Friday, November 11, 2022

Is There Any Value in IQ Tests

This week's article summary is Is IQ a Load of BS?

Similar to last week’s summary on standardized tests, this one focuses on the pros and cons of IQ tests.

With both standardized and IQ tests, the goal is an objective assessment of general intelligence (aptitude and/or achievement).

As you’ll see in the article, there is a slight correlation to IQ results and career success, yet myriad other factors play a role in our professional and personal successes. It’s not simply what your brain can do, it’s how you use it, especially in your interactions and relationships with others. Yes, you need some gray matter to succeed, but, especially in today’s marketplace, you need to be able to work collegially, collaboratively, and productively with colleagues. 

Nevertheless, it seems to be a human instinct for us to want to know our IQ score. Whenever I come across an article that promises to assess my IQ in only a few questions, I can’t resist taking the bait. I think we all want to be considered smart. Validation from an IQ test perhaps can give us the confidence to push ourselves to take intellectual risks, like reading Moby Dick, a book I’ve tried to read several times yet failed miserably.

Just as Trinity emphasizes a whole-child approach to education, we also need to see that our brain power is only one part of the greater whole of who we are and what contributes to our success and happiness. It’s why Trinity focuses so much on character/social-emotional (sense of self and care and concern for others) development. Intelligence is dangerous without being guided by goodness.

 Joe

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At the turn of the 20th century, people were falling over themselves trying to make tests to objectively measure intelligence. It was based on the common assumption that all kinds of intelligence — verbal reasoning, spatial awareness, memory, and so on — were simply manifestations of some central, basic general intelligence. The first test to measure this general intelligence was well intentioned. It originated in France and was designed to identify which children would need extra help at school. This test, known as the Binet-Simon test, eventually became the model on which all IQ tests today are based.

It wasn’t long, however, before the tests were turned to ill. Children as young as three are told they are of below-average intelligence based on a series of questions inspired by a century’s old psychology. Racists have long used IQ as an “objective” measure of racial superiority. The Nazis used versions of these tests to “prove” that certain ethnicities were subhuman. They used it to justify forcible sterilizations or the murder of children considered of an insufferably low IQ. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 in Buck v. Bell to allow states the right to forcibly sterilize those they deemed “mentally deficient” by these tests. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” It’s thought that roughly 70,000 people were victims of this ruling.

Just because something has, historically, been used for immense evil doesn’t necessarily mean it is, in itself, unfit for purpose. So, with what we know today, how far should IQ be trusted?

To answer that question, we have to first ask what IQ is. These days, most reputable IQ tests or psychologists will openly admit that IQ is not a complete measure of how smart you are. These tests do not tell you, nor are they intended to tell you, your overall cognitive prowess. What IQ does measure is something called “general mental ability” (for example, pattern recognition), also called g. The Raven Matrices, one of the most popular tests, is pretty reliable at telling you what a person’s g might be. There are many other more specific tests that can investigate particular cognitive aspects — like memory, verbal reasoning, mathematical ability, and so on. If you want to know someone’s g, then an IQ test is the best tool for the job.

Additionally, there does seem to be at least some evidence pointing toward a correlation between someone’s g and their overall academic and professional success. Personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, trust, and generosity also feature highly in indicating future success, but, as one study puts it, “Higher intelligence results in significantly higher… earnings.” Personality matters, but IQ matters a bit more.

There’s also a practical aspect to IQ. In a world where large organizations, from the military to multinational corporations, insist on some kind of psychometric testing, IQ tests might be the best we have available.

But, there are two major problems with IQ.

The first problem with IQ stems from those who misunderstand what it’s trying to measure. IQ measures your score on a test against the averages of everyone else taking that test. It tells you how good someone is at answering certain types of questions, as compared with others. Thus, it’s not about an absolute intelligence, but relative intelligence. The trouble occurs when people misunderstand this point.

They assume IQ represents raw “brain power.” Worse, some people equate IQ with worth. Employers, especially, might write off a person based on a low IQ. Doing so fails to appreciate that many employees can offer skills and abilities that lie beyond the scope of IQ tests (such as personality factors like conscientiousness). Furthermore, the correlations mentioned above — that is, those between IQ and success — are still, statistically, considered small ones. The data we have — the data some people use to pigeon-hole a person for life — is desperately weak and inconclusive.

The second problem is that IQ is far too narrow a metric to dominate so much of the psychometric landscape. IQ represents only one, or a few, kinds of intelligence. Even the ancient Greeks knew there were different types of intelligence. For example, there was techne (vocational skills), episteme (general knowledge), phronesis (practical wisdom), or nous (a kind of rational intuition). Psychologist Howard Gardener identified eight different kinds of intelligence, and “IQ tests and other kinds of standardized tests valorize” only two of them.

So, is IQ BS? Well, it’s complicated. IQ is a test, designed to gauge a certain type of intelligence, which some argue (on weak data) is a good indicator of lifetime success. It ranks people against each other, when no other information (such as examinations or qualifications) can meaningfully help in that ranking.

Headlines like “Ways to improve your IQ!” seem to reveal what IQ is — an examination. And, like any exam, you can game and train for it. The fact that you can improve your IQ reveals a still more fundamental point: IQ is not a measure of who you are. It isn’t something structural to your being, unchangeable and predetermined (such as your genetics).

Human society is diverse. No one is identical, and no two people will approach a problem in quite the same way. Each of us is better and worse at different aspects of life. When employers seek to hire only one type of person, they risk missing the benefits of what others — those beyond the remit of IQ tests — can provide.


Friday, November 4, 2022

The Many Negatives of High-Stakes Standardized Tests

This week's article summary is The Psychological Toll of High-Stakes Testing.

I’m guessing that very few of us recall with glee taking standardized tests. I remember getting my first SAT results as a junior in high school: I had always felt I was fairly intelligent and while not Ivy League material I assumed most colleges would accept me. Getting those SATS scores was a shock to my ego. I literally worried if I would get into any college.

So, I prepped before I took the test a second time and raised my scores enough that I no longer felt stupid. Still, it really wasn’t until second semester of my freshman year in college that I began go regain confidence in my academic abilities.

Not surprisingly, the article below highlights the many negatives of standardized tests.

Topping the list is that they are a poor predictor of future academic performance because they don’t measure qualities like creativity, work ethic/effort, perseverance, and resilience.

The article points out some good aspects of standardized tests as well, especially that they provide a snapshot in time of where we stack up compared to others.

It’s dangerous, however, when scores are used to determine important decisions like college admissions or for our students middle school acceptance.

Partially due the pandemic and partially due to changing trends, many schools are beginning to re-assess the purpose and use of standardized tests. In many ways, what we have traditionally done at Trinity is what many schools are now using them for: one data point to help inform where a child is and needs to go. We don’t teach to the test yet we know from experience that our child-centered, differentiated pedagogy yields positive results (more a byproduct of) in traditional assessments, like standardized tests.

According to the article, it’s not standardized tests that are evil; it’s making them ‘high-stakes.’ It will be interesting to see to what extent colleges continue to de-emphasize standardized test results in their admissions process.

 Joe

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One problem with standardized tests: We don’t fully understand what they measure.

They are ideally designed to provide an objective appraisal of knowledge or perhaps even of inherent intelligence. 

But a recent study by Brian Galla, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, with Angela Duckworth and colleagues concluded that high school grades are actually more predictive of college graduation than standardized tests like the SAT or ACT. 

That’s because standardized tests have a major blind spot, the researchers asserted: The exams fail to capture the “soft skills” that reflect a student’s ability to develop good study habits, take academic risks, and persist through challenges. 

High school grades, on the other hand, appear to do a better job mapping the area where resilience and knowledge meet. Arguably, that’s the place where potential is translated into real achievement.

“The more I understand what testing is, actually, the more confused I am,” said Duckworth, a psychologist and expert on measuring human potential. “What does the score mean? Is it how smart somebody is, or is it something else? How much of it is their recent coaching? How much of it is genuine skill and knowledge?”

Yet standardized tests are still a mainstay of U.S. education. They play a critical role in deciding whether students graduate, what college or university they’ll attend, and, in many ways, what career paths will be open to them. Despite the fact that they take a few hours to complete—a tiny fraction of the time students spend demonstrating their learning—the tests are a notoriously high-stakes way to determine academic merit. 

By several measures, high-stakes tests are an inequitable gauge of aptitude and achievement. A 2016 analysis, for example, found that the tests were better indicators of prosperity than ability: “Scores from the SAT and ACT tests are good proxies for the amount of wealth students are born into,” the researchers concluded. 

Even students who manage to do well on the tests often pay a steep price emotionally and psychologically. “Students in countries that did the best on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) often have lower well-being, as measured by students’ satisfaction with life and school,” wrote Yurou Wang, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Alabama. 

Test results are often tinged with a kind of existential dread. In an 2011 study, Laura-Lee Kearns, a professor of education at Xavier University, discovered that high school students who failed the state standardized literacy test “experienced shock at test failure,” asserting that they “felt degraded, humiliated, stressed, and shamed by the test results.” Many of the students were successful in school and thought of themselves as academically advanced, so the disconnect triggered an identity crisis that made them feel as though “they did not belong in courses they previously enjoyed, and even caused some of them to question their school class placement.”

“I enjoyed English, but my self-esteem really went down after the test,” a student reported, echoing a sentiment felt by many. “I really had to think over whether I was good at it or not.” 

High-stakes testing commonly begins in third grade, as young students get their first taste of fill-in-the-bubble scantrons. And while the tests are commonly used as diagnostic tools (presumably to help tailor a student’s academic support) and to evaluate the performance of teachers and schools, they can come with a bevy of unintended consequences.

“Teachers and parents report that high-stakes tests lead to higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of confidence on the part of elementary students,” researchers explained in a 2005 study. Some young students experience “anxiety, panic, irritability, frustration, boredom, crying, headaches, and loss of sleep” while taking high-stakes tests, they reported, before concluding that “high-stakes testing causes damage to children’s self-esteem, overall morale, and love of learning.”

Tests like the SAT and ACT aren’t inherently harmful, and students should learn how to manage reasonably stressful academic situations. In fact, banning them completely might be counterproductive, denying many students a critical avenue to demonstrate their academic skills. But to make them a condition of matriculation, and to factor them so prominently in internal ranking and admissions processes, inevitably excludes millions of promising students. 

Last year, the University of California dropped SAT and ACT scores from its admissions process, delivering a resounding blow to the power of two standardized tests that have long shaped American higher education. Meanwhile, hundreds of colleges and universities that dropped testing for pandemic-related reasons are reconsidering their value--including all eight Ivy League schools.

“This proves that test-optional is the new normal in college admissions,” said Bob Schaeffer, FairTest’s Public Education director. “Highly selective schools have shown that they can do fair and accurate admissions without test scores.”

In the end, it’s not the tests—it’s the almost fetishistic power we give to them. We can preserve the insights that the tests generate while returning sanity and proportionality to a broken system. Quite simply, if we deemphasize high-stakes tests, our students will, too.