PEGGY CURRAN [email protected]
The Gazette
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young got it right. Teach your children well.
Amid all the gloom and doom about how boys are lagging behind girls from grade school to grad school, Concordia University economist James Mclntosh believes he has uncovered an unexpected bright spot.
His exhaustive - and, to the mathematically challenged, largely incomprehensible -econometric analysis of Statistics Canada data suggests that how well both boys and girls do in school has little to do with how much money their parents earn, whether their mother is on welfare or Papa has a Ph.D.
Instead, Mclntosh says the key factor in determining a child's grades and overall academic performance appears to be their parents' attitudes toward education -whether they instill their children with a sense that doing well in school matters, by heaping praise when they get good grades and offering a loving push when they don't.
"These are happy results," said Mclntosh, who is affiliated with the Danish National Institute of Social Research.
"Children from disadvantaged families are not condemned to be at the bottom of the grade distribution. In fact, children with poorly educated fathers can actually do better than average if their parents have positive school-grade and education attitudes."
Mclntosh used Statistics Canada's 2002 Survey of Approaches to Educational Planning to calculate how family background, parental characteristics and attitudes toward schooling, homework supervision, praise and the time parents spent with their children corresponded with how well those students did in school. "The most important contributing factors were the degree to which parents supported their children as well as their outlook in terms of how important they thought grade performance and getting further education were as objectives for their children," Mclntosh writes.
"The variables were more important than parental educational qualifications or whether the child came from a low-income or dysfunctional home."
The study does not dismiss the role of a child's innate abilities or the impact of genetic factors, characteristics they might have inherited from their parents.
"Parents can also serve as good role models or promote behaviours like being conscientious, ambitious and methodical; all of which are likely to contribute to making the child more successful at school," he writes. Mclntosh admits his number-crunching failed to reveal the secret of what's troubling boys and why they begin to fall behind girls as early as kindergarten, long before the methods of female teachers could be a major factor: "The simple fact is that the girls are much better at school than boys."
The Statistics Canada numbers used in his research model showed 20.5 per cent of girls in the top grade category, compared with just 13.7 per cent of boys.
"The causes are not likely to be exclusively associated with the educational system, but are symptomatic of a broader set of problems that affect the way boys learn to deal with the changes that have occurred in child and adolescent society," he said.
Mclntosh said the good news is that his findings hinge not on income or intelligence quotients but on patterns that can be changed, through policies and public awareness campaigns encouraging parents to take a more active interest in their child's test results, study habits and motivation to learn.
"Getting parents to be more aware of the advantages of doing well in school and the benefits that this brings to their children could be an effective policy for raising average grades," he suggests.
"The model shows that a change in attitudes to the importance of school grades from important to very important would raise grades by 12.2 percentage points for boys."
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest_MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
--canada.com network
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx February 15, 2007
The Gazette
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young got it right. Teach your children well.
Amid all the gloom and doom about how boys are lagging behind girls from grade school to grad school, Concordia University economist James Mclntosh believes he has uncovered an unexpected bright spot.
His exhaustive - and, to the mathematically challenged, largely incomprehensible -econometric analysis of Statistics Canada data suggests that how well both boys and girls do in school has little to do with how much money their parents earn, whether their mother is on welfare or Papa has a Ph.D.
Instead, Mclntosh says the key factor in determining a child's grades and overall academic performance appears to be their parents' attitudes toward education -whether they instill their children with a sense that doing well in school matters, by heaping praise when they get good grades and offering a loving push when they don't.
"These are happy results," said Mclntosh, who is affiliated with the Danish National Institute of Social Research.
"Children from disadvantaged families are not condemned to be at the bottom of the grade distribution. In fact, children with poorly educated fathers can actually do better than average if their parents have positive school-grade and education attitudes."
Mclntosh used Statistics Canada's 2002 Survey of Approaches to Educational Planning to calculate how family background, parental characteristics and attitudes toward schooling, homework supervision, praise and the time parents spent with their children corresponded with how well those students did in school. "The most important contributing factors were the degree to which parents supported their children as well as their outlook in terms of how important they thought grade performance and getting further education were as objectives for their children," Mclntosh writes.
"The variables were more important than parental educational qualifications or whether the child came from a low-income or dysfunctional home."
The study does not dismiss the role of a child's innate abilities or the impact of genetic factors, characteristics they might have inherited from their parents.
"Parents can also serve as good role models or promote behaviours like being conscientious, ambitious and methodical; all of which are likely to contribute to making the child more successful at school," he writes. Mclntosh admits his number-crunching failed to reveal the secret of what's troubling boys and why they begin to fall behind girls as early as kindergarten, long before the methods of female teachers could be a major factor: "The simple fact is that the girls are much better at school than boys."
The Statistics Canada numbers used in his research model showed 20.5 per cent of girls in the top grade category, compared with just 13.7 per cent of boys.
"The causes are not likely to be exclusively associated with the educational system, but are symptomatic of a broader set of problems that affect the way boys learn to deal with the changes that have occurred in child and adolescent society," he said.
Mclntosh said the good news is that his findings hinge not on income or intelligence quotients but on patterns that can be changed, through policies and public awareness campaigns encouraging parents to take a more active interest in their child's test results, study habits and motivation to learn.
"Getting parents to be more aware of the advantages of doing well in school and the benefits that this brings to their children could be an effective policy for raising average grades," he suggests.
"The model shows that a change in attitudes to the importance of school grades from important to very important would raise grades by 12.2 percentage points for boys."
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest_MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
--canada.com network
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx February 15, 2007