Interesante artículo aparecido en el sitio de educational psychology resources, muy a tono con las discusiones que sobre testing se tienen en Chile.
No Child Left Behind and the Debate in Educational Psychology
The No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001 with much bipartisan fanfare. This widespread, federally mandated education reform was designed to hold schools accountable for improvement, assure that students meet basic learning requirements, and improve teacher qualifications. In 2011, after it became evident that a large percentage of schools in some states were failing to meet the mandate, changes were made that gave certain school districts more flexibility in implementing the policy.
One of the most important and highly controversial provisions of the original No Child Left Behind Act was the use of annual standardized tests to measure school performance. The debate over the effectiveness of these tests as a fair gauge of school achievement is fierce, with proponents arguing that standardized tests are the fairest way to compare schools across the board, and opponents claiming that the tests don’t tell the whole story of how a school is performing and improving. Teachers, in particular, are often critical of standardized tests for a variety of reasons: they only measure one aspect of a student’s performance; they force the teaching of specific test-related skills, leaving little classroom time for other tasks; and they might be biased against minorities and the poor, putting already low-achieving schools at a disadvantage.
Because of their interest in determining how children learn best and how educators can best serve students, educational psychologists have also been a part of the discussion around No Child Left Behind and specifically the standardized test issue. From an educational psychology perspective, standardized tests — which are based on more traditional forms of IQ assessment — paint an incomplete picture of human intelligence and have little correlation with future performance in school and in life.
Multiple Intelligence Theories
Howard Gardner’s multiple Intelligence theory has been extremely influential in the context of education in the last thirty years, with wide acceptance among education professionals. Gardner’s theory proposes that human intelligence can be divided into eight categories: logical/mathematical, verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, bodily/kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, visual/spatial, and naturalist. Everyone possesses a mixture of all the intelligences, with strengths in certain areas and weaknesses in others while problem solving requires the use of two or more intelligences working in tandem. Not surprisingly, those with a propensity for logical/mathematical or verbal/linguistic skills are more likely to score highly on multiple choice standardized tests. They are also more likely to do well with a traditional curriculum that relies on rote memorization, sitting still, and following directions. (In contrast, those with bodily/kinesthetic intelligence are more likely to do well in sports, and those with visual/spatial intelligence are more likely to succeed in the applied arts). Teachers have found that Gardner’s theory resonates with their own experiences in the classroom, with several schools across the country implementing multiple intelligence principals as part of their ongoing curricula. And yet, standardized tests continue to place emphasis on a narrow set of skills using a narrow set of measurements. Adherents to Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory argue that No Child Left Behind fails to encourage those students who might be gifted in the arts, for instance, by placing emphasis only on reading and math.
Standardized Testing and the Full Picture
Even psychologists who subscribe to more traditional views of human intelligence agree that current tests rarely tell the whole story. In Beyond IQ: A Model of Academic Competence and Motivation, educational psychologist and psychometrician Kevin McGrew who helped develop the WJ III IQ test asserts that a student’s scholastic performance is linked to a variety of factors, only one of which is cognitive ability or IQ. Stating that cognitive ability only accounts for 40-50% of school achievement, he believes that factors such as motivation, attitude, social skills, learning styles, and behavior are other important determinants of student success. He therefore argues that the job of schools should be to have more influence on those non-cognitive (or conative) factors in children—those things that are “beyond IQ,” and subject to intervention by educators.
This leads to another criticism of standardized testing—namely, that test scores do not accurately predict a student’s future success. Research has found, for example, that high school GPA and class rank are better predictors of success in college than SAT scores, even accounting for such factors as race and socioeconomic status (which have been proven to influence test scores due to inherent biases contained in the tests). This, as McGrew and others have found, is because characteristics such as drive, determination, and confidence lead to high student achievement and continue to influence performance in college and beyond. Another study posits that self-control, which correlates to high report card grades, is as important as intelligence in the success of students. Self-control is related to study habits and behavior, which is a better measure of overall classroom performance and a more accurate reflection of what is actually taught.
What Next
Proponents of No Child Left Behind argue that standardized tests offer the most objective comparison of schools, irrespective of such factors as size, socioeconomic status, or geographic location. Research in educational psychology has shown, however, that qualities measured by standardized tests—the primary tool of assessment in the federal program—might not be the fairest way to define student achievement. It’s unclear how recent findings will affect public policy decisions in the future, but as the issue continues to spark discussion among educators, politicians, and parents, it’s likely the debate isn’t going away anytime soon.