I have a fairly large test sample, 8 biological siblings. I would not say that all of my kids are top % kids. I am under no delusions about my children. 
But I do not hesitate to use that descriptor for 2 of them.
Re: #304 and Mismatch
Seems similar to the argument that Malcolm Gladwell made in David and Goliath, but directed to all kinds of students (not just those of ethnic minority groups), that it may be better to be a top student at an admission safety school than a bottom student at an admission reach school.
I’m not top 5 or 10 (not sure if that was implying percentile nationally or students in your graduating class or what) but I’m a smarter than average guy. My best guess is that I’d fall in the 9th decile in intelligence. I got a 36 on the Math on the ACT but lower scores in everything else.
My parents didn’t really do anything special. I mostly watched what my mom watched from a very young age, so the shows I had the most exposure to from around age 3 or 4 on were Law and Order and Murder She Wrote. Obviously at 4 I didn’t understand what was going on, but I probably did start to understand it at a younger age than would otherwise have happened. My parents also always told me about how much everything costs and whenever they were spending money how much it was and what it was for and how much they made. That gave me a good sense of money from a young age.
My parents told me when I was little I could listen to and repeat back a few minutes of conversation immediately after, but I don’t remember that.
Apparently, you jumped from NAEP to GRE. You’d have to be more specific about what you are referring to.
This reminds me of some event I noticed today:
I had a lunch with a colleague today. He was a first generation American so his native language is not English. During lunch, someone called him and he was talking to the caller for a while in English. After he had got off the phone, he mentioned he had just talked to his college-age “child.”
I wonder whether most first generation parents have been “Americanized” enough within just a couple of decades here in US (or intentionally choose to do so) that they only talked to their college age children in English.
For a record, we do not talk to our child in English. Most of the time we (parents) speak to our child in our native language but he talked back to us partly in English and partly in our native language. It is only when we have a concern that he might not “get it” that we would use a few English words/phrases here and there - in order to make sure that he actually gets the message. His English is much better than the first language he picked up from us.
Because of this, we really had a grave concern that he might have some trouble in catching up with his classmates when we first sent him to school. He had never been sent to any “full-time” preschool for a long time, like having 4 hours a week only at a part-time preschool – and only for a year. So it was a legitimate concern then. Therefore, we were busy finding/hiring “English tutors” in those few years prior to sending him to elementary school and during his early elementary school years. All of the English tutors we hired were mostly his classmate’s’ mother or their older siblings in our neighborhood . Luckily, we did not live in a more affluent neighborhood at that time so it was not difficult to find “non-professional” tutors/baby sitters in our neighborhood. We could not afford professional English tutors.
Strange as it is, sometimes the words we need to speak in English to our child could be as simple as numbers, e.g., telephone numbers. When he was growing up, we never purposely “taught” him our native language – having a full-time SAHM for 20+ years did it in the context of daily family life. As regard to English, we have never taught him that; he had to learn it from outside our home, mostly from school. (To his own credits and not due to our efforts, his SAT CR was also 800.)
People here are using the term genetics as if it were the 1950s with no consideration of Epigenetics. Hey, the year is 2015!
Not at all sure where ‘Epigenetics’ is leading.
Better living through Chemistry?
Some people keep replying with “good genes”, but I honestly don’t think that has anything to do with how well a child achieves academically. It is all nurture, and setting up an environment where you teach them that learning is fun, and that intelligence and education along with a great work ethic is the only thing that can truly get them far in life.
It very much does.
@mcat2: Actually, it’s a well-documented and widespread phenomenon where, if parents who are speakers of L₁ are raising children in an environment where L₂ is predominantly spoken, by the time you get to late childhood the children will very frequently understand the parents’ L₁ perfectly well but respond nearly consistently in L₂.
The data on outcomes from this are hotly disputed, but from what I find most compelling in my reading of the literature, this is the point where a lot of parents give up and simply switch to L₂ with their children. That often leads to incomplete bilingualism on the part of the children—they may end up with full competence in L₂ but only passive competence in L₁. Parents who keep speaking L₁ with their children, though, usually end up raising fluent bilinguals. Whatever the parents do, though, it’s clear and not in dispute (in the scholarship on the matter, at least), that no cognitive deficits result from either path.
@dtbdfb, Interesting. DS picked up L1 relatively well (spoken language, not written language) because he had been very close to mom in his daily life before college. (e.g., he has likely played more video games with his mother than doing the same with his friends. How odds is this? They were often chatting with each other while playing video games. Our child would do the (school) work and whenever he needed a break, he would invite his mother to play the video game with him.)
I noticed that in many cases, parents might not be able to communicate well with their child “at a deeper level”. This happens more often in a two-income family when the child spent most of his/her time in daycare and the parents somehow are unable to learn L2 well enough. This is a very sad outcome.
For 2-income families without grandparents wishing to maintain heritage language of their young kids the obvious solution is to hire an immigrant babysitter who preferably does not speak English.
There’s an interesting counter-discussion happening on Reddit where people are asking when they knew their kid was not so bright. The stories are more amusing than an indemnification of dumb kids, though. I think for true examples of parental idiocy being passed down (nature or nurture?!?) there are other places to go on the internet. A few minutes hunting around and I felt like a dang genius after what turned up.
I agree with post#329. My nephew switched immediately to English when some delivery guy delivered furniture, when he was 4 or 5 years old. Up until that point he spoke exclusively his parents native language. I don’t recall he when to preschool much because his mom didn’t work outside of the home, not when he was younger anyway.
@MotherOfDragons can you give me the link please? I would love to read that
@paul2752 just google “stupid parents reddit” and you’ll get a plethora! Some are funny; some are really sad.
Please also do not miss the thread
“Children of dumb parents… how do you deal with it?”
We always discussed current events, politics, international affairs, etc at the dinner table. Kids always wanted to participate so they read everything. News junkies starting at 5 years old. Had lots of books at home. Subscribed to intellectual magazines with interesting articles. They not only love to read but wanted to read everything so we could discuss and debate. Second, we always invited interesting people over(politicians, clergy, professors, writers, etc.) and traveled to interesting places. They were always included in the discussions with our guests. I was criticized by my parents for talking to our kids like adults and asking their opinion on things. But, we respected their intelligence and opinions since they were very young. We still made the decisions but they knew we listened to them. Both excel not because we asked for it but because they are smart, interesting, and interested in learning.
They don’t just rely on the NAEP scores they also quote studies that use the SAT. If I remember correctly, the book suggests English tests (including the CR section of the SAT), especially in the case of young native English speakers are a sort of proxy measure for intelligence.
So, in your opinion what does the SAT measure? How does it differ from the NAEP?
Also, what do you think about their thesis:
- These findings imply that although the test score gap may be exacerbated by K - 12 education,* it already exists in large measure when students start schooling*."
- *Students, thus progress over time, but not very dramatically.*
Therefore,
Instead of recommending that minority students go to the most prestigious school they can get into, high school guidance counselors should recommend that each student go to a school where he or she is likely to do well academically. An HBCU may be such a school. Guidance counselors, in short, should try to reduce some of the lack of fit between the level of academic preparation of minority students and the schools where they enroll.
Hmmm, a slight modification would result in something similar to what Malcolm Gladwell claimed in David and Goliath.