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Why the most successful students have no passion for school

Jihyun Lee is associate professor in the School of Education at University of New South Wales in Australia. Her main research area is developing methodology to increase psychometric properties and usability of survey instruments. She publishes regularly in educational psychology journals. In order to be successful, many people believe, one must be passionate. Passion makes challenges enjoyable. It bestows the stamina necessary to excel. However, there are telling counterexamples where passion doesn’t seem to be a necessary ingredient for success. One such case is academic success. You might think that successful students should be passionate about their schooling, and that this passion for school would account, at least partly, for why some students succeed and why some don’t. But this isn’t right. My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. A student doesn’t need to be passionate about school to be academically successful. My research findings derive from the analysis of a large-scale international database called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes the dataset available every three years. It’s a treasure trove that gives researchers like myself an unparalleled view into what students across the world think about their education. In the most recent 2015 PISA assessment, 72 countries and economies contributed. Reading, mathematics and science tests, along with a questionnaire about attitudes, beliefs, learning habits and the like, are administered to nationally representative samples of 15-years-olds around the world. In previous surveys, four simple options were used to measure students’ attitude toward school: (a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when I leave school(b) school has been a waste of time(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions(d) school has taught me things that could […]

“Harbinger households”

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.” In the new paper, the researchers consider very large data-sets on consumer goods and fashion purchasing, house-buying, and political donations, to examine whether being a “harbinger household” correlates to other predictors of failure, and find that these households are also likely to buy real-estate that makes lower profits (or generates larger losses) than nearby properties; they are likely to buy fashion and consumer goods that get discontinued due to lackluster sales; and they are more likely to donate to losing politicians’ campaigns than winners. The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don’t appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn’t alter its purchasing and political contributions to “loser” products and candidates. Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents. They tend to make above-average use of coupons, and the coupons they use have above-average values. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between these different factors — donating to losing political candidates doesn’t make you prefer Crystal Pepsi, for example — but rather speculate that there is an “unobserved intervening variable” that explains both factors. Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread. […]

Why today's protests are not revolutionary TM website

Why aren’t today’s protests leading to revolutions?

-Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion. These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at “the system” and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood. These are huge rebellions. In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month. By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested. How might we make sense of these upheavals? Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail? Key characteristics of a revolution As an historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949). A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary. A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are: long-term causes and the popularity of a socio-political ideology at odds with the regime in power short-term triggers of widespread protest moments of violent confrontation the power-holders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels the consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime a subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power the re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power. Why today’s protests are not revolutionary […]

Davos 2020: What mattered

McKinsey global managing partner Kevin Sneader during the 2020 WEF Annual Meeting panel: Leading a 21st Century Corporation, held January 22, 2020. By Kevin Sneader January 27, 2020 Unseasonably and somewhat unnervingly mild temperatures provided a fitting backdrop for what emerged as the top issue at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: climate change and its risks. But that was far from the only topic. At the end of this year’s Annual Meeting, I sat down with Rik Kirkland, our director of publishing, to share my reflections. Climate risk is firmly established as a C-suite issue. Research published in reports like the McKinsey Global Institute’s “Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts” has clearly convinced more and more global policy makers and business leaders that the problem of climate change has moved from a far-off priority to a here-and-now risk that demands action. Personal experiences, whether from watching the wildfires in Australia or California or numerous other small examples, have also brought home the reality that this is a topic that requires leadership from the top. While there wasn’t much debate about the science, executives and investors were concerned about the lack of reliable data on the efforts companies and society are making, not to mention their impact. Greater clarity is required in order to speed development of new standards to help markets act more efficiently and reward progress. Beyond metrics, the leaders I spoke with are thinking about the problem in new and creative ways. They are taking a clear-eyed look at what is driving their carbon footprints, beginning to quantify the cost of inaction, and asking how they can accelerate positive change in a way that fits within their core business agenda. That’s a huge shift in tone from even a year ago. The short-term economic outlook is […]

If you can read this headline, you can read a novel.

Judith SeaboyerSenior Lecturer, The University of Queensland Public anxiety about the capacity of digital-age children and young adults to read anything longer than a screen grab has come to feel like moral panic. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest we must take such unease seriously. In 2016, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported the proportion of American adults who read at least one novel in 2015 had dropped to 43.1% from 56.9% in 1982. In 2018, a US academic reported that in 1980, 60% of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, the number had plummeted to 16%. Those same 12th graders reported spending “six hours a day texting, on social media and online”. American literacy expert and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes the threat screen reading poses to our capacity for “the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading”. She asks: Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? But rather than taking up defensive positions on either side of the digital-analogue reading divide, Wolf encourages us to embrace both. As parents and teachers we can help our children develop a bi-literate reading brain. There are several ways we can do this. Reading pathways Reading is a learned skill that requires the development of particular neural networks. And different reading platforms encourage the development of different aspects of those networks. Screen-reading children, immersed from toddlerhood in the pleasures and instant gratification of skimming, clicking and linking, develop cognitive skills that make them adept power browsers, good at the useful ability to scan […]

Blowout: Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All

by Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe—from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea—exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidising the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Climate explained: why we need to cut emissions as well as prepare for impacts

First, let’s accept climate change is happening and will have major negative impacts on New Zealand. Second, let’s also accept that even if New Zealand did absolutely everything possible to reduce emissions to zero, it would still happen, i.e. our impact on climate change is negligible. Third, reducing our emissions will come with a high financial cost. Fourth, the cost of dealing with the negative impacts of climate change (rising seas etc), will also come at a high financial cost. To argue that we should not act to reduce emissions because it is not in our interests to make a contribution to global mitigation is ultimately self-defeating. It would be to put short-term self-interest first, rather than considering both our long-term interests and those of the wider global community. Our options on climate are looking increasingly dire, since we as a global community have postponed combating climate change so long. But in New Zealand – and indeed in any country – we should still do as much as we can to reduce the extent of climate change, and not, at this stage, divert significant resources away from mitigation into “preparing for” it. Starting with the physics, it is clear that climate change is not a given and fixed phenomenon. It is unhelpful to say simply that “it is happening”. How much heating will occur will be determined by human actions: it is within humanity’s grasp to limit it. Any significant action taken over the next decade in particular will have high payoffs in terms of reducing future warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in effect says emission cuts of 45% or more over the next decade might just avert catastrophic change. Inaction, on the other hand, could condemn humankind to experiencing perhaps 3℃ or more of heating. Each further […]

How China’s propaganda machine tried to control the message in the Hong Kong protests

China is known for the strict control it exercises on information, especially online. Discussion of events that might reflect unfavourably on the government is often censored, or framed in such a way that it becomes pro-government propaganda. That’s why so many Chinese citizens remain unaware of, for example, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Online discussion of the recent protests in Hong Kong against a now-suspended extradition bill was no different. But this was also a rare occasion when China’s news propaganda machine was mobilised to simultaneously target several audiences both inside and outside China. China’s propaganda network is made up of a constellation of domesticand international news outlets. They span social media, mobile apps, websites and traditional media. The news is tailored to particular audiences according to different agendas. Everything, however, comes under the direction of the Central Publicity (formerly translated as “Propaganda”) Department of the Chinese Communist Party. This is an amazing time lapse of the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen the China extradition bill elevated from a local Hong Kong controversy to a story of international concern following the protesters’ lobbying campaign targeted at the G20 summit. As events escalated from peaceful rallies focused on a single issue to at times violent confrontations seeking a range of demands, including the resignation of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, the agendas of several spheres of China’s propaganda converged. The first day protesters took to the streets was March 31. That was two days after the extradition bill was published in the Gazette, the official publication of the Hong Kong government. The same day, two Chinese-language newspapers that have long acted as de-facto official media of the Chinese government in Hong Kong (but not openly declared as such) swung into action. Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao both used either the entire or the majority of the second […]

Scientists amazed as Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years early

Matthew Green – Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.General view of a landscape of partially thawed Arctic permafrost near Mould Bay, Canada, in this handout photo released June 18, 2019. The image was captured in 2016 by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks who were amazed to find the permafrost thawing 70 years faster than models predicted. A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilized the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia. “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters by telephone. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.” The team’s findings, published on June 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency. The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analyzing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned Cold War-era radar base more than 300 km from the nearest human settlement. Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier. The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter […]

Three Lessons from the Hong Kong Protests

Protests this month in Hong Kong over a proposed extradition law have revealed the depth of citizens’ concern for their way of life, and of their anger at Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s gross mismanagement. Lam now seems unlikely to serve out her full term in office – but China also has lessons to learn from recent events. LONDON – The massive protests in Hong Kong in recent weeks have demonstrated the depth of its citizens’ determination to uphold their democratic way of life – something they were supposedly guaranteed when the United Kingdom returned sovereignty over the city to China in 1997. Moreover, the protests hold three powerful lessons: for Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, for the demonstrators themselves, and for China’s rulers. The Roots of Our DiscontentTITO BOERI interviews RAGHURAM G. RAJAN about the plight of left-behind communities, migration, and the war on expertise.9Add to Bookmarks Over the past few years, the Chinese authorities have steadily increased their interference in Hong Kong’s affairs, gradually eroding the “one country, two systems” principle that was meant to ensure a “high degree of autonomy” for the city after 1997. The current crisis stems from China’s desire for a legal framework to return fugitives from the mainland who have allegedly used the city as a safe haven for ill-gotten wealth. In many respects, the extradition law introduced by Lam represented an extension of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign to Hong Kong, and was intended to avoid further incidents like Chinese security officers’ 2017 abduction of tycoon Xiao Jianhua from the city. There is no evidence that China gave Lam detailed instructions on enacting the law. Instead, she seems to have taken it upon herself to introduce it. However, Lam exceeded her remit by making the proposed extradition law applicable not only to fugitive mainland Chinese, but […]

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