systems to ensure that they are employing the very cream of the crop teachers.
social circumstances
language
intelligence
learning
environments
non-cognitive
standardized
memorizing
motivation
This episode of This American Life was very interesting because of the different aspects of intelligence and learning that were discussed. Specifically, this episode discussed the issues of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in schools. These skills relate to intelligence because they are different types of intelligence. Cognitive skills are the typical “book learning” or “school learning.” These are things that are tested through the standardized testing that occurs in most school settings. Non-cognitive skills, however, are things like social skills, resourcefulness, resilience, temperament, self-presentation, and self-control. The experts in this episode stress the importance of non-cognitive skills for the success of high school graduates. They used the example of people who gained GEDs instead of a high school diploma. Both of these groups of students had the same level of test scores, but the people with GEDs often failed in life because they were not taught these non-cognitive skills in their education.
One of the biggest discussions in this episode was the discussion of poverty and trauma on the development of young children. It has been shown that children who experience stress during their younger years have real development issues in their prefrontal cortex. This severely inhibits the development of non-cognitive skills. These kids tend to have problems focusing, paying attention, sitting still, and having good behavior. Often, like Kewauna, these kids are put into lower level classes that do not push them to try to develop either cognitive or non-cognitive skills that will help them succeed in the rest of their future. Despite the biological effects of the stress that kids facing poverty and trauma face, there are ways to lessen these effects and help these kids succeed. One thing that was mentioned was giving these students the message that you can improve your intelligence if you want to. Students exposed to this message were more likely to improve their intelligence because of this message. Also, it was shown that secure attachment can help ease the biological effects of early childhood stress. Even though these kids still experience the stress, because they have someone to support them, the biological damage is significantly less allowing them to still develop these non-cognitive skills.
In my opinion, one thing that could be greatly improved about our education system is in reducing the extreme emphasis on cognitive learning. Although book learning is definitely important for success, the non-cognitive skills are equally, if not more important. Because these non-cognitive skills are harder to test, they are often pushed to the wayside. The consequence of this is that children in school are defined by how well they perform on standardized tests. Because learning is so complicated, this is very limiting to many students. Like Kewauna, many of these students are put into lower learning classes that are more stigmatizing than they are helpful. Instead of just pushing these kids into a lower learning class and hoping that this will help them, we should be focusing less on how they are scoring in relation to others and more on how they are improving on their own accord. Developing non-cognitive skills can often supplement these cognitive skills and can still help prepare students for future success.
Vocabulary: intelligence, learning, cognitive, non-cognitive, prefrontal cortex, secure attachment, standardized
At the beginning of the show, Ira Glass discussed how teachers are struggling as children are coming from bad home lives and are having a hard time learning how to read and write. In the chapter on intelligence, as well as the chapters on language and language, the importance of a solid home life in which the child feels safe and is stimulated and encouraged in his learning is highlighted. The language chapter refers to the sensitive period of childhood, in which it is critical to teach children words at home. Children from homes with lower socioeconomic status, like the children on the south side of Chicago in the show, tend to come to school with less developed vocabularies.
When they were discussing standardized testing, it reminded me of the section in the intelligence chapter that stated that different cultures define intelligence differently. As mentioned in the program, the United States defines intelligence through standardized tests. This is why, though those who passed the GED were thought to be as smart as those who did not drop out of high school, these people did not succeed in the rest of their lives and continued to have that drop out mentality. When something got too hard, they would quit. The intelligence chapter explains why this is when it discusses how schooling both affects and is an effect of intelligence. Those with higher intelligence (higher test scores) succeed in school, but schooling also helps them succeed by teaching them new information and skills, like perseverance. The chapter on thought discusses the different types of cognition, such as cognitive control and problem solving. Cognitive control is being able to control the direction of your thoughts and put them towards your goal. Problem solving is figuring out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Both of these skills are taught in schools, especially on tests.
The majority of the program, however, focused on non-cognitive skills. This made me think of the section in the intelligence chapter about the additional types of intelligence. Some of these include social intelligence, wisdom, creativity, personality, and emotional intelligence. To me, the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive skills is like the difference between book smarts and school smarts.
After reading the chapters and learning about learning and intelligence, it is becoming clearer to me that standardized tests are not a fair measure of intelligence. That’s hard for me to say, because I am actually pretty good at tests. But there are so many more aspects to intelligence, and even in my case there are other things that make me intelligent besides the fact that I do well on tests. I think that tests encourage cramming and putting things just in short term memory, which just sets students up for failure. I’m not completely sure of all the details and how it would work out, but I think the school systems should depend less on standardized tests and give students opportunities to show off other aspects of their intelligence, and encourage more hands-on learning that will actually stick in their brains.
Terms: sensitive period, intelligence, cognition, cognitive control, problem solving, emotional intelligence, creativity
This show did an excellent job of combining the ideas of learning, intelligence, and language through meaningful studies and countless examples. For one example, Ira Glass discussed the idea of cognitive skills versus non-cognitive skills. He explained that cognitive skills are the different skills we can quantify through tests whether standardized or otherwise. Non-cognitive skills were those that included personality traits, character, and self-control to name a few. Ira Glass and James Heckman made a case that non-cognitive skills can be taught where cognitive skills have more of a natural talent aspect. In this episode, they touched on the fact that they believed intelligence was a hard thing to measure and so therefore they chose to quantify this concept more with the subject of the IQ test and someone’s natural ability rather than trying to qualitatively describe this concept. The part that they tried to qualitatively describe was the idea of non-cognitive skills. There were several examples given in the episode regarding teaching non-cognitive skills. One of those examples was the marshmallow test that was brought up in teaching young children self-control and the ability to delay gratification. This is a non-cognitive skill that if mastered served children much better as adults than if this concept was not fully grasped.
The idea of language, throughout the chapters and the episode, ties to the topics of intelligence and learning in more of an indirect way. In the episode, they also talked a lot about a child’s success in regard to if they have been present in four or more adverse situations. This, in turn, not only affects the child’s brain pathways but also their ability to communicate in an effective manner later in life. This affects their ability to concentrate in school and therefore adversely affects their ability to learn how to communicate and comprehend things. Ultimately, language, learning, and intelligence are all tied to one another and the school systems should continue to find alternative solutions to make these things available for children to grasp while they are in school.
With this in mind, there are a couple things that the school system could implement to make these non-cognitive skills improve throughout schools in the United States. One of the things that could be done would be to implement a sort of coaching system among older and younger children. This was done in a study mentioned in the show and it showed very positive effects when the older child encouraged the younger child to work hard in school and to not give up. If this idea were implemented in school systems not only would language and communication skills among different age children improve, but the amount of perseverance for these children would improve. This would then raise the number of children graduating from high school and college. Along with this change if schools were able to find other ways to “grade” their teachers instead of using children’s standardized test scores I believe that the children would benefit. I believe that standardized tests are good to some extent, but when we use them for things they were never intended for that is where the school systems get into trouble. If teachers were graded on how well they impacted student’s lives instead of how high their average test score was this would encourage teachers and students to be more creative and open to learning and teaching new subjects rather than stressing about a number.
Vocabulary: learning, intelligence, language, non-cognitive skills, cognitive skills, marshmallow test, IQ test, standardized tests
This episode of This American Life was very interesting because of the different aspects of intelligence and learning that they discussed. Specifically this episode discussed issues of different skills, in personality, social, and cognitive. The experts in this episode stressed the importance of personality and social skills for success of high school graduates and gave an example of what happened to people who received their GEDs instead of a high school diploma. Both of these groups of people had the same level of test scores, but the people with GEDs often fell behind because they were not these other skills during their education.
When the topic of standardized testing was brought up I was happy. There has been so much controversy right now regarding these tests. I happen to oppose the standardized tests because it is no way to accurately measure the effectiveness of teachers, some states even have decided to base a teachers’ raise in pay off these tests, but it also causes unnecessary stress to the students, some of whom have trouble comprehending difficult questions or writing. As stated in the beginning of This American Life, teachers can only help a student so far when they only teach them for one year, but at the same time I have been learning recently that as a teacher, you should not judge a student. As a teacher, you should not think you know everything about them, especially their home life, do not put your experiences onto them.
Poverty and trauma were discussed as well during this episode for young children and how it can affect a child's’ thrive stature. It was shown that if a child experience stress during their younger years, they could have developmental issues or they could have failure to thrive. Hearing Kewauna’s story made me think back to my middle school years. Bringing me back to the memory of a classmate punching my vice principal. Unlike Kewauna, my classmate was not put into lower classes, but was kept in the general population of classes. These children tend to have problems focusing, paying attention in class, sitting still, and overall just having good behavior is a problem.
In my opinion, I believe that schools should go back to how they were teaching before standardized testing. I think they should be teaching the seven pillars and that children should treat people how they want to be treated. The consequence of not doing this is that children are being defined by how well they perform on these standardized tests. Teaching outside of cognitive learning would be helpful because learning with non-cognitive skills is good as well. Instead of putting children into lower level classes when they act out and hoping it will help, we should be focusing less on the test relation to others and more on how to help them improve on their own. Teaching personality and social skills besides cognitive skills could help improve the future lives of children and help prepare them for future success.
Vocabulary: intelligence, learning, cognitive, standardized, non-cognitive
This episode was about a subject I know all too well about. My mother is a third grade teacher at a lower income (not as bad as Chicago) school and talks about these kind of problems all the time. And I specifically remember a time where she talked about the first time she learned about how stress affects a child’s brain and after learning about the home life of some of her students decided to greatly reduce the amount of homework she assigned each week. She also tries to use the homework as a time for the children and the parents to connect by reading together and to have the parent work with the child on math problems or handwriting assignments as much as they can. I think that having the parents engage in the child’s learning helps facilitate the development of intelligence through social interaction.
Also discussed in this episode was the problem of cognitive control; being able to control behavior, direct attention, and being able to learn efficiently. The specialists mentioned multiple times how the constant stress of the fight or flight reflex reduced the child’s ability to have control over some of their cognitive functions, whether that means they are violent, or have a hard time paying attention.
From what I’ve read about in the textbook, I think we could improve our educational system by relying less on standardized tests and focus more on how to work with others, be flexible and productive in different situations, and encourage different types of intelligence. One thing that I’ve noticed in my experience and the stories I’ve heard from my mother is that so much energy is spent on standardized testing. In some classes I’ve taken, the goal was to get the right answer and do well on the test, but the classes that I’ve enjoyed the most and got the most out of where the classes where the goal was to teach me how to get the answer, why we use x method, how x method works and how to learn from our mistakes on quizzes. When the class focused on how the solution and method were created, we all seemed to do better on the test because we felt confident on our ability to understand the method and not just try to get the answer.
If we spent more time teaching students how to get along and work with one another, it would make the rest of life easier to apply those social skills and work together to solve problems and discuss problems together because two heads are better than one. Working together would also help to teach children to be flexible and learn to adapt to different situations.
I think it is also important to encourage different types of intelligence. Instead of focusing on being good at math, English, and science, we should try and expose children to as many different types of learning and intelligence as possible. If a student is struggling in school, they could lose hope on ever doing well; but if they had exposure to different intelligences such as music, they might realize that they are good at something and not lose hope.
Intelligence
Cognitive control
Theory of multiple intelligence
This show was basically entirely about how standardized testing in school situations isn’t fair nor is it particularly helpful to students and teachers. It addressed learning ability conditioned on the home environment of young students. I talked in one of my previous blog posts about how school for me was not just a place to learn in class, but to learn in social contexts with my peers. The podcast talks about how school also provides an environment to learn non-cognitive skills, such as tenacity, resilience and impulse control, and how a rough or stressful home environment can impede the development of these skills. Students who have difficulties with this find that it leads to difficulties in other areas of their lives; for example, the girl in the podcast, Kewauna, was put in the “slow” class for those who were unable to keep up with the regular class. This stunted her learning further because she said they accomplished nothing in that “class” while the other kids with more stable home lives continued their learning on schedule. This sets them up for a disadvantage in their future, in which other kids or even the adults they come into contact with assume that because they were in the slow class that they aren’t intelligent or deserving of certain opportunities, when in fact they simply are lacking in those non-cognitive skills.
I really think schools should do away with standardized testing. It creates an unnecessary amount of stress for the students, who feel so much pressure to do well for themselves, their teachers, their schools and states. It creates stress for the teachers who are required to follow the test guidelines to a T, or risk somehow skewing the results (or perhaps just accidentally making the test non-standardized). It puts the focus on memorizing and consuming as much material as possible instead of actually learning it and enjoying it. Standardized tests don’t test intelligence through creativity, use of mental imagery or problem solving skills, just memorization and decision making as students have to choose a letter between A and D. Even now, in college, this class is my favorite one because there isn’t the stress of tests, whether standardized or not. I just get to relax and absorb the information at my own pace, which really makes it enjoyable. I’ve learned more in this class than I have in most of my other classes this semester, because I don’t feel that pressure to learn. I really wish that teachers were allowed to decide the testing needs based on the class itself, and adjust as necessary. I think students would be much more eager and willing to learn, as well as able to learn better, without all the stress of standardized testing hanging over their heads.
Mental imagery, problem solving, decision making, intelligence, creativity, standardization
Out of all the episodes that I have heard this semester, this was definitely the most interesting. This podcast covered personal situations and the issue of how external factors such as neighborhood environments, poverty, and other social impacts affected their learning capabilities. In a general sense, the podcast focused on how a child’s difficult home environment makes it harder for that child to learn. Nowadays schools are putting a lot of emphasis on standardized test which are often used to measure a student’s cognitive development. Essentially the standardized test that we are forced to take measures solely our intelligence which then determines the fate of that child’s classes and how much help they need. These tests however do not factor in a child’s “non-cognitive” skills such as self-awareness or conscientiousness. What I found interesting is that this episode points out that success after high school graduation does not solely depend on cognitive skills, which is shown by studies that compared the success of high school graduates to those who earned GEDs. It was found that even though both groups obtained essentially the same education, high school graduates proved to be more successful in occupation performance and even earned more than those with just a GED. This is thought to be the result of exposure to non-cognitive skills. So although those who earned their GEDs had equivalent cognitive skills as a high school graduate, they didn’t have the opportunity to build their non-cognitive skills like those who attended high school.
Non-cognitive skills can be affected by the amount of stress that a child holds. While these skills have the power to make a child coming from a poor background become successful, it does no good to the child if stress is blocking their ability to develop these skills. As we learned in the learning chapter external forces can affect a child’s ability to learn. Experiencing abuse or being subjected to live in a neighborhood filled with violence and poverty can add stress to virtually anyone. This stress hinders the development of non-cognitive skills. The absence of these skills makes it hard to develop cognitive skills and thus limits a person’s learning significantly like in the case of Kewauna. Her unfortunate situation led her to become stressed and having low non-cognitive skills. Since she was unable to control herself, she was put in an environment that did not contribute to her learning (being put into a room where she played video games).
Personally, I don’t agree with the idea of standardized tests or basing the financial funding a school receives on standardized tests. Intelligence is more than just tests and grades; I don’t think that someone should be defined as a number or a letter. Every person has a unique situation that I think is often overlooked in schools. Schools should focus on the overall success of a child, tailoring the specific needs of each child. If we are taught from early on that all that matters is our intelligence, we might never learn to accept failure, self-acceptance, and most importantly resilience. I understand that this is really hard to do especially with one teacher being assigned to about 20-30 students but we are talking about the success of our future generations.
Vocabulary: cognitive development, non-cognitive skills, learning, intelligence, standardized
The education system in the United States is flawed. There aren’t many people who would argue otherwise, it’s plain to see that we, in the US, just aren’t stacking up against other countries’ educational systems. Listening to this particular installment of “This American Life” justified in a way, a belief that I have had for quite some time. That belief is that we need to teach students to be critical thinking, problem solving adults who can act for themselves and be confident and then the learning of school subjects will come much easier. If we create students that are interested in learning, and critical of new information then they will be more likely to become invested in what they are learning. Students will be more confident and unafraid to ask questions. The more questions asked, the better their overall understanding. Only when we can make kids and students feel that they are discovering and understanding information will we be able to move from a school system that teaches at children to a school system that truly promotes learning. We’ve learned about how people learn and how information is stored and recalled. We know that too much stress causes inefficient recall of information yet we push students to their breaking points with heavy consequences for poor performance. Its counter intuitive. Students should be put into scenarios where they are better able to find their successes. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be told that they are making mistakes or told what they need to do better but there needs to be a medium.
Critical thinking, learning,
I found through listening to this American Life broadcast, that many of the concepts of intelligence, language, and especially learning were well in play during the course of their discussion. One of the large point in the episode, was the point of adverse living and social situations and their effects on a child’s developing minds. They even recited a statistic that kids coming from a background with four or more adverse situations within it, are 32 times more likely to have problems later in life, whether that is behavioral health issues. This translates well into what we read about learning and awareness and how when learning these cognitive skills, a higher level of awareness is key. In this situation that these children are being placed in however, their stress is so high, and their situations are so so ugly that they have no room in their minds for this focus on learning cognitive skills. It is also proven that the higher the stress is, the poorer people tend to do in the task at hand which in this case is these teens higher education. As far as language is concerned, the story in Act Two of the broadcast fits well. Language is taught at a much younger age and develops along with the Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area and once you get into adulthood it is much harder to learn a second language. Tying back to the story, it is important for parents to have a good relationship with their children and since language learning is done at such a young age, just like the mother who was taught how to have a wonderful relationship with her child, parents need to have good relationships with their children to be able to help them progress in their early-childhood language learning. An example of how bad relationships with children can affect language, is seen in the story of a father child who was chained to a potty chair at a young age and was never spoken to barely at all. When services got a hold of her and her mother when she was around 13, she had only a vocabulary of 20 words or so and didn’t know proper syntax or grammar whatsoever. John Heckman also referred to a study within the broadcast that showed that parenting can improve the quality of life in a child even in stressful living conditions. Much like the rats who were groomed as babies in the study, did well in adulthood, the same situation is seen with human children all over the world.
I think the public education system can be improved through teaching these noncognitive skills that were talked about in the broadcast and focusing on them more than cognitive skills or at least to the same degree for each skill. If schools wish to focus so keenly on cognitive skill instead of noncognitive skills, they should also push more on the issue of sleeping habits among high schoolers and college students. Since sleep plays big roles in the storing of memory and the stress that your body is taking, this should be a big topic that they have never tackled to a large degree.
Terms: cognitive skills, noncognitive skills, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, language, Broca’s Area Wernicke’s Area, intelligence
The big idea that this show covered is how social context really affects a child’s learning, language development and intelligence. It specifically talked about children that grow up in very disadvantaged homes in inner city Chicago, and how that environment later affects their ability to perform in school and life. As was described in chapter 10, children who grew up in wealthier homes tended to have higher intelligence levels because they had access to more educational toys, better education, and tended to have more supportive and loving attention from their parents. These aspects of childhood, unfortunately, are not found in the lives of those who grow up for example in inner city Chicago. Therefore, from the get go, these children are set up to be lower performing students later on in life. They also tend to have less attached relationships with their parents, as was described in the chapter on development, and this then also leads to language and communication problems. In Kewauna’s case, she didn’t have the ability to develop strong relationships with her family growing up, and this led to her inability to communicate her thoughts and feelings later on in life, getting her into a lot of trouble. As was also described in chapter 9, babies learn language and communication based on what they see around them and their social context, just as much as they do biologically. Because Kewauna was not able to witness proper communication of thoughts and feelings, she never learned this skill, putting her at a disadvantage when she grew up. Fortunately, there are ways to combat these setbacks kids growing up in disadvantaged homes experience, and the effects are not permanent.
Based on what I’ve learned in the chapters of language, intelligence and learning, our public education system could be greatly improved by the removal of standardized testing. As was discussed in the show, these tests fail to take into account non-cognitive abilities, an important aspect of a person’s intelligence. Standardized tests also put too much emphasis on simply memorizing as opposed to actually learning. Focusing on a child’s individual intelligence, as well as their non-cognitive skills is a more difficult task for schools to take on, but in the long run it is infinitely more beneficial than a number a standardized test spits out. Chapter 10 even emphasized that there is more to intelligence than cognitive abilities, proving that if schools want accurate representations of children’s intelligence, focusing only on cognitive skills is not the way to go. Moving away from standardized testing is going to be an extremely difficult task for our school systems to take on, but the benefits its removal will provide will impact students and teachers greatly.
Terms: Intelligence, language, cognitive, non-cognitive, attachment, social context