"John Knight" <johnknight at usa.com> wrote:
[regarding TIMSS physics question H04, which he has NOT yet successfully
answered or explained]
>The correct answer is voluminously documented at the url's that were linked
>to this question, so this is no longer the issue.
The issue is that YOU, who criticize the intelligence of American girls, may
not know the answer, and if you looked it up, cannot explain WHY it is that
answer. This means that you are DUMBER than the girls that you criticize,
because they at least attempted to answer the question, whereas YOU play
games and hi-step around admitting your ignorance or giving an explanation of
the correct answer.
>The issue is that
>American 12th grade girls answered this question in a way that suggests they
>were misled.
Really? I thought you said that most of them guessed?
(The truth is probably that few of them were taught anything at all that
pertained to the question, and they attempted to solve it using false
analogies to things that they did know, with different false analogies
leading to each of the wrong answers given because that was what the test was
designed to do - figure out what kids were being taught and how well)
>The reason we know they were misled is that only 22.8% of them got it
>correct, compared to an international average for girls of 26.3%, 42.6% of
>American boys, and 53.9% of Swedish boys.
Even 53.9% is not a particularly good score, if they had in fact been taught
the test. But we have no reason to believe that even the Swedish boys were
taught the test problem.
>Clearly American girls did very poorly on this question. If they knew
>nothing whatsoever, 25% of them would have gotten it correct just by
>guessing, so when 2.2% fewer get it correct than if they'd just guessed,
>many of them clearly thought they knew the right answer, but it was the
>wrong answer.
Or perhaps they had some ideas on what MIGHT be the correct answer, but were
less than sure, and didn't much worry about it because TIMSS is a test that
doesn't really matter to the kids.
>This is a bit worse than knowing absolutely nothing about the problem,
>wouldn't you say?
No.
>If it was just one question, you could chalk it up to
>some kind of error in the test,
I would NEVER chalk it up to an error on the test. I might chalk it up to
GOOD test design, however.
>but this was just one of 13 questions where
>the same thing happened
Ignoring the cases where it did NOT happen, and those cases where the boys
got it wrong more than the girls and did worse than if they had just guessed.
What were they doing? "Male intuition"? Explain the results of E06 and F08,
nincompoop.
lojbab
