Assessing Intelligence with Standardized Testing Has a Limited Purpose, with Howard Gardner

Assessing Intelligence with Standardized Testing Has a Limited Purpose,

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You can apply this to almost every field and human pursuit and it’s still true: too much of one thing rarely yields a positive outcome. Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of The Imagination Institute, thinks the US has fallen into this trap with standardized testing, which lacks insight into the breadth of intelligence.

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SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN:

Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., is scientific director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he investigates the measurement and development of intelligence, imagination, and creativity. He has written or edited six previous books, including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. He is also co-founder of The Creativity Post, host of The Psychology Podcast, and he writes the blog Beautiful Minds for Scientific American. Kaufman lives in Philadelphia and completed his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Yale University in 2009 and received his masters degree in experimental psychology from Cambridge University in 2005, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Scott Barry Kaufman:  The idea of what we should be testing is a very hotly debated because there’s a certain objectivity that we think we have once we standardize things. We give the same test to everyone. And there is some truth to that that the more you standardize a test the more you kind of give everyone the same opportunity to perform on that test. So there is some argument to be made towards standardization. But we don’t have standardized minds. I mean no one has a standardized mind. There’s no such thing as an average mind. So every one of us, every unique individual is a dynamic system of not just cognitive processes but motivational processes, dreams, desires. I formulated a theory and I called it the theory of personal intelligence because I argued I wanted to shift our focus of analysis from taking one aspect that we are saying this is the measure of intelligence whether it’s a standardized test or whether it’s an IQ test. We say well we’ve decided as a society that’s our measure of intelligence. And then we compare everyone to each other on that one metric.

I wanted to move it to a personal level and recognize that well within a person every single one of us has a combination of traits and we can compensate for lower levels of one trait with higher levels of another trait. For instance we can compensate with lower levels of IQ with grit or with perseverance. So we’re capable of mixing and matching our own unique profile of characteristics in such really fascinating exciting ways that make us who we are. That’s what makes us a whole person. So when it comes to testing I’m not necessarily against testing and not necessarily against using standardized tests as a way of measuring learning outcomes. But as a way of measuring human potential I’m not down with that.

A really great report came out recently called Talent on the Sidelines which found very clearly that our ethnic minority students, ethnic and racial minority students are not being identified in gifted and talented programs period. And we need to call this out. We need to make this – there are some wonderful researchers here trying to correct this. Like Julia Lawson Davis for instance trying to figure out what is going on there, what we can do. You know when you have very poverty stricken environments for instance it’s not as easy to get the opportunity to display your brilliance. It’s not as easy to learn when people all around you are dying. When you are not being fed, you know. It’s very hard to show your intellectual brilliance. It is a fact that there’s a huge underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minority students in gifted talented education. And I do not believe that ethnic and racial minority students are less gifted. I mean who wants to make that argument. It is not the reality of the matter. And what you find there are some really neat programs.

For instance this one program called Project Bright where they taught gifted behaviors to every student. So they assumed well everyone in this school system was going to learn something from behaviors that gifted students tend to have. They kind of tried to distill how do gifted students think, you know, and can we teach this. And they taught every student in the school and they thought after teaching it like 25 percent or so mor...

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