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Tag: school
Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students
In American high schools, black students typically perform worse than their white peers, which can damage their self-esteem and their future prospects. Studies have found that the fear of living up to this underachieving stereotype can cause so much stress that a child’s performance suffers. Their teachers may even write them off as lost causes, and spend less time on them.
With so many students caught in this vicious cycle, where the stereotype of poor performance strengthens itself, it might seem absurd to suggest that you could turn things round in less than an hour. But try telling that to Geoffrey Cohen from the University of Colorado.
In 2007, he showed that a simple 15-minute writing exercise at the start of a school year could boost the grades of black students by the end of the semester. The assignment was designed to boost the student’s sense of self-worth, and in doing so, it helped to narrow the typical performance gap that would normally separate them from white students. Now, Cohen returns with a new report of the same experiment two years on.
Things are still looking good. Even though two years have passed, the students are still feeling the benefits of those precious exercises. With the help of a couple of booster sessions, they still felt more confident about their chances of success, their grade point averages had increased (particularly among the weakest students), and the proportion who had to repeat a grade was two-thirds lower.
Cohen originally asked a group of white and black seventh-graders to write about a topic that they felt was important – from having good friends, to sense of humour, to musical ability – and why it mattered to them. The idea was to encourage the students to affirm their own abilities and their integrity, as a sort of psychological vaccine against the negative effects of stereotypes. As a control, a second group of students had to write about something they felt was not important, and why it mattered to someone else. Teachers, incidentally, were never told which student was completing which assignment and they were largely kept in the dark about the exercises and the aims of the experiments.
What makes 250,000,000 fish gather in the same place?
On the 3rd of October, 2006, Nicolas Makris watched a quarter of a billion fish gather in the same place. They were Atlantic herring, one of the most abundant fishes in the ocean and one prone to gathering in massive schools. This was the first time that anyone had watched the full scope of the event, much less capture it on video.
The first signs of the amassing herring appeared around 5pm and by sunset, the gathering had begun in earnest. Once a critical level of fish was reached, the shoal expanded at a breakneck pace, suddenly growing to cover tens of kilometres within the hour. By midnight, the shoal contained about 250,000,000 individuals – 50,000 tonnes of fish gathered in one place.
The ability of fish to congregate in gigantic schools may be familiar but until now, we’ve known remarkably little about the things that set off these gatherings. Without Facebook as a coordinator, what causes small groups of herring to take sociability to an extreme? Scientists have tried to follow gathering fish aboard research vessels but these can usually only see a small fraction of the massive schools are any one time.
Makris wasn’t so hampered. He used a new technique called Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS) that can visualise fish populations over vast distances in real-time. It needs two ships, one to send out sound waves in all directions and a second to pick up their echoes as they bounce off fish and floor alike.
In an instant, it can scan an area of ocean 100km in diameter, and it can update its images every 75 seconds, providing an unprecedented view of the genesis of herring shoals. The location was Georges Bank off the coast of Maine, where herring migrate to spawn in early autumn. Makris pointed his instruments at an area where herring historically gather, and waited.
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