kitchen table math, the sequel: revenge of the C student

Sunday, June 1, 2008

revenge of the C student

from Education Week

Robert J. Sternberg often writes about a lecture-style psychology course he took as a college freshman in which he got a C. “There is a famous Sternberg in psychology,” the professor told him at the time, “and it looks like there won’t be another.”

To Mr. Sternberg, the vignette illustrates that conventional assessments don’t measure all the abilities students need to succeed in life.

A nationally known psychologist, he has spent much of his career designing new measures that might more accurately capture the full range of students’ intellectual potential at the university level.

Now, a team of Yale University researchers is using the same ideas to rethink the tests that schools use to identify pupils for gifted and talented programs in elementary schools.

The team’s Aurora Battery, named for the colorful spectrums created by the northern and southern lights, is being translated and tested with tens of thousands of 9- to 12-year-olds, not only in the United States, but also in England, India, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and other countries.

If the preliminary results from those tests are borne out, its developers say, the new assessment could yield a very different pool of gifted students—one that includes a higher proportion of students from traditionally underrepresented minority groups than is often the case now.

[snip]

“This test has the potential to capture a more diverse population of students with a more varied and better-qualified array of skills,” said Elena L. Grigorenko, a psychology professor and the leader of the Yale study team in New Haven, Conn.

[snip]

Traditional intelligence tests, these researchers say, measure only a narrow subset: memory and analytical skills. Also known as “g” for general intellectual ability, those skills come in handy for comparing and contrasting, analyzing, judging, and classifying, and they are the kinds of abilities that teachers tend to value and emphasize in the classroom.

If people who score high on such measures succeed later on in life—and studies show that they often do—it’s partly because the educational system is geared to reward their particular mental skills, Mr. Sternberg said.


Someone should alert Robert Sternberg to the fact that this problem has been solved. Once you've got Connected Math, block scheduling, and portfolio assessment the kids who got straight-As back in the day become reliable B students.

Implement the middle school model in your town et voilĂ . IQ gap gone.

In its entirety, Aurora is a comprehensive battery that includes a group-administered paper-and-pencil test, a parent interview, a scale for teacher rating of students, and some observation items. The paper-and-pencil test gauges creativity, for instance, by asking students to imagine what objects might say to one another if they could talk, or to generate a story plot to fit an abstract illustration on a children’s-book cover.

A question assessing students’ practical skills with numbers directs test-takers to draw a line mapping the shortest route between a friend’s house and a movie theater.

Ideas of Practical and Creative IQ Underlie New Tests of Giftedness
by Debra Viadero
Education Week
Vol. 27, Issue 38, Pages 1,16


At last!

A standardized test that can tell me whether any of my kids has the sense it takes to come in out of the rain.

Seeing as how our family motto is no common sense-y, I'm guessing no.


5 comments:

Unknown said...

URGENT - Teacher needs feedback on EM at:

http://teachers.net/mentors/math/topic7756/5.24.08.18.05.00.html


PS>>Loved the post!

Linda Seebach said...

Joanne Jacobs had a post on this EdWeek story recently
http://joannejacobs.com/2008/05/23/redefining-intelligence/

and one of the commenters recommended a brilliant takedown of Sternberg's nonsense by Linda Gottfredson at Delaware. The commenter said,

>>>
Here’s a nice rebuttal to Sternberg’s theory of practical intelligence…

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2003dissecting.pdf

The funny thing about this, though, is that although more Hispanic and Black children will be identified as gifted, so will more White and Asian children, so unless schools start establishing affirmative action-like programs to determine “gifted” status, the new tests will do squat about the percentages.
>>>

Gottfredson nails him as not merely wrong, but mendacious. RTWT.

Katharine Beals said...

The "scale for teacher rating of students," included in the Aurora Battery, opens up the floodgates for any underlying agenda, including that of discriminating against Caucasian males and East Asians in favor of other minorities.

Catherine Johnson said...

Linda - I found the Gottfredson article last night!

I've also got the Murray/Hernnstein article on "decline at the top" - amazing. (I'll get passages posted.)

I'm with Lefty on the question of whether you can create a test that discriminates against Caucasian males & East Asians in favor of other minorities.

It is very easy to make a smart child look not very bright. I've now seen it over and over and over again (and will be writing posts about it come summer vacation).

Don't know if you've been following the gifted situation in NYC. The city has done exactly what Sternberg envisions doing across the country and -- gosh -- the planet. (These C students can really soar!)

They changed the test in precisely this way; now students have to be interviewed by school personnel (I believe that's the requirement).

White children with high IQs are failing these tests and being denied spots in GATE programs. From what I gather, this is being done systematically.

Catherine Johnson said...

One of the best ways to grade-deflate gifted students is to use complicated rubrics that include a hefty score for "creativity" (or sometimes "aesthetics," I think).

That allows a teacher to give a grade of B or C to a project in which the academic content is perfect, but the creativity is judged to be poor. This has happened to C. on occasion, and I know it's happening to kids around the country.

This is an especially effective tactic when you don't teach students how to draw or do graphic design, but you then grade Spanish or social studies projects on "creativity."

On the other hand, a mom I know showed me her child's special achievement certificate for a social studies project she did at the high school --- in an Honors course, I believe.

The mom told me her child is good at drawing.

Now that the middle school is adopting the middle school model, teachers will be able to grade most of the kids down most of the time since they'll be grading outside their areas of expertise.