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An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

scientificamerican.com

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Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#51

Post by nostrademons »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #39
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Improved upon" assumes something that is constant on the level of long-term worldview, not something that may change situationally. You wouldn't usually say that your choice of what to have for dinner or which sweater to buy can be "improved upon", but many of the individual choices we make that lead to the world we currently live in are on that level. I guess the article does mention engaging the ethical reasoning…

It changes situationally, but not everyone acts identically in the same situation, so it must vary personally too, no?

I would assume so, yes.

Additionally, the same action might be perceived in a different moral light by different people. Just look at how the same events are reported in Breitbart vs. CNN vs. Pravda vs. Al-Jazeera (and read the comments on them) for an example of this.

The complexity of moral education is that you have to balance situation vs. individual vs. audience, and it's very difficult to do this in a consistent way. Propose any concrete curriculum, and it's almost guaranteed that some people will scream about how you're imposing your values on the rest of society, and at least one kid will take the exact opposite lesson from what you intended and do something you found morally abhorrent.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#52

Post by Jach »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #43
pirocks wrote: post #18

As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.

What makes you think basing admissions on SAT/ACT does not also have 'major flaws'?

I imagine because being nationally standardized, the SAT/ACT more reliably correlate to IQ. A 4.0 GPA means nothing but an A in all classes, which may give some insight into Conscientiousness, but it says nothing about what the classes covered, what the school averages at, and is thus harder to correlate with IQ.

Since IQ+Conscientiousness is better than either alone, of course they'll want to consider both.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#53

Post by neogodless »

kartan wrote: post #17

The article mixes two ideas that partially contradict each other. 1. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place. 2. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do. I agree with the second statement, and its implications are…

Idea 1 simply states that wisdom and creativity may actually be more important than the intelligence or knowledge being tested for. It doesn't insinuate that we cannot cultivate wisdom, nor does it say that the two cannot coexist. Merely that we're only filtering based on those tests, without also considering wisdom.

I do not see the contradiction.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#54

Post by Retric »

jbscpa wrote: post #15

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…

In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.)

If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

Retric wrote: post #54
jbscpa wrote: post #15

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…

In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.) If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.

That's not all that surprising: outward religious formality is a sign of religion being tribal identity rather than substantive ideology.

There's​ a degree to which some degree of tribalism sis useful for promoting continuity of community and preservation of ideas, but there's also a persistent danger of degeneration into empty tribalism preoccupied with outward form.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#56

Post by nostrademons »

neogodless wrote: post #49
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Improved upon" assumes something that is constant on the level of long-term worldview, not something that may change situationally. You wouldn't usually say that your choice of what to have for dinner or which sweater to buy can be "improved upon", but many of the individual choices we make that lead to the world we currently live in are on that level. I guess the article does mention engaging the ethical reasoning…

I see what you're saying about the virtues being "different based on the situation and/or other variables." However, that doesn't mean you can't "improve upon" the ability to make virtuous choices. In your dinner example, if someone has only math and finance education, they might simply say that fast food is the best choice for dinner. But if they get some nutrition education, suddenly they're wondering if maybe some…

Sure, and this type of moral education is actually done in schools. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we had a unit on water conservation; a unit on energy efficiency; a play we wrote about rainforest destruction, endangered species, and global warming; recurrent reminders to recycle; programs for anti-drug and anti-smoking initiatives; sex ed; and pervasive lessons on respecting each other and authority.

I haven't had any connection to the school system since 2000, but from what I've heard, kids these days also get lessons on nutrition and on diversity & inclusion.

But here are three major complexities:

a.) A good portion of America believes that this sort of moral education is indoctrination. You're seeing the rise of Christian homeschooling as a reaction to it, for example, which proponents of these values find just as morally abhorrent.

b.) There's an opportunity cost to everything you teach. So while diversity & inclusion has gotten a lot more classroom time of late, the importance of free speech seems to have fallen by the wayside. While we hear a lot about global warming or fossil-fuel exhaustion, there's little about groundwater pollution, rare-earth mining, or labor rights.

c.) Once people get into the real world, they discover markets. Markets reward people who supply what others do not, which means that if you have a cohort of idealistic young conformists, the one defector can make lots of money simply by breaking the consensus. In many ways, this is exactly what moralists complain of, and what led off this article: people who break common ideas of virtue are getting very rich off of it. And yet we don't want to get rid of markets, because they supply the things that we want but somebody else would rather not supply us with.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#57

Post by Glyptodon »

So the 30 point IQ thing, is that a reference to a global increase driven by access to education, or am I missing something? Because it's not like 130 is the new normal IQ score? But at the same time haven't they always been normalized around 100 in industrialized countries?

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#58

Post by SeeDave »

jbscpa wrote: post #15

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…

>2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns.

I would have appreciated this as my public school experience was rife with negativity, sarcasm, snark, jeering, insulting, etc.

I'm not sure what causes such anti-social behavior but I dream of a day where all students can be kind, considerate, polite, and supportive of one another.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#59

Post by grandalf »

While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years.

Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence.

When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. To a large extent, pre-law and pre-med curricula offer this, and so many of the students who excel using that technique end up in positions of social authority.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#60

Post by deepnotderp »

oculusthrift wrote: post #25
pirocks wrote: post #18

As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.

honestly it seems to me that many that bash them are just insecure they didn't do well and therefore claim that it isn't a valid measure.

Well it stands to reason that if a test isn't a valid measure then those who are hurt most by it will be the most vocal complainers. That doesn't invalidate what the complainers have to say. There are numerous studies showing the poor validity of these standardized tests.
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