The “purpose of schools” and the “summer slump”

Last updated on: November 9, 2015 at 11:34 am by Jane the Actuary

The “purpose of schools” and the “summer slump” 2015-11-09T11:34:02-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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You’ve surely heard this before: we need to adopt year-round schools to end the “summer slump” — that is, the fact that students forget so much of what was learned during the school year, over summer break, requiring that a sizeable portion of the next year’s instruction is simply a repeat of the prior year’s material.

Here’s a quote from a long piece at the Washington Post, “A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found.” (as linked to by Sarah Hoyt at instapundit.com)

In my travels, I visited the Lawrenceville School, rated as one of the very best high schools in the United States. To its credit, Lawrenceville conducted a fascinating experiment a decade ago. After summer vacation, returning students retook the final exams they had completed in June for their science courses. Actually, they retook simplified versions of these exams, after faculty removed low-level “forgettable” questions The results were stunning. The average grade in June was a B+ (87 percent). When the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade plummeted to an F (58 percent). Not one student retained mastery of all key concepts they appear to have learned in June. The obvious question: if what was “learned” vanishes so quickly, was anything learned in the first place?

The holy grail in our high schools is the Advanced Placement (AP) track. Pioneered 50 years ago by elite private schools to demonstrate the superior student progress, AP courses now pervade mainstream public schools. Over and over, well-intentioned people call for improving U.S. education by getting more of our kids — especially in poor communities — into AP courses. But do our kids learn in AP courses? In an experiment conducted by Dartmouth College, entering students with a 5 on their AP Psychology exam took the final exam from the college’s introductory Psych course. A pitiful 10 percent passed. Worse, when the AP superstars did enroll in intro Psych, they performed no better than classmates with no prior coursework in the subject area. It’s as though the AP students had learned nothing about psychology. And that’s the point.

Now, the “experiment” in the first paragraph is a bit fuzzy, and seems possible that the B+ and the F are not apples-to-apples, if they didn’t remove the “low-level” questions and re-grade the June exams. The example of the AP exams is more concerning, considering how much these exams are growing in importance (even to the point of Illinois legislating that it’s state schools accept them).

The author’s main point is that students should chiefly be learning grander “higher-order thinking skills” rather than rote memorization of the sort that’s rewarded on multiple-choice standardized exams. You can read the whole argument at the Post, but it’s nothing you haven’t heard before. And yet — you can’t have one without the other. You can’t move to critical thinking if you don’t have a fundamental knowledge base. These are some of what the author lists as irrelevant: “factoring polynomials, memorizing the definition of mitosis, past participles, conjugating French verbs, facts about the Mesopotamians.” — all of which I would say are quite relevant: you can’t learn more complex skills unless you’ve mastered the basic core of algebra; you can’t move on to higher levels of science without knowing about cell reproduction; you can’t learn a foreign language without, well, memorization; and it is important to be grounded in history to understand the fundamentals of how the world works.

But there is a bigger challenge: what do you do about the fact that so much knowledge is learned, then lost? Let’s face it: I have forgotten far more about actuarial mathematics than I have retained from my years in exam-taking.

There are some subjects where there is a “natural” reinforcement: for instance, reading comprehension skills, or grammar and writing, for instance. Others may have interconnected topics but may require intentional review: for instance, there seems to be an increasing emphasis on review in math, so that kids don’t just learn regrouping for addition and subtraction, and leave that sit while they move on to multiplication and division.

Other subjects have more discrete subject matter — e.g., “science” consists of units of study which you can’t readily chain into a set of materials that build on each other from one year to the next. At the younger levels, you might learn about the planets, or do simple experiments on the states of matter; then you move into things like the cell, or the basic concepts of the periodic table, before ultimately moving into biology, chemistry, physics in-depth in high school. Yes, there is the overarching concept of the scientific method, but you can hardly learn anatomy via a set of hypotheses; you have to simply learn content, and a lot of it.

And history? Yes, students will forget much of their World History class over the succeeding summer; but adopting a year-round calendar doesn’t mean there’s any greater degree of retention the next year when American history is studied. But this doesn’t mean that history shouldn’t be studied, or that that there are easy remedies to be found if only we “engage” students (which typically seems to involve doing special units on narrow topics to the exclusion of the larger context). Many years ago, I toyed around with the idea that if I ever taught history again, I’d create a course with two components: a core timeline and set of basic facts to be memorized, and tested repeatedly over the course of the semester, to hopefully boost retention more than one semester-end exam; plus in-depth reading that builds off this core framework.

Bottom line: it’s a matter of both/and, not either/or, when it comes to core learning vs. critical thinking skills.

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