The dangers of Teaching to tests.

This is a transcript from this video here

It gives me a premise for my next blog here. 

Anchor CNBC : Howard Gardner is one of the world's leading thinkers on the subject of how children learn and so we've invited him to be our guest here tonight to discuss the value of standardized tests like the SATs. 

A psychologist and educator at Harvard University, Dr Gardner is the author of 17 books including his latest, "The Disciplined Mind".  Dr Gardner joins us from Boston this evening. 

Anchor : Do you think that taking cultural factors into account is a good thing?

HG : At first ...I like the idea very much. Basically, it's an attempt to even the playing field in making judgments about something that is very consequential like college admission. We all know that some people have huge amounts of advantages when they start off, because of the wealth of their family to the schools they go to and the amount of education at home and so on....and other people have huge disadvantages and while at the end of the day it's true that you get credit for what you can do and not for what yo can't do, and when we're making judgments about people's potential, we really need to say, "To what extent have they overcome their circumstances and under what circumstances have they made good use of them? (overcoming their circumstances.)"

Anchor :What about the statement in (..earlier....) It's sort of telling a student : You did good for you. Isn't that a bad place to put a striving student?

HG : I don't think so because after all we're not saying that you can't get the raw score, the actual score the student received, we're saying in addition we're going to talk about what you did compared to other people who had the same things going for you. In a sense, it's almost like the zipcode. If you tell me somebody's zipcode, I can give you a pretty good prediction of how they're going to do on a college board test. 

Anchor : Really?

HG : and because of the amount of resources available for the people in Beverly Hills compared to say, to (...) or Compton, this is just giving us a more objective of saying, "Well, how well did this student do compared to other people who had the same amount of resources the student did."

Anchor : I wondered too how much of the problem - and I think back to the dates when I had to memorize all the dates in History class and wondered, "When the heck am I going to need those?" - Is the problem instead of teaching children how to learn and fostering their intelligence, we concentrate more on drilling them with facts, facts, facts?

HG : Well, the (...) test is a very specific kind of test - the more it has high stakes, the more teachers and parents are inevitably going to train the child to do well in the test; it's common sense. So, the priority of the test becomes very, very important. In thinking about the SAT this evening (a test taken to see which college you can get into) I thought it would be nice to have a country or  schools where you could have an entirely new version of the test each year so that nobody could prepare just for that particular test ....

Anchor : That's fascinating!

HG: ...so if, for example, you wanted to know how well a student is reading,and obviously that's very important to know, you wouldn't know from one year to the next whether you're going to have (this format) or (that format) or (another format) test so that there's no possible way where someone could practise for a particular version of a particular test....But if a student did pretty well on this randomly chosen reading test, you could be pretty confident they could read well.

Anchor : That's a (awfully fantastic idea!) ...I wonder why they don't do that?

HG : I can tell you why they don't do it. Because when they do bring in a new test, the scores will go back down again. I remember, looking at the test scores in Chicago several years ago and noticing that it would go up for a while and then go back down....and the answer is you can't (...) without immediately introducing a new kind of test where the students weren't ready for it. 

HG : So, there's a very big risk in teaching to the tests;  - It's funny, the SAT, 20 years ago, ETS said, "You can't drill for this. This is somehow an assessment of your true, intellectual potential. Then places like Stanley-Kaplan and the Princeton Review showed you could raise the points 100,200,300 and now ETS says, "Oh, we can show you how to get better (results) for this test, as well." So we have to be very, very careful that any type of measure isn't something you could drill for and get much better for. 

Anchor : See, this is why I like your work, Dr. Gardner. You always make me think differently.

Comment for blog April 6th.

I'd just finished skimming through The Leader in Me last night and it did mention the importance of alignment. I think it's interesting what 'you' (the past me) say out of instinct keeps finding data/expert information to back it up. It builds my confidence in myself to know that.

Secondly, what you said about spidering sounds like what I'd just read last night in Howard Gardner's 5 MINDS OF THE FUTURE. In fact, I shared those few lines in today's class : Those with shrewd scaffoling can participate in several disciplines.

I find it very reassuring that evidence continue to turn up to support your thoughts and instincts. I bought 5 Minds around the final week of April. I know you were worried about writing something like this, an issue that's been at the back of your mind for years, because you didn't want to sound like you were bragging. But I'm glad you overcame your fears of 'sounding crazy' because it gave me an opportunity to prove to myself that mentioning the ability to magnetize information to support a theory doesn't jinx it.

I know it's hard to qualify 'research' that goes on only in your head, where only you are conducting, supervising and evaluating it. I'm beginning to see that the ability to magnetize information isn't something hocus-pocus that can be jinxed just because you admitted it. I think what is happening is that you're conducting a scientific inquiry on your own - you have a hypothesis and then you look out for data/information that will either over time support or reject your hypothesis.

Because you come up with hypotheses all the time, the timeline among the different hypotheses can overlap. Instead of traditional inquiry which looks out for only information/data that will confirm or reject one objective, you are 'spidering' for a FEW objectives at the same time. Some conclusions are arrived at before others and some conclusions preceed the emergence of the next objective. It is like a series of S-curves sometimes, overlapping one another.

Occassionally, 2 points from 2 different objective/inquiries meet one another. This synergy or fusion will then create a NEW OBJECTIVE to inquiry.....which will suddenly find a synergy or fusion with another/older ONGOING mental observation/inquiry to either arrive at a better conclusion/conviction or be the genesis for the next objective/inquiry/hypothesis to be pursued.

(Read the context of this blog here.)

Authentic Self

Today I mentioned one theory I am developing/testing mentally in my mind. I talked about Finding "The Authentic Self". The authentic self lends itself to the idea of a person who tries to be honest, credible and sincere towards oneself and others all the time. I haven't yet had enough insights or information to formulate an entire story of what it means to find and become an Authentic Self. Some clues : to have the courage to become transparent, the courage to not conform, the courage to be wrong, the courage to try something others think is a mark of insanity.

I cannot be an Authentic Self if I lie that I doubt myself, that I hold myself back a lot of times. I once told my class, "Say something brilliant, you're smart. Say two brilliant things/discoveries, you're a genius. Say three, you're a revolutionary. Say four, you're radical. Say five, you're an extremist. Say six, you're psychotic. Say seven, you're insane."

I said what I did then based on the premise that humans at large are very conservative when it comes to change. They are struggling and shifting in their own traditions and discomfort yet they will do little or nothing to utilize the premise of their human capacity to be the change they want to see.

They will eventually reach a level, as a whole, where they really feel they have to change or face annihilation/destruction to the things they hold dearer than their own comfort. So they look for an answer, to a guru, to a master, to an inventorm, to a healer, a teacher, a leader, etc.

So whoever happens to be developing a theory of their own all along will finally get a chance to share it. The people embrace it. Change begins to happen. So, as The Joker says, you either die a hero or you be a hero long enough to die a villain.

So apparently, there must be 'balance'. The world is not ready for people to be Authentic. The divorce between Science, Art and Spirit, first wrought upon the world by the Western world, has not been settled. To be scientific, to be intellectual, to be rational, one must not say, "Allahhuakhbar!or talk about Heaven and Hell. One must write in an 'academic voice' or be dismissed as "New Age" nonsense.

However, I think the works of people like the founder of Logotherapy; Viktor E. Frank,works of Maria Montessori (Absorbent Mind), Jiddu Krishnamurthi on Education and more recently, Daniel Goleman (Destructive Emotion) Howard Gardner (Existential intelligence),Daniel H. Pink (Story, Empathy)and a host of others are collectively creating a bridge to narrow the distance what it means to be INTELLECTUAL and HUMAN at the same time.

I have always felt that there must be a reason why I have been repelled from pursuing an academic route, in spite of the fact that as a child, the idea of reading/researching/writing 8-12 hours a day (or more) for a humble living, appealed to me more than anything else. For many years, my all-protective Ego told me it was because I'm not really as smart/lucky/disciplined as I think, and that is the sole reason why I am not graduating magna/summa cum laude on a prestigious scholarship. But I think I know now, why. I needed the freedom to be a story-teller. Despite the fact that my first 'aspiration' was to be a story teller (I must've been about 4 or 5 years old then) like many others, the idea of being a vesself for stories sounded ridiculous and pathetic in this material/post-modern era I've grown up in.

And yet, here I am, once again, in my third decade of life, revisiting the idea of playing the role of story-teller. The way I see it, there is so much information out there and a great need to be able to self-direct oneself to build the necessary scaffolding to leverage on the information/data. But academics being who they are and peer reviews being what they are, confinesacademic research and writing to a voice that is alien to non-post-grad students of their specific disciplines. The ONLY reason I can understand academic jargon on those occassions (live or recorded) academics share their work with people outside the academic circle is because one part of my 'learning brain' has been reserved early on to not tune out to academic language. That part of the brain was the part that wanted to have an academic route.

I now appreciate that writing 'voice' is distilled from an eclectic mix of dynamics that enters one life, most signficantly, the 'voice' of the input we receive, be it through spoken words or printed works. I can only imagine that a romance writer herself reads plenty of romance and experiences plenty of romance in real life. I can imagine a horror story writer is thrilled by folklore, mythology and superstitions. In the context of academics and researchers' life, they cannot help but output in the same voice. Trouble now is, the people who should act on their knowledge cannot 'hear' them.

And in that I find comfort in the idea that I can be both 'bookish' and 'story-teller'. I can be both 'academic' and 'marketer', I can be both 'teacher' and 'actor'. I can have both 'a disciplined mind' and 'comedic timing'.