

Why exams mean nothing out of context - fun2have
http://blog.webnographer.com/2010/11/why-exams-mean-nothing-out-of-context/

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donall
What are the chances that the kids are good at calculating prices because the
sample space of possible total costs of products and offered money is quite
small? In this case, they could imitate good mental arithmetic simply by
memorising the most common combinations.

If you sell only two products - sunscreen and gum - at a fixed price and most
people are unlikely to buy more than a couple of each, you can draw up an
easily memorisable table of all likely total costs. Assuming a finite number
of notes in "normal" denominations (i.e. not a 8063 cruzeiro note) then it is
probably also relatively straightforward to memorise all possible combinations
of products and proffered notes. This memorisation might not happen
consciously, but through endless repetition.

So if you buy a pack of gum for 300 cruzeiros and pay with a 1000 cruzeiro
note, just like everybody else did that day, the kid will know that it's 700
in change from memory. Bring that same kid into a classroom, introduce a suite
of new products at different prices and ask him/her to perform the same
computations and it is quite understandable that he/she will not perform as
well.

Now I'm not saying the classroom setting doesn't have an effect such as making
the kids nervous, just that it would be important to control for this kind of
memorisation. I couldn't access a full copy of the paper cited, so I don't
know if it was taken into account...

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pmiller2
I can confirm this result from personal experience. In teaching basic algebra,
I found people who couldn't multiply 0.8 by 20 without a calculator could
easily tell me how much something that cost $20 would be if a store was having
a 20%-off sale. Some of them could even compute the amount with sales tax.

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sp4rki
The problem with the kids in the private schools is that they are taught to
memorize a procedure to attain an answer to a pre-constructed question. For
them it's different to ask if x is 3.56 and y is 4, what is the product of x
times y, in contrast to asking them to multiply a the 3.56 per item cost of
four burgers.

In my opinion the problem is not what is taught or how, but the direction
teaching as a whole has always had. It's fine to teach kids that the product
of x and y is z, as long as you've also spent time explaining the actual uses
something might have in the children's life. Kids and teenagers always say
"Why do I have to study this if it has no use in real life?", and it's the
school's and teacher's job to teach this children that they're wrong.

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tkahn6
_with the kids in the private schools_

I have observed this is both private and public schools.

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sp4rki
I was referring to the experiment on the original article in which private
school kids where subjected to using their knowledge in standardized tests
versus real life situations. This is actually true from elementary school all
the way up to graduate courses.

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extension
From the research paper linked from the article, here are how the kids scored
in different contexts:

    
    
      calculating prices in the street      98%
      solving word problems on an exam      74%
      solving abstract problems on an exam  34%
    

This would suggest that applying concepts is more important, physical context
less so.

Mind you, this is an extremely difficult experiment to carry out
scientifically and is open to many interpretations. I would at least want to
see it reproduced before giving it much consideration.

~~~
fun2have
The experiment was later reproduced by Stephen J.Ceci and Antonio Roazzi. See
“The effects of context on cognition: postcards from Brazil” Stephen J. Ceci
and Antonio Roazzi, in “Mind Context” Sternberg R. J. and Wagner K. eds.
(1994), page 78

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LaPingvino
This might just be why you're an entrepreneur: it's way better doing it than
learning about it out of context ;)

~~~
fun2have
Very good point that I had not thought about. This is the challenge of
business schools, they are teaching out of context. It may be a reason why so
many MBA fail at been an entrepreneur.

~~~
philwelch
_It may be a reason why so many MBA fail at been an entrepreneur._

I suspect it's right there in the title: "Master of Business Administration".
MBA's are master administrators for businesses, which is not the same thing as
an entrepreneur.

