#17 - Educator: Some experimental educational programs

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken—CE. The correct answer choice is (B)

Here, the educator discusses some experimental educational programs. Guided by the notion that home is where children should receive their first education, these programs teach parents how to be their child’s “first teacher.” The educator points to the above average school performance of children in these programs as support for the conclusion that the programs are successful and should be expanded.

Notice that the phrase “first teacher” is in quotation marks in the stimulus. When you see information highlighted like this in the stimulus, stop to think about why it is presented this way. Here, the educator is saying that the parents are not really teachers.

The argument is causal: the program makes the parents capable of instructing the child, and the parent’s instruction makes the child a better student. Although it likely is not necessary for you to diagram this relationship, we can diagram it as:

P = program
PI = parent as instructor
BS = child as better student

• Cause Effect/Cause Effect
  
  P PI BS

As with all causal argument on the LSAT, the educator’s argument leaves some unanswered questions. At each stage of the causal chain, we can simply ask, how do you know for sure? Although the program instructs parents, how do you know it is that program’s instruction that helps the parents teach the child? And even if that relationship is shored up, the educator’s evidence of success is merely a correlation between the child’s involvement in the program and the child’s performance in school. A correlation cannot prove a causal relationship.

The question stem indicates this is a Weaken question. Our prephrase is that the correct answer choice will attack some portion of the causal chain described above.

Answer choice (A): Whether children enjoy being taught by their parents is irrelevant to the conclusion, which focused on the success of the program in enabling parents to teach their children.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice, because it attacks the causal chain at the heart of the educator’s argument. If it is the case that most of the parents participating in the program have prior experience as educators, then the program does not turn the parents into faux “teachers,” they already are teachers. This fact potentially eliminates the value of the program as the initial cause that set the chain in motion.

Answer choice (C): Although some parents are participants in the program, the approval of a majority of parents, generally, to the expansion of the program is not relevant to the educator’s conclusion that the program is a success, and should be expanded.

Answer choice (D): The cost of the program expansion would matter to the question of whether expansion is feasible, but it has no impact on the question of whether the conclusion is valid.

Answer choice (E): If the educator’s argument were conditional, and established the program as necessary for any child to perform well in school, then this answer choice would attack that conditional relationship. However, the educator’s conclusion was causal, and was restricted to only those students who participated in the program. So, this answer choice is irrelevant to the conclusion.

[karlaurrea]

What makes answer choice E wrong? The way I see it, is that is some children who did not participate in the program performed well in school, then a program would not be needed thus weakening the argument, how is my reasoning wrong?

And what makes C correct? How is that parents having prior experience as educators weaken?

[Jon Denning]

Hey karlaurrea - thanks for the question. The educator here makes a causal argument (always a dicey proposition on the LSAT), where the educational program instructing parents in how to be their child's first teacher is said to cause these children to perform better in school. From this the educator concludes the programs should be expanded.

To weaken this relationship, all we need to show is that something else (not the program/parental training) would likely lead to the children performing better in school. Answer choice B gives us exactly that: if most parents participating in the program were already experienced educators, then it seems likely that experience (and not the program's training) could be the cause of the children's improvement. Hence expanding the program to parents without that same background seems less certain to yield the same results.

Answer choice E doesn't address the argument at all. The conclusion and causal relationship is all about the children whose parents participated in the program; an answer choice about children OUTSIDE that group cannot be thought to undermine an argument based on children IN that group. It's simply irrelevant information.

Hope that helps!

[lsatstudier]

Hi,

Would you have any advice on how to identify this stimulus as cause and effect? I think I might be getting too caught up in identifying words that indicate cause and effect. However, the only causal aspect that caught my attention was that this question was about an experiment.

Please let me know. Thank you!

[Adam Tyson]

Thanks for asking, lsatstudier. The causal nature of this stimulus is a bit more subtle than some others you've been studying. The key is in recognizing two things: 1) the author gives us a correlation (students in the programs correlates with above average performance); and 2) the author uses some language that is active - specifically, "successful", which can be interpreted as "it worked" or "it caused success". Nothing obvious here, no use of the most common causal indicators, but the correlation combined with the active language in the conclusion should still clue you in. The author believes that the programs caused the higher performance - that should be your paraphrase for the conclusion.

Key words are a great start to recognizing and understanding certain reasoning types like conditional and causal, but once you have those down you need to go a little further and look for more conceptual relationships and work on seeing the underlying assumptions and structures of the arguments. With time and practice, that will come! Keep up the good work.

[cindyhylee87]

Hi Powerscore,

I spotted that this question has a causal conclusion.

Cause: this experimental program Effect: better school performance of children under programs

I remember one way to weaken causal conclusion is to show that effect occurs but cause doesn't. Isn't it what answer choice (E) is doing here?

Thanks,
Cindy

[Adam Tyson]

That's certainly one way of looking at answer E, Cindy, and it makes sense on those grounds to keep E as a contender. But what makes B a better choice? Two things, I think.

First, answer B (the credited response) tells us about "most" children in the programs, while answer E only talks about "some" children. That could be just one or two! Which of these bits of evidence is more compelling, and thus does "most" to weaken the argument (as the stem tells us to do)? The "most" answer is more damaging than the "some" answer.

There's another reason, brought up in our explanation at the top of this thread, and that is that the argument is about comparing the children in these programs to the average. The ones in the programs are, overall, doing better than the average. But an average can still have some variation, right? In answer E, we look at some kids not in the programs and see that they are doing exceptionally well (which I would say means better than average). But the question is, are kids who are not in the programs doing better than average overall? Or are these "some" kids just the usual outliers at the top of the curve, and they are still part of a group that is doing just average? The evidence in answer E tells us nothing about the average and makes no comparison, whereas the stimulus did just that. Answer B tells us that there is a possible alternate cause for their above average performance, and that does the real damage here.

Good thinking, I like where you were going with that! Sometimes we have to dig just a little deeper, though, to see what makes one answer not just good, but better than all the others. Keep digging!

[Albertlyu]

thanks, what confuses me about B is that even it was true, let us say 60% of the parents were previously teachers themselves, from the context we can tell that all students from these programs perform better than average, which means for the 40% of parents who were not teachers, their kids did better than average. Which means these programs might actually be successful.

Or even in an extreme case: just one parent who was not a teacher (the rest of the parents were all teachers), since her kid did better than average in school, which could mean that the program she was in might still be successful.

please can anyone share some insights. thanks

[Robert Carroll]

Albert,

There is no need in your hypothetical for the children of the 40% of parents who were not teachers to be above average. Nothing in the premise about the children performing above average requires all of them to do so. So if the children of the educators do better, and the other children stay the same, the average of the entire group would still go up.

Further, yes, the programs might be successful. But the question is a Weaken. Our task is to make the argument worse. Disproving the conclusion is a great way to make an argument worse, but not the only one. Showing that the conclusion is less likely to be true is perfectly fine, and answer choice (B) certainly makes it a worse conclusion. You point out that it doesn't entirely disprove it, and I agree - that's just not something that ever matters for a Weaken question. Our task is not that extreme.

Robert Carroll

[Albertlyu]

Albert,

There is no need in your hypothetical for the children of the 40% of parents who were not teachers to be above average. Nothing in the premise about the children performing above average requires all of them to do so. So if the children of the educators do better, and the other children stay the same, the average of the entire group would still go up.

Further, yes, the programs might be successful. But the question is a Weaken. Our task is to make the argument worse. Disproving the conclusion is a great way to make an argument worse, but not the only one. Showing that the conclusion is less likely to be true is perfectly fine, and answer choice (B) certainly makes it a worse conclusion. You point out that it doesn't entirely disprove it, and I agree - that's just not something that ever matters for a Weaken question. Our task is not that extreme.

Robert Carroll

thanks, Robert for your detailed explanation, yes now I do see why B is a weakener, I chose D the first time because I thought "should be expanded" is the final conclusion here, and everything else is the support. Therefore the author concluded we should do something simply because there is something good about it without considering the cons.

May I ask if D is wrong is because we need to assume something additional(the cost of the expansion will be a con) for D to be a weakener? If answer D was "the cost of expanding the program is prohibitive", would it be right? Because "the cost has not been precisely determined" does not give us much even if it is true.

thanks again Robert for your help!

Albert