Category: Education

Videogames Help ADHD Children

(p. A9) It isn’t often that children are encouraged to play videogames.
But a group of Boston Children’s Hospital researchers have developed videogames for children with conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, or those who just need to learn how to control their emotions better.
The videogames track a child’s heart rate, displayed on the screen. The games get increasingly difficult as the player’s heart rate increases. To be able to resume playing without extra obstacles the child has to calm themselves down and reduce their heart rate.
“What we’re trying to do is build emotional strength for kids,” said Jason Kahn, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Mighteor, a Boston-based company and spinoff of Boston Children’s Hospital. BCH runs an accelerator and funded some of the research and development of the products. They retain a small piece of ownership of Mighteor. Dr. Kahn worked as a developmental psychologist at Boston Children’s for seven years and maintains an affiliation there but launched the company in November [2016].
The games help children “build muscle memory,” he said. So once they are able to reduce their heart rate over and over again the response of physiologically calming themselves down becomes more automatic.

For the full story, see:
Sumathi Reddy. “‘When Videogames Can Help.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 18, 2017): A9.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 17, 2017, and has the title “YOUR HEALTH; When Children Can Benefit From Playing Videogames.”)

“Eye-Popping” Lack of Ideological Diversity in Universities

Cass Sunstein, the author of the passages quoted below, was the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012 during the Obama administration. He is currently a professor at the Harvard Law School. His spouse is Samantha Powers who he met while advising the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. She went on to be appointed by Obama as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

(p. 7B) In recent years, concern has grown over what many people see as a left-of-center political bias at colleges and universities. A few months ago, Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, published a study of the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked highest by U.S. News in 2017.

The findings are eye-popping (even if they do not come as a great surprise to many people in academia). Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, Langbert’s survey found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.
. . .
. . . , the current numbers make two points unmistakably clear. First, those who teach in departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to offer competing views and to present them fairly and with respect. A political philosopher who leans left should be willing and able to ask students to think about the force of the argument for free markets, even if they produce a lot of inequality.
Second, those who run departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to find people who will represent competing views — visiting speakers, visiting professors and new hires. Faculties need not be expected to mirror their societies, but students and teachers ought not live in information cocoons.
John Stuart Mill put it well: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”

For the full commentary, see:
Cass Sunstein. “The problem with All Those Liberal College Professors.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, May 1, 2018): 7B.
(Note: the ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original; the other ellipses were added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 30, 2018.)

Exposing the Failure of Peer Review

(p. A15) The existence of a monthly journal focused on “feminist geography” is a sign of something gone awry in academia. The journal in question–Gender, Place & Culture–published a paper online in May whose author claimed to have spent a year observing canine sexual misconduct in Portland, Ore., parks.
The author admits that “my own anthropocentric frame” makes it difficult to judge animal consent. Still, the paper claims dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’ ” and issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.”
The paper was ridiculous enough to pique my interest–and rouse my skepticism, which grew in July with a report in Campus Reform by Toni Airaksinen. Author Helen Wilson had claimed to have a doctorate in feminist studies, but “none of the institutions that offers such a degree could confirm that she had graduated from their program,” Ms. Airaksinen wrote. In August Gender, Place & Culture issued an “expression of concern” admitting it couldn’t verify Ms. Wilson’s identity, though it kept the paper on its website.
All of this prompted me to ask my own questions. My email to “Helen Wilson” was answered by James Lindsay, a math doctorate and one of the real co-authors of the dog-park study. Gender, Place & Culture had been duped, he admitted. So had half a dozen other prominent journals that accepted fake papers by Mr. Lindsay and his collaborators–Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and Helen Pluckrose, a London-based scholar of English literature and history and editor of AreoMagazine.com.
The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences. “I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,” Mr. Boghossian says. Anyone who questions research on identity, privilege and oppression risks accusations of bigotry.
. . .
The trio say the bias in favor of grievance-focused research was so strong that their hoax papers sailed through peer review, acceptance and publication despite obvious problems. The data for the dog-park study, Mr. Lindsay says, “was constructed to look outlandish on purpose. So asking us for the data would not have been out of sorts. It would have been appropriate, and we would have been exposed immediately.”
One hoax paper, submitted to Hypatia, proposed a teaching method centered on “experiential reparations.” It suggested that professors rate students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories. Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and “invited” to “sit on the floor” or “to wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course.” Students who complained would be told that this “educational tool” helps them confront “privileged fragility.”
Hypatia’s two unnamed peer reviewers did not object that the proposed teaching method was abusive. . . . Hypatia didn’t accept the paper but said it would consider a revised version.
. . .
Mr. Boghossian doesn’t have tenure and expects the university will fire or otherwise punish him. Ms. Pluckrose predicts she’ll have a hard time getting accepted to a doctoral program. Mr. Lindsay said he expects to become “an academic pariah,” barred from professorships or publications.
Yet Mr. Lindsay says the project is worth it: “For us, the risk of letting biased research continue to influence education, media, policy and culture is far greater than anything that will happen to us for having done this.”

For the full commentary, see:
Jillian Kay Melchior. “Fake News Comes to Academia; How three scholars gulled academic journals to publish hoax papers on ‘grievance studies’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 6, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 5, 2018.)

More Boys Choose Math Fields Due to Their Weaker Verbal Skills

(p. C2) A key tenet of modern feminism is that women will have achieved equity only when they fill at least 50% of the positions once filled by men. In some fields, women have already surpassed that target–now comprising, for example, 50.7% of new American medical students, up from just 9% in 1965, and 80% of veterinary students. But the needle has hardly moved in many STEM fields–such as the physical sciences, technology, engineering and math, in which barely 20% of the students are female.
A new study suggests some surprising reasons for this enduring gap. Published last month in the journal Psychological Science, the study looked at nearly a half million adolescents from 67 countries who participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, the world’s largest educational survey. Every three years, PISA gauges the skills of 15-year-olds in science, reading and math reasoning. In each testing year, the survey focuses in depth on one of those categories.
. . .
Some fascinating gender differences surfaced. Girls were at least as strong in science and math as boys in 60% of the PISA countries, and they were capable of college-level STEM studies nearly everywhere the researchers looked. But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided–a finding that confirms several previous studies.

For the full commentary, see:
Susan Pinker. “Why Don’t More Women Choose STEM Careers?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 3, 2018): C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 1, 2018, and has the title “Why Aren’t There More Women in Science and Technology?”)

The print version of the Psychological Science article discussed above, is:
Stoet, Gijsbert, and David C. Geary. “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education.” Psychological Science 29, no. 4 (April 2018): 581-93.

Bezos to Donate $2 Billion for “Montessori Inspired” Preschools

(p. A10) When Jeff Bezos announced last week that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, would create and operate a national network of Montessori preschools, few were more surprised than Montessori organizations and leaders themselves.
In a statement released on Twitter, Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, said the preschools would be “in underserved communities.” He continued, “We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer.”
News of the initiative, called the Bezos Day One Fund, came with an eye-popping commitment: $2 billion, some of which will support organizations that help homeless families.
. . .
Montessori’s unique combination of freedom and rigidity — a famously “child-centered” practice with a host of rules and restrictions — can make its classrooms look drastically different from traditional ones.
Students span a three-year age range, say, between 3 and 5. Dressing up or talking about fairies or superheroes is not allowed. Instead of a play kitchen, there may be a real one, where students might pour their own juice into a glass cup, not a plastic one, so that they will learn the lesson that a glass can break if they are careless.
And every day, students get three-hour blocks of unscheduled, uninterrupted “work” time — the word “play” is not used — in which they are free to choose their activities, whether finger-painting or sorting wooden pegs.
. . .
With little else to parse, Montessori leaders pored over Mr. Bezos’ brief statement, which described the planned schools as “Montessori-inspired.” The term “Montessori” is not copyrighted, and any school can choose to describe itself as such.
. . .
Mr. Bezos attended a Montessori preschool in Albuquerque in the 1960s and is one of several tech industry leaders with personal ties to the method. The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have attributed some of their success to their Montessori educations. Dr. Montessori’s reframing of child’s play as “work,” driven by the child’s choices and interests, is, in many ways, a natural fit for Silicon Valley’s culture of founder-driven entrepreneurship and innovation.

For the full story, see:

Dana Goldstein. “‘Money, but Few Details, In Bezos Montessori Plan.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 21, 2018, and has the title “‘Jeff Bezos Cites a Big Number, but Few Details, in Plan for Low-Income Montessori Preschools.”)

Uncredentialed Entrepreneur Innovated to Save Babies

(p. 1A) He showed up in Omaha 120 summers ago, another unknown showman hoping to make a name for himself at this city’s biggest-ever event, its world’s fair.

He gave his name as Martin Couney, or sometimes Martin Coney. It wasn’t, at least not yet.
He said he was a doctor, a European doctor, a protégé of the world’s finest doctors. He was none of these things.
And yet in Omaha, Dr. Couney set up shop in a little white building on the east midway, not far from the Wild West Show, the Middle Eastern dancers, the roaming fortune tellers and the Indian Congress starring a Native American chief named Geronimo.
The fair, officially known as the Trans-Mississippi and International (p. 2A) Exposition, showcased all manner of things seen as strange, exotic and otherworldly to the 2 million Nebraskans and visitors paying the 50-cent admission to have their minds blown in the summer of 1898.
Couney thought he had just the thing to blow their minds.

“Infant Incubators with Living Infants” read the sign above the entrance.

“A Wonderful Invention … Live Babies” said another.
. . .
Usually the experts are right. That’s why they are experts,” says Dawn Raffel, author of the “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” a new biography seeking to save this once-famed faux doctor from history’s trash bin. “But occasionally you get an outlier like this. Someone who is extraordinarily inventive. Who brings us something incredible.”
What Dr. Couney gave us, through decades of work and tireless promotion, was an understanding that we could save babies that since the beginning of time had died before they crawled. We could save them using a piece of equipment designed by a French engineer who realized that if an egg could be nurtured in an incubator, then so could a newborn.
. . .
Newspapers, including The World-Herald, largely ignored the exhibit, Raffel says. The public didn’t seem particularly bothered that a “doctor” had decided to house anonymous newborns on the fairgrounds and put them on public display.
They also didn’t seem particularly interested, either.
. . .
Raffel estimates that Couney and his doctors and nurses saved between 6,500 and 7,000 premature babies all on their own during decades of midway work. But they saved countless thousands more by raising the profile of premature babies. By raising the hope that they could grow into healthy, happy adults.
. . .
“I find him fascinating because he was such a complicated man,” Raffel says. “He deserves more credit.”

For the full story, see:
Hansen, Matthew. “Tech Costs Force Honda To Let Go of Engineering Legacy.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday, Aug. 3, 2018): 1A-2A.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to sentence, in original.)

The Raffel book on which the passages quoted are partially based, is:
Raffel, Dawn. The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2018.

Strong Job Market Increases Opportunities for the Uncredentialed

(p. A1) Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years.
Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the recession, when millions were out of work and human-resources departments were stacked with résumés.
Across incomes and industries, the lower bar to getting hired is helping self-taught programmers attain software engineering roles at Intel Corp. and GitHub Inc., the coding platform, and improving the odds for high-school graduates who aspire to be branch managers at Bank of America Corp. and Terminix pest control.

For the full story, see:

Kelsey Gee. “Help Wanted, Degree Not Needed.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, July 30, 2018): A1 & A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 29, 2018, and has the title “Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: ‘No Experience Necessary’.”)

Technologies Can Offer “Extraordinary Learning” Where “Children’s Interests Turn to Passion”

(p. B1) The American Academy of Pediatrics once recommended parents simply limit children’s time on screens. The association changed those recommendations in 2016 to reflect profound differences in levels of interactivity between TV, on which most previous research was based, and the devices children use today.
Where previous guidelines described all screen time for (p. B4) young children in terms of “exposure,” as if screen time were a toxic substance, new guidance allows for up to an hour a day for children under 5 and distinguishes between different kinds of screen use–say, FaceTime with Grandma versus a show on YouTube.
. . .
Instead of enforcing time-based rules, parents should help children determine what they want to do–consume and create art, marvel at the universe–and make it a daily part of screen life, says Anya Kamenetz, a journalist and author of the coming book “The Art of Screen Time–How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life.”
In doing so, parents can offer “extraordinary learning” experiences that weren’t possible before such technology came along, says Mimi Ito, director of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine and a cultural anthropologist who has studied how children actually use technology for over two decades.
“Extraordinary learning” is what happens when children’s interests turn to passion, and a combination of tech and the internet provides a bottomless well of tools, knowledge and peers to help them pursue these passions with intensity characteristic of youth.
It’s about more than parents spending time with children. It includes steering them toward quality and letting them–with breaks for stretching and visual relief, of course–dive deep without a timer.
There are many examples of such learning, whether it is children teaching themselves to code with the videogame Minecraft or learning how to create music and shoot videos. Giving children this opportunity allows them to learn at their own, often-accelerated pace.

For the full commentary, see:
Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS; Not All Screen Time Is Equal Screen Time Isn’t Toxic After All.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 22, 2018): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was last updated Jan. 22, 2018, and has the title “KEYWORDS; What If Children Should Be Spending More Time With Screens?”)

The book mentioned above, is:
Kamenetz, Anya. The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.

Entrepreneur Was Frustrated by Patients’ Pill Confusion

(p. B2) TJ Parker grew up working the counter for his father’s pharmacy in Concord, N.H., where he became frustrated by how much customers struggled to keep track of their medications.
He went to pharmacy school but rather than take up the family business, he and a friend set out to change it. In 2013, they launched an online pharmacy from Manchester, N.H. On Thursday, the 32-year-old CEO said he sold his startup to Amazon.com Inc. It was a roughly $1 billion deal, according to people familiar with the deal. Mr. Parker is expected to stay involved after the deal, said a person familiar with the matter.
. . .
One of the company’s earliest investors, David Frankel of Boston-based Founders Collective, wrote in a post on the website Medium Thursday that the company showed promise with two founders that complement each other.
“TJ cherishes beautiful design but has the bearing of a doctor,” he wrote of Mr. Parker, while Mr. Cohen was able to master the technical challenges behind an “indispensable pill dispensing solution.”
. . .
While attending the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, he started taking fashion-design classes at the nearby Massachusetts College of Art. “Pharmacy school was sooo boring,” he said in the interview.
His design-school stint was short-lived, but the expertise, he said, inspired PillPack’s concept of simplifying medication regimens by sorting pills into so-called “dose packets,” dispensed from a small box in baggies marked with the date and time they are to be taken.
It turned out to be a billion-dollar idea.

For the full story, see:
Eliot Brown and Sharon Terlep. “Frustrated Pharmacist Came Up With PillPack.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 29, 2018): B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2018, and has the title “Behind PillPack’s $1 Billion Sale, a Frustrated 32-Year-Old Pharmacist.”)

Those Born Poor, Benefit Less from College Degree

(p. A23) It’s a cruel irony that a college degree is worth less to people who most need a boost: those born poor. This revelation was made by the economists Tim Bartik and Brad Hershbein. Using a body of data, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which includes 50 years of interviews with 18,000 Americans, they were able to follow the lives of children born into poor, middle-class and wealthy families.
They found that for Americans born into middle-class families, a college degree does appear to be a wise investment. Those in this group who received one earned 162 percent more over their careers than those who didn’t.
But for those born into poverty, the results were far less impressive. College graduates born poor earned on average only slightly more than did high school graduates born middle class. And over time, even this small “degree bonus” ebbed away, at least for men: By middle age, male college graduates raised in poverty were earning less than nondegree holders born into the middle class. The scholars conclude, “Individuals from poorer backgrounds may be encountering a glass ceiling that even a bachelor’s degree does not break.”
. . .
It shouldn’t here, either: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 20 percent of American jobs actually require a bachelor’s degree. By 2026, the bureau estimates that this proportion will rise, but only to 25 percent.
Why do employers demand a degree for jobs that don’t require them? Because they can.
What all this suggests is that the college-degree premium may really be a no-college-degree penalty.

For the full commentary, see:

Ellen Ruppel Shell. “College May Not Be Worth It Anymore.” The New York Times (Thursday, May 17, 2018): A23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 16, 2018. The online version is substantially longer, and in some places has different wording, than the print version. Where the wording of a quoted passage differs, my quotation above follows the print version.)

The research by Tim Bartik and Brad Hershbein, mentioned above, is:
Bartik, Timothy J., and Brad J. Hershbein. “Degrees of Poverty: The Relationship between Family Income Background and the Returns to Education.” Upjohn Institute Working Paper 18-284, March 2018.

Shell’s commentary is related to her forthcoming book:
Shell, Ellen Ruppel. The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change. New York: Currency, 2018.