In this article, Tamar Lewin reports on researcher Laura Hamilton's surprising lack of surprise at the surprising result that children who receive greater financial support from their parents do less well at college (2013). Hamilton admits that this not what is commonly believed, but she explains that the result may be due to students who do not have to make any sacrifice or effort themselves simply wasting the opportunity to get a decent education, something that Hamilton had suspected from what she observed during her own earlier personal experience of life in a dormitory.
When I saw the headline on the list of returned search items, I expected it to be a study reporting exactly what most people think: that students who get more financial support from their parents do better at university than those who get less. I was one of the people who were surprised by the facts that the research reveals. However, when I thought about it a bit more, Hamilton's explanation does sound right, and in fact chimes with my own memories of some students I knew at Sydney University, who spend their four or more years there largely having a good time, and working only hard enough to get passing grades, while their devoted and sacrificing parents, or their rich parents, paid all the bills. Of course, as Hamilton also acknowledges, not all students whose parents were paying behaved that way, and I was rather glad that my parents were kindly paying all of my expenses so that I could concentrate on my studies. Perhaps it also helped that my parents allowed me the freedom to choose to study what I truly loved, which is why I ended up with a mixed bag of mathematics, physics, and dead languages along with my major in philosophy - not the most useful sort of degree for most jobs, but I did get decent grades as well as having the leisure to enjoy the non-academic learning experiences that go with being a uni. student.
Hamilton's research also reminded me of a similarly surprising statistic, this time from an economist, who, after a careful analysis of a massive amount of data from the California High School System, found that whilst having books on shelves at home correlated strongly with children doing academically in school, parents reading to their children did not correlate at all with academic performance in schools. This is another fact that initially surprises most people, especially parents, who are naturally concerned for their own children (my own fascination was more strictly academic, although I would like my young nieces and nephews to do as well as possible). And of course, just as Hamilton felt the need to explain her surprising result, we also want an explanation for these surprising statistical facts about how books on shelves and reading to children correlate with how the kids do at school. What do you think? What is the explanation for the seeming odd facts that having books on shelves at home correlates with children doing better at school, whilst parents reading to them does not so correlate?
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Reference
Although I've made it a link, if you look at my search results in a day or two, the list of returned results will almost certainly be quite different - the New York Times search results displayed at the URL http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/financial+support+college+grades/7days/ are generated anew from a database search every time the query is run.
ReplyDeleteAnd you have probably noticed that I made a couple of mistakes in my reference citations this morning - APA style says that the title of an article written in a reference citation (in the References section) should be all lower case except for the first letter and any proper nouns, such as Sony.
ReplyDeleteThe above reference citation is correctly written: there are no quotation marks around the title of the article and every word begins with a lower-case letter, except the first.
In contrast, in my first paragraph, the introduction of my blog post, the title is written in "Quotation Marks" and the first letter of every word that is not a preposition or conjunction and also less than four letters starts with a capital.
Don't worry too much about this capitalization detail - it changed in the 5th edition of the APA style manual, and I notice that the new 6th edition wants to change the way the titles of sources such as newspapers and journals are written. Most academics and publishers have not yet adopted these new style guidelines.
The points we practised this morning are the most important for writing reference list citations, and you will get more practice over the next few weeks, starting this evening with your own blog post on an article discussing an issue of modern life.
Your blog make me surprised about the statistics. I'm not sure that the result about grading of university student match with Thai society. In my university life, I rarely saw my classmates lived on their own. Mostly, they, including me, were supported by parent's finance. They did quite well, only around 3-4 students fail and resign from my faculty. It's about Thai culture that children are dependent on parent longer than western culture.
ReplyDeleteHaving books on shelves at home correlates with children doing better at school, whilst parents reading to them does not so correlate. For me, my family are the avid readers, especially my dad and I. Actually, I can't remember that he read a book to me before bed times. But there are many books surrounding the house, including a rest room.lol I can read a book everywhere in my house; hence, I'm watching TV less than reading. It make me tough to read a lot of books in university. Thanks Dad.
The statistics show not that students fail or drop out, but that those with more financial support do less well than those more fully supporting themselves. I was certainly surprised by this seemingly counter-intuitive result, which, like Mo, also contradicted my personal experience at university.
DeleteAnother interesting condition, which I should have fit into my summary, is that the correlation did not obtain at the best universities - Harvard, MIT, Yale, UCLA and the like. Perhaps students who make it into the few universities that are excellent are sufficiently self-motivated that the causal explanation offered by Hamilton does not work against those receiving generous financial support from caring parents. It was at the majority universities, the average and below average types, that Hamilton discovered her surprising correlation to hold.
Perhaps such results are a useful reminder that our own personal experience, in this case mine and Mo's, whilst suggestive, is rarely solid support for any more general statement.
This newes was reported in Korea. Koreans have strong interest on a education issue than others. However, nobody may pay attention to the news because it's not a big deal in our view of points. Korean's educational mind ends in the entering a university, and after graduating university is another problem, job searching, actually the after graduating part is more serious in our life, although the high tution of a university is a social problem because it's always increasing over the inflation.
ReplyDeleteI'm suprised at the fact the books on our selves are correlated with children's academic doing in school. In my case, I don't like real books because they have some tiny insects which you can see easily observe in your old books. So, I don't like collecting books for my selves. My preference is e-books which have no insects and don't need any space except some memory space. However, if it is ture, I have to consider having more real books.