Math Anxiety Hits High-Achieving Kids Hardest

A study of first and second graders found that many high-achieving students experience math anxiety, with worry and fear undermining them so much that they can fall behind other students who don’t have that anxiety.

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that math anxiety was most detrimental to the highest-achieving students, who typically have the most working memory.

“You can think of working memory as a kind of ‘mental scratchpad’ that allows us to work with whatever information is temporarily flowing through consciousness,” said Dr. Sian Beilock, a professor in psychology. “It’s especially important when we have to do a math problem and juggle numbers in our head. Working memory is one of the major building blocks of IQ.”

Worries about math can disrupt working memory. The research team found that a high degree of math anxiety undermined the performance of otherwise successful students, placing them almost half a school year behind their less anxious peers, in terms of math achievement.

For the study, the researchers tested 88 first-graders and 66 second-graders from a large urban school system. The students were tested to measure their academic abilities, their working memory and their fear of mathematics. They were asked, on a sliding scale, how nervous they felt to go to the front of the room and work on a mathematics problem on the board.

The study found that among the highest-achieving students, about half had medium-to-high math anxiety. Math anxiety was also common among low-achieving students, but it did not impact their performance. That may be because these students developed simpler ways of dealing with mathematics problems, such as counting on their fingers, according to the researchers.

“Early math anxiety may lead to a snowball effect that exerts an increasing cost on math achievement by changing students’ attitudes and motivational approaches towards math, increasing math avoidance, and ultimately reducing math competence,” Beilock said.

The researchers recommend some ways to alleviate math anxiety, noting that “when anxiety is regulated or reframed, students often see a marked increase in their math performance.”

One way to reframe anxiety is to have students write about their worries regarding math ahead of time. A procedure called “expressive writing” helps students to “download” worries and minimize anxiety’s effects on working memory, the researchers said.

For younger students, expressive picture drawing, rather than writing, may also help lessen the burden of math anxiety, the researchers add. Teachers can also help students reframe their approach by helping them to see exams as a challenge rather than as a threat, the researchers conclude.

[Via PsychCentral]

Examples of Misleading Statistics

Suppose there is a test for a tuberculosis and it's given to every schoolkid in the US.  Then it's found that 99% of the positive results were actually false positives; the kid was fine but the test said they were sick.

Many people would interpret this to mean that the test has low accuracy.  Not so - its accuracy is still pretty high, but there are simply very few kids who actually do have tuberculosis out there, so the number of positive results is simply very low.

For example, if the test is given to 10 million kids and it returns the correct result 99.9% of the time (regardless of the kid's health) and 100 kids in the country have tuberculosis, the test will have 100 or 99 or 98 correct positive results and about 10,000 incorrect positive results.  99% of positive results will be wrong results, even though the test was actually very accurate.

[Via Quora]

The Most Beautiful Number

Surely, there are a lot of beautiful number but the most beautiful is 108.

Why? Some proofs are below.

• It is the hyperfactorial of 3 since it is of the form .

• 108 is a number that is divisible by the value of its φ function, which is 36. 108 is also divisible by the total number of its divisors (12), hence it is a refactorable number.

• In Euclidean space, the interior angles of a regular pentagon measure 108 degrees each.

• There are 108 free polyominoes of order 7.

• In base 10, it is a Harshad number and a self number.

• The distance of the Sun from the Earth divided by the diameter of the Sun and the distance of the Moon from the Earth divided by the diameter of the Moon is approximately equal to 108.

• The number 108 is one of many numeric motifs in the American television program Lost

• The pre-historic monument Stonehenge is about 108 feet in diameter.

• According to Marma Adi and Ayurveda, there are 108 pressure points in the body, where consciousness and flesh intersect to give life to the living being.

• In Homer's Odyssey, the number of suitors coveting Penelope, wife of Odysseus.

• 108 is the number that the Belgian cyclist Wouter Weylandt wore when he crashed fatally in the Giro d'Italia on May 9, 2011.

• An official Major League Baseball baseball has 108 stitches.

• There are 108 cards in a deck of UNO cards.

• In India, 108  is the toll-free emergency telephone number. 

• 108 degrees Fahrenheit is the internal temperature at which the human body's vital organs begin to fail from overheating.

Millions in San Francisco Health Fees Don't Go to Workers

Restaurants and other businesses in this food-loving tourist mecca collected almost $14 million dollars in extra fees last year from their patrons, as they sought to comply with the progressive city's landmark universal health-care ordinance. But an Associated Press analysis of records show that roughly 40 percent of that money hasn't been spent on their workers' health care.

The surcharges, which range from 3 to 5 percent and often appear in fine print on receipts, are one result of San Francisco's five-year-old health care program, which includes some of the most far-reaching such requirements mandated by any U.S. city.

The law applies to more than 4,000 businesses with as few as 20 part-time workers, from nail salons to international banks with local branches, requiring them to set aside for workers an extra $1 to $3 an hour for health care.

The city's mandate is unrelated to the federal health care law that takes effect in 2014 and will apply only to companies with 50 or more employees. They could face fines if they don't provide coverage. And the IRS will collect the money, minimizing the chances of gaming the system.

In San Francisco, the fees have become a vexing issue for local officials, labor leaders and restaurants, whose owners say they are doing their best to comply with what many consider to be a confusing law with an admirable goal.

City officials say the vast majority of businesses in San Francisco go beyond what's required to make sure their workers have health care. But Donna Levitt, who is head of the city's Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement, said self-reporting by the 5 percent of businesses with surcharges last year confirms the city's suspicion that the money doesn't always go to health care.

There was nothing on the books in 2011 that required businesses to spend all the health surcharge money they took in. But a new law took effect this year requiring them to use the money for its intended purpose, or face a consumer fraud investigation.

In July, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury raised concerns about abuse of the surcharges after looking at about three dozen restaurants jury members had patronized. It concluded many businesses were misleading customers into believing that every dollar was going to the health and well-being of workers.

"Most residents are socially conscious and embrace social changes, and paying a surcharge for employee health care is something we would readily agree to," said Mark Busse, a retired real estate agent who led the investigation. "But to discover they would make profits off surcharges really turned our stomachs."

The AP, through a public records request, later obtained names and health care expense breakdowns of the 172 businesses that reported imposing surcharges. There are likely even more that didn't file their numbers, city officials said. The records showed that 14 businesses collected at least $100,000 more than what they paid out for costs such as doctor's visits, medication and insurance. A third of the businesses spent less than half of what they collected from customers for health care.

In interviews, representatives of a dozen companies that collected more than they paid out denied hoodwinking anyone. Instead, they said the businesses are saving excess money for the future, or had workers who didn't fully take advantage of free money for medical expenses. Others disputed the figures they had filed, saying they were confused by the reporting requirements.

Celebrity chef Michael Mina, a business partner of tennis-legend Andre Agassi, owns high-end restaurants that include RN74 and a namesake eatery that was declared Esquire's 2011 Restaurant of the Year. Both spots reported collecting about $540,000 in health surcharges from customers last year while paying out about $211,000 in health-care money.

Paula Kaduce, a Mina Group controller, said the company worked hard, even held mandatory meetings, to get its workers to apply for reimbursement of medical expenses. But many of the 150 plus employees did not, although the company recently started seeing a bump in health care spending.

"Why they are not all excited about it like we are, I don't know," Kaduce said.

Some, like American eatery The Blue Plate, have ditched the surcharge. It raised $40,000 with the fee but spent only $500 in 2011. Co-owner Jeff Trenam said he noticed many of his young, healthy employees didn't have many medical expenses, so he stopped charging his customers for them. The company plans to use the extra money for future health care needs.

"No one really wants to feel like we are collecting money or charging guests in a way that is irresponsible or secretive," Trenam said. "That's not how we want to make our money or how most people want to make their money in this business."

Some local politicians and labor advocates say the gap between surcharges and health care spending reflects a wider problem, namely that businesses are skirting their obligations to pay workers' health care costs. The law doesn't say how money should be spent on health care. As a result, critics say many businesses set up accounts to reimburse medical expenses that disallow many types of them.

Ian Lewis, a representative for Unite Here Local 2, said his union has advocated for stricter employer health care spending rules, though its restaurant worker members receive benefits over and above the law's requirements. He said these reimbursement accounts "are structured so employees don't know they are there, and there are strict limitations on their use; and as a result, workers can't take advantage of them, which undermines very much the spirit of the law."

Records show more than $50 million set aside for workers were not paid out last year.

Squat and Gobble, a chain of five local restaurants, reported collecting more than $160,000 from its customers in surcharges but spending nothing from a reimbursement account for more than 80 employees in 2011. The company reported workers could not be reimbursed for services such as health insurance premiums and over-the-counter drugs.

The owner did not return calls for comment. Deisy Bach, whose company HR Ideas helps dozens of companies including Squat and Gobble comply with the law, said the company was among several clients who presented slideshows and updated their handbooks to instruct workers about their benefits, but employees may not have understood. "This restaurant has gone above and beyond to educate their people," Bach said.

Mayor Ed Lee signed legislation last fall requiring businesses to inform individual employees about their reimbursement accounts and keep left-over money available for workers for two years.

The 800-member Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which unsuccessfully fought the health care spending requirements in court, said it expects that new legislation will increase the amount spent on health care this year. The 2011 spending, said Executive Director Rob Black, "does not reflect at all how successful the amendments were at achieving goals set forth by the mayor."

William Dow, a University of California, Berkeley health economist who has studied San Francisco's health care law, said the disparity between what businesses have collected through surcharges and what they pay out is "striking."

"This seems as if they are bringing in funds under the guise of paying health care for employees and in fact that's not where the funds are going," he said.

However, Dow said it is too early to conclude companies are deliberately pocketing unspent money, because they could spend it on health care later.

[Via Mercury News]

Majority of Students Cheat to Some Degree

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academyand, most recently, Harvard.

Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades.

Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

“I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,” said Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating.

“There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,” he said. “But more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.”

Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is.

A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.

The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role.

“Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating,” said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate professor of management.

Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that over the 20 years he has studied professional and academic integrity, “the ethical muscles have atrophied,” in part because of a culture that exalts success, however it is attained.

He said the attitude he has found among students at elite colleges is: “We want to be famous and successful, we think our colleagues are cutting corners, we’ll be damned if we’ll lose out to them, and some day, when we’ve made it, we’ll be role models. But until then, give us a pass.”

Numerous projects and research studies have shown that frequently reinforcing standards, to both students and teachers, can lessen cheating. But experts say most schools fail to do so.

“Institutions do a poor job of making those boundaries clear and consistent, of educating students about them, of enforcing them, and of giving teachers a clear process to follow through on them,” said Laurie L. Hazard, director of the Academic Center for Excellence at Bryant University. In the programs that colleges run to help new students make the transition from high school, students are counseled on everything from food to friendships, but “little or no time is spent on cheating,” she said.

A 2010 survey of Yale undergraduates by The Yale Daily News showed that most had never read the school’s policy on academic honesty, and most were unsure of the rules on sharing or recycling their work.

In surveys of high school students, the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which advises schools on ethics education, has found that about three-fifths admit to having cheated in the previous year — and about four-fifths say their own ethics are above average.

Few schools “place any meaningful emphasis on integrity, academic or otherwise, and colleges are even more indifferent than high schools,” said Michael Josephson, president of the institute.

“When you start giving take-home exams and telling kids not to talk about it, or you let them carry smartphones into tests, it’s an invitation to cheating,” he said.

The case that Harvard revealed in late August involved a take-home final exam in an undergraduate course with 279 students. The university has not yet held hearings on the charges, which may take months to resolve.

Officials said similarities in test papers suggested that nearly half the class had broken the rules against plagiarism and working together; some of the accused students said their behavior was innocent, or fell into gray areas.

Mr. McCabe’s surveys, conducted around the country, have found that most college students see collaborating with others, even when it is forbidden, as a minor offense or no offense at all. Nearly half take the same view of paraphrasing or copying someone else’s work without attribution. And most high school teachers and college professors surveyed fail to pursue some of the violations they find.

Experts say that along with students, schools and technology, parents are also to blame. They cite surveys, anecdotal impressions and the work of researchers like Jean M. Twenge, author of the book “Generation Me,” to make the case that since the 1960s, parenting has shifted away from emphasizing obedience, honor and respect for authority to promoting children’s happiness while stoking their ambitions for material success.

“We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant, author of “Creating the Ethical Academy,” and director of the academic integrity office at the University of California at San Diego. “Thirty, 40 years ago, the parent would come in and grab the kid by the ear, yell at him and drag him home.”

Educators tell tales of students who grew up taking for granted not only that their highly involved parents would help with schoolwork but that the “help” would strain the definition of the word.

Ms. Gallant recalled giving integrity counseling to a student who would send research papers to her mother to review before turning them in — and saw nothing wrong in that. One paper, it turned out, her mother had extensively rewritten — and extensively plagiarized.

“I said, ‘So what’s the lesson here?’ ” Ms. Gallant said. “And she said, completely serious, ‘Check the work my mom does?’ ”

[Via  NY Times]

Honesty Rating of Professions

Here is the list of professions rated by honesty and ethical standards (the list is based on Gallup poll):

1. Nurses
2. Pharmacists
3. Medical doctors
4. High school teachers
5. Police officers
6. Clergy
7. Funeral directors
8. Accountants
9. Building contractors
10. Journalists
11. Bankers
12. Real estate agents
13. Lawyers
14. Business executives
15. Labor union leaders
16. Stockbrokers
17. Advertising practitioners
18. Telemarketers
19. Car salespeople
20. Lobbyists
21. Members of Congress

Beaked Putin to Fly with Cranes

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to put on a fake beak and fly a motorized hang-glider to lead a flock of endangered young Siberian white cranes on part of their migration to Asia.

The cranes, raised in captivity, do not know how to fly south, and environmentalists have to devise an imitation lead crane to show them the way.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Interfax news agency Wednesday that the flight is to take place "one of these days." He could not be reached by The Associated Press for elaboration.

The newspaper Vedomosti said it is expected before Putin chairs the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok beginning Friday.

Putin has become alternately notorious and beloved for an array of macho stunts, including posing with a tiger cub and riding a horse bare-chested.

Some of the stunts, such as petting a polar bear tranquilized in the wild, have purported scientific connections. But Putin last year was caught short when one of the events was revealed to be a set-up.

In that case, Putin was shown scuba diving and bringing up fragments of ancient Greek amphorae. But Peskov later admitted the artifacts had been planted on the sea floor for Putin to grab.

The stunts irritate Putin's opponents, who regard them not as benign political entertainment but as part of an establishment of a cult of personality lionizing an authoritarian leader.

Masha Gessen, author of a book critical of Putin, left her post as editor of the travel and science magazine Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) this week, claiming she was fired for refusing to send a reporter 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) northwest of Moscow to Yamal Peninsula to cover Putin's flight with the cranes.

A statement from the magazine Tuesday said she left by agreement with management because of "differences" on the separation of editorial and publishing powers.

Vokrug Sveta works closely with the Russian Geographical Society, whose board of trustees is chaired by Putin.