The Trouble with Bright Girls [link]

Dreaded_Anomaly

The Trouble with Bright Girls (article @ the Huffington Post)

Excerpt:

My graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck (author of "Mindset") conducted a series of studies in the 1980s, looking at how Bright Girls and boys in the fifth grade handled new, difficult and confusing material.

She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

The topic of this article seems to relate to several common Less Wrong issues: the nature of human intelligence, and the gender imbalance among LW readers.

I'm not sure how much credence I give to the proposed explanation of the difference in mindsets. It may well have to do with socialization and feedback, but the specific description of feedback that is presented seems a bit too much of a "just-so story" to me. The difference itself is fascinating, though, and I hope more is done to further our understanding of it.

The Trouble with Bright Girls (article @ the Huffington Post)

Excerpt:

My graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck (author of "Mindset") conducted a series of studies in the 1980s, looking at how Bright Girls and boys in the fifth grade handled new, difficult and confusing material.

She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

The topic of this article seems to relate to several common Less Wrong issues: the nature of human intelligence, and the gender imbalance among LW readers.

I might have expected that 'gifted' programmes would do the opposite, by putting children in an environment where their natural talents are nothing special you force them to actually put in some effort.

Although I've never been in one myself, so I guess it depends on the atmosphere;if its all about giving them easy challenges and making them feel good about themselves then you have a point, if the emphasis is more about winning and rewarding those who stick out from the crowd even in that situation, then maybe not.

Not just the atmosphere-- the skill with which the gifted program is designed.

And some gifted programs are worse than what you imagined-- they just pile busywork on the students.

Developing good gifted programs is a hard (or if you prefer, complex) problem. I'd start by surveyed students and graduates from gifted programs about the their take on the value of various parts of the programs.

7MinibearRex15y

I am currently a college student in a gifted program, and was in them all through elementary, middle, and high school. My experience has been that it wasn't rewarding easy challenges, quite the contrary. The teachers I've had have been thrilled at having students that actually can handle a complex problem. They've mostly liked the challenge we provided. Although, for a few of my years, I've had teachers that genuinely were not as intelligent as the average student in the classroom. They had more factual knowledge, but not the actual thinking skills. Those years were rough. My only major complaint about those classes was that the problems, in many cases, weren't challenging enough. The teachers would pick complex topics for us to untangle, but the problem solving process typically took around 30 seconds. We very seldom did anything that required thinking for minutes. Nothing "impossible". And we totally could have done those.

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The Trouble with Bright Girls [link]

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The Trouble with Bright Girls [link]

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