According to Charlotte Pritchard writing in "Does chocolate make you clever?", studies inspired by evidence that cocoa is both healthy and improves brain function, show that there is a strong correlation between a nation's chocolate consumption and its number of Nobel Prizes in the various sciences, although she is also careful to note that correlation does not necessarily imply causation in either direction.
The specific figure for the correlation that Pritchard reports is r = 0.791, which is very strong. It is even stronger than the strong correlation between regular response blogging and final grades for an AEP Reading and Writing course. The statistics for last term (term 6, RW3) are below:
GPA
|
blog
|
12
|
105
|
9
|
82
|
7
|
80
|
10
|
78
|
8
|
54
|
8
|
47
|
8
|
21
|
9
|
19
|
4
|
19
|
5
|
10
|
8
|
8
|
3
|
6
|
4
|
4
|
2
|
4
|
-1
|
2
|
Pearson
|
0.74123
|
blog = the number of blog posts + comments over the six week term.
As with eating chocolate and Nobel Prizes, the correlation is very strong: although there are clearly outliers and the fit is not perfect (Pearson = 1.0), the students who did the most response blogging also tend to do best at formal academic writing. I don't think that this is surprising: writing, and also reading, like every other skill, improve with practise and they require practice on a regular basis, at a challenging level, to improve. David Beckham was not born a great football player, nor do great chefs become great until after much practice. As with the chocolate and Nobels, I am cautious about interpreting the causal basis for the correlation behind response blogging and standard of academic writing, but that the correlation is real is proved by every terms' results. The students who blog the most tend to be the best academic readers and writers.
The scientifically cautious Cornell later retracts his assertion that dark chocolate is superior to milk chocolate in intellectual efficacy as much as in excellence of taste, but although I don't have any supporting statistics for it, I'm still sticking with him and the dark side of the chocolate industry. I love really dark, high cocoa chocolate - even up to a whopping 99% cocoa, which is almost perfectly free of sugar and very, very chocolatey. Excellent to suck on, though perhaps not ideal for dessert making - Sacher Torte probably needs a little more than 1% sugar to be entirely wonderful.
A tasty square of dark chocolate lasts just about long enough to write one or two decent blog comments.
For rw5, weeks 1 - 2. Added November 19, 2012
I've just done the statistics for the class for the past two weeks. They are:
GPA
weeks 1-2 |
Blogs
weeks 1-2 |
9
|
21
|
8
|
17
|
9
|
17
|
9
|
16
|
6
|
15
|
5
|
11
|
5
|
11
|
9
|
10
|
2
|
9
|
6
|
9
|
8
|
7
|
10
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
Pearson =
|
0.378
|
This correlation of 0.378 is not so very strong as the usual correlation at the end of term, but it is a medium correlation ("Pearson product-moment", 2012), and we can already see a general trend developing, which we can track over the coming weeks.
__________
Reference
Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. (2012, November 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:01, November 19, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient&oldid=521414174
Pritchard, C. (2012, November 18). Does chocolate make you clever? BBC News Magazine. Retrieved November 18, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20356613
When I first read this article on BBC News Magazine, I was thinking to pick this one to write response writing on Tuesday. Now I must change my mind.
ReplyDeleteSorry Cee.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm glad to see that it caught someone else's attention as well, even if for different reasons.
I'm trying to refrain from response blogging BBC articles, but this one was too irresistible.
I've emailed myself a couple of New York Times and other non BBC News articles which I'll stick to for the next week.
You can also response blog any article in one of the sources on my lists on the right - even Dilbert is OK if you write something substantial on it.
I knew an old lady, who was my neighbor, always gave her grandson dark chocolate. Since her son and daughter in law had to work, she took care of her grandson in son’s house. She insisted dark chocolate make people clever. I tried to give my daughter dark chocolate, that night my daughter didn’t sleep. Too much caffeine to a child or especially a vulnerable body to caffeine might have been a reason of insomnia. I quit giving dark chocolate to my daughter who was five years old. I wonder whether her grandson becomes smatter or not.
ReplyDeleteYour essay forces me to write this followings. I doubt the effect of my writing without correction and reading peer’s writings. I know my writings are too coarse, and have many grammar mistakes and unsuitable words. Do you think writing under these conditions will be improved by just repeating? And, about reading, my hobby is reading books. When I read something, my writing style is affected by it, and I learn its vocabularies and expressions. If I read some my own language’s writings, I know what are mistakes if they have mistakes, and just ignore them, but in English I can’t notice mistakes and just receive them as my knowledge. How can I avoid such bad effect? Even though I know merits of reading my peer’s and repeated writing, I’m just worrying about that.
Katie,
ReplyDeleteThe primary purpose of most reading and writing is to communicate, to share ideas between people, and the blogging here generally does that very well. I don't generally see people repeating the errors of others, and if there is a common error, or something that could be, we can look at it in class. Certainly, the presence of errors does change how people use that language, and we can see this in how language changes. When I was at university, you did not, for example, see sentences beginning with the words and or but, both of which are now so common even in journals that it really is about time that Hartmann and Blass updated their information about these and other coordinating conjunctions. These days I sometimes even see so starting a sentence in a piece of academic writing, and whilst I can happily do that in my own less formal writing, say an email to a friend, I can't normally bring myself to do it in more formal writing. But this, too, might change.
Exposure to mistakes in language does not harm children learning a language, who get an awful lot of awful "baby" talk from parents and others and hear each other's mess of their own language all the time, not to mention the "mistakes" that are common on TV and in popular music; and yet children manage to become fluent in several versions of their language - and I think we do all have a few versions of our own language. I don't speak English the way I write it in an essay, and the way I write here is different again, as is the way I speak with my family in Australia. The human brain seems well designed to learn languages, and even among adults, exposure to mistakes does not seem to do any harm, provided that there is also exposure to correct and well-written (not the same things) models of the target language.
This is why I make sure you have plenty to read. Although you don't need to respond to them everyday, you should be reading something at least at the level of the BBC News daily, as in every day, meaning at least six days a week. Response blogging forces you to read much more carefully, and our variation on Hartmann and Blass's response blogging moves it in the direction of academic writing, even thought a major purpose is to practice and get into the habit of putting your ideas down in sentences in English with some fluency and confidence. Anchoring the responses to examples of well written English ensures that there is a reasonably close connection to good writing, and from this week, we are moving up from the BBC News standard to more academic models of written English.
A commonly repeated suggestion in the official TOEFL preparation guidelines is almost exactly the same: read something like The New York Times daily, practise summarizing the articles, and respond to them (Educational Testing Services, 2008).
References
Educational Testing Services (ETS). (2008). TOEFL iBT Tips: How to Prepare for the TOEFL iBT. Retrieved November 19, 2012 from http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/TOEFL/pdf/TOEFL_Tips.pdf
You might be interested in checking the correlation for the first two weeks of term, for which I've just done the statistics. I added them to the blog post with a note because I can't neatly format them here in a comment.
ReplyDeleteI've only given the numbers, removing the names and AUA serial numbers, but assume that everyone has a fair idea of how many blog posts + comments they have posted so far.
I love chocolate but not dark chocolate with less sugar which is too bitter for me.
ReplyDeleteI think that respond writing and comment on blog are good way to practice English by reading the good source like BBC, NY Times, NPR and new scientists that Peter recommend. Grammar is important when you use English but ,without practice by use it to express your ideas, it's useless. Morover, reading good source will improve your writing and also grammar by imitation of using language by native speaker.
Thank you Mo.
DeleteI agree with the last sentence 100%.
I am sure I only learnt to write because I read a lot.
From later primary school, I loved reading. I was a very bad student for doing homework, but I loved reading; although I read a lot of rubbish, I also read a lot of good stuff, and I think it all helped - the rubbish as well as the great stuff, the comics and cartoons as well as the great history, essays, philosophy and literature.
I recently reread some books I'd loved when I was around 13 - 15 years old. They really are awful - but they still fuelled my imagination and kept me reading. In fact, I would have been 13 or maybe 14 years old when I first read Lord of the Flies - it was all a bit confusing, and I didn't like it nearly as much as the fiction and non-fiction I was choosing for myself from the school and town libraries, but I read it again when I was at university and started to see what a truly great novel it is.
I remember we also read Shakespeare's Macbeth in the first year of high school. The language was so very difficult that I don't think any of us appreciated or enjoyed much more than the witches, and perhaps one catchy line from Lady Macbeth: "Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!". Even though we knew that it was a great story, full of the bloody murders of kings, the suicide of a murderous queen, and ghosts, witches, battles and all sorts of other excitement to entice a 13 year old boy - the sort of boys on the island of the Lord of the Flies (whom we will soon meet in all his rotting flesh). I'm so glad my English masters forced us to stick with it. After a few years of reading Shakespeare, the language became less of a problem, and, like so many others for the past 400 years, I came to love Shakespeare and to see and to read him again, and again, and again. For sheer horror, Macbeth, whether on stage, screen or page, beats even Silence of the Lambs.