@roethlisburger Haha so because he’s in high school he doesn’t have to use acceptable sampling methods?
Did you read how he conducted his sampling?
Ha! Back in the 80s my husband found that he was an unwitting sample in a moron’s science project. The thesis was that different races breathe at different rates. The moron recorded my husband breathing rate during class and then said that Asians breath at n rate. The teacher said how did you come to that conclusion. Moron pointed to my husband and said he watched him breathing.
The kicker - My husband is Mex-American.
I don’t blame social sciences, where the first and hard and fast rule I was taught was to step aside from personal beliefs and prejudices, strip those from a hypothesis, aim for more purely analytical scientific process.
I can name more than a few hard sciences professionals who miss this point, who see it all, from the get go, in terms of their own preconceived notions.
I’ll go further and say blaming SS is an unsupportable personal notion. Not scientific.
I’m with Romani all the way on this one. Teacher probably didn’t know better.
CC seems to have an above average number of these “fringe” people, particularly in the Race/AA thread.
Ha, OHMom, forewarned is forearmed. I skip that one.
Between limited sample sizes, self selection bias, non-random or non-representative polling, and low response rates, I’m sure I could tear to pieces almost all the HS student projects with social science surveys. HS projects are pedagogical exercises, largely conducted without research or grant funding, and if the student had chosen a less controversial topic, I’m sure no one would be nitpicking over sampling issues.
@OHMomof2, you are one of the most prolific posters on that thread, and I don’t consider you too fringe at all. 
But in all seriousness, there are a few different groups of posters on that thread.
- Disgruntled students or parents, expressing their frustration of not getting into their elite school of choice. There are several of them, but they move on fairly quickly.
- People like OHMomof2 providing a rational response to #1.
- Recently, a small set of posters actively debating affirmative action, providing extensive citations to research to back up their position.
If you have pre-conceived notions you do not want challenged, or are easily offended, the thread is not for you. For others, it can be informative and thought provoking.
A few comments:
-The HISP program has 12 black students spread across all years, and the IQ test was administered only to 15-16 year olds, meaning there were probably a half dozen or fewer black students included. That’s a pitifully small sample size.
-Did anyone else notice how incredibly sloppy the poster was? That wouldn’t have flown in my kids’ elementary school classes, much less a program for gifted high schoolers.
-Was there not a single check in with the teacher? My kids aren’t science fair types, but any time they’ve had to do a long-term project they’ve had to have their topic approved and there’s been a halfway point check in to make sure things are on track.
I’ve seen plenty of well designed and executed HS SS projects. One of the keys is to not overreach. Trying to judge the IQ’s of 6 different racial groups is a clear overreach. This study was just plain poorly designed. KISS.
It looks more like a small set of posters claiming that test scores = innate intelligence (with no or minimal environmental influence), that there is a racial hierarchy of intelligence, and that intelligence is all that matters in future life success.
If the student had chosen a less controversial topic, no doubt very few would have heard about it.
Nevertheless, it is the teacher’s job to “nitpick” the sampling methods, and one hopes that he or she would have done so, no matter how innocuous the topic.
The student’s biggest error was not realizing there are certain questions which can not be asked in certain environments.
^Oh boy…
I find the biggest error to be lack of a control group. The topic itself could work if approached differently. Instead of a small, random sample of willing test takers, the sample should have been larger to focus on many households with siblings of varying races adopted at birth who were raised in similar economic environments. I would imagine that the student’s results would have been vastly different if the ONLY variable studied was race.