I have seen the future and it has implications!

 

April 15th, Ano Dos

File under; “I have seen the future and it has implications!”

My daughter who, incidentally, teaches math and who is as much a knowledge junkie as her parents, sent me a very interesting research abstract from NATURE which publishes high quality, peer reviewed research papers to an international audience. As they say, “It’s got street creds”. The paper was titled, “Genetic associations with mathematics tracking and persistence in secondary school”, published in 2020 February. What initially got my attention was the thought of scientifically measuring persistence in non laboratory settings. But as I read the paper, the whole thing became fascinating to read. Here’s the opening paragraph with my comments in parentheses.

Abstract

Maximizing the flow of students through the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline (“...the flow of students through the…pipeline…” sounds like discussing widget production issues), is important to promoting human capital development (...”human capital” ranks right up there with renaming The Personnel Dept, to Human Resources) and reducing economic inequality (“reducing economic inequality”, a worthy but not necessarily mandatory goal). A critical juncture in the STEM pipeline is the highly cumulative sequence of secondary school math courses. Students from disadvantaged schools are less likely to complete advanced math courses. Here, we conduct an analysis of how the math pipeline differs across schools using student polygenic scores,(Huh? What’s this “polygenic” score, and who’s keeping them?) which are DNA-based indicators (“DNA based indicators”, Head up! I see a privacy issue coming in to focus!) of propensity to succeed in education (as an aside, I like the term “propensity”, it has a neat sound to it. Think, “William has a propensity to take the vacuum cleaner apart if left alone”, definitely misdirected STEM interests, or “Sam has the propensity to light his pets on fire if given the opportunity”, NOT STEM related). We integrated genetic and official school transcript data from over 3000 European-ancestry students from U.S. high schools. We used polygenic scores as a molecular tracer to understand how the flow of students through the high school math pipeline differs in socioeconomically advantaged versus disadvantaged schools. Students with higher education polygenic scores were tracked to more advanced math already at the beginning of high school and persisted in math for more years (Basically the authors are saying they used a students genetics to predict students educational path and this was validated as the students moved through the pipeline). Analyses using genetics as a molecular tracer revealed that the dynamics of the math pipeline differed by school advantage. Compared to disadvantaged schools, advantaged schools buffered students with low polygenic scores from dropping out of math. Across all schools, even students with exceptional polygenic scores (top 2%) were unlikely to take the most advanced math classes, suggesting substantial room for improvement in the development of potential STEM talent (Basically, some kids with genetics that would make them good at STEM job/careers don’t seem interested in going that route. This indicates there is substantial room for the development of more “refined” techniques of “guiding” them into STEM by providing more STEM related early childhood experiences and starving them of early childhood liberal arts experiences). These results link new molecular genetic discoveries to a common target of educational-policy reforms (Oh! This sentence is just sooo laden with landmines! It’s not a question of IF students will be genetically typed, or if this is a good thing. It is a question of the pressure of the eternal pursuit for efficiency. To NOT have every student genetically profiled in order to best educated them would be like NOT taking blood profiles in the treatment of your child’s leukemia. This is just another mile marker on the road to humankind taking over and Self-Directing their evolution).

In order to keep this post relatively short, I’ll end it here, but there is so much more I could say, that I might revisit this.

bobb

10Paul Stroebel, Roy Schreyer and 8 others