So where did standardized testing come from anyway? That’s not just a rhetorical question. There is a “father” of the multiple-choice test, someone who actually sat down and wrote the first one. His name was Frederick J. Kelly, and he devised it in 1914. It’s pretty shocking that if someone gave it to you today, the first multiple-choice test would seem quite familiar, at least in form. It has changed so little in the last eight or nine decades that you might not even notice the test was an antique until you realized that, in content, it addressed virtually nothing about the world since the invention of the radio.
…
Thus was born the timed reading test. The modern world of 1914 needed people who could come up with the exact right answer in the exact right amount of time, in a test that could be graded quickly and accurately by anyone. The Kansas Silent Reading Test was as close to the Model T form of automobile production as an educator could get in this world. It was the perfect test for the machine age, the Fordist ideal of “any color you want so long as it’s black.
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
A school board member takes versions of his state’s standardized tests in math and reading, and realizes something is really wrong with these high-stakes exams.
— Washington Post
Source: Washington Post
Whether you are sitting for an important test or sinking a winning golf putt, your brain can get in the way when you need to perform at your very best. Ginger Campbell, MD, of the Brain Science Podcast interviews psychology researcher Sian Beilock about her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
This excellent interview regarding research conducted at Beilock’s Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago provides some great insights into how the brains of high performers can interfere with delivering an expert performance when it matters most. Beilock doesn’t stop at explaining the many different reasons why someone might choke on a test, a job interview, a speech, or an athletic game. She offers many practical suggestions for how to overcome the memory overload that can impede top performance.
This is really valuable information for students and their teachers. Beilock says high performers are more likely to choke on a test than students with lesser skills. This seems counter-intuitive until she explains that these higher performers generally have greater working memory to help them perform highly complex cognitive tasks, but this working memory can become flooded by anxiety and worry, significantly limiting the amount of working memory available for the task, resulting in a less than optimal performance.
Beilock describes research that shows that 10 minutes of free writing about these feelings and anxieties can relieve the worries enough to free up that valuable working memory for the cognitive tasks and performance can return to normal.
The interview is filled with interesting research findings and concrete suggestions about mitigating performance problems. Brain Science Podcast host Ginger Cambell does a nice job leading Beilock through many different aspects of her research in a presentation that is easy to follow and full of practical advice. Be sure to take a look at previous episodes of the Brain Science Podcast for some fascinating interviews with many of the world’s leading neuroscience researchers.
Source: brainsciencepodcast.com
Students in a classroom during scholarship examinations, 16 April 1940.
- Public domain image from State Library of Queensland, Australia, available at Wikipedia.
Seventy years and not much changes.
Your grandparents were subjected to standardized testing too. I especially love the test proctor lurking ominously in the back corner.
“We considered that our society is replete with tests to measure ‘objectively’ a host of skills and abilities. In addition to tests of abilities, such as the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, and GRE tests, we have several intelligence tests. These tests have all been standardized and made as objective as the test makers could think to do. In fact, because of the widespread belief in their objectivity, those who perform poorly on these tests are more limited in their options for further education, may spend a lifetime in self-recrimination, and often avoid entering careers or taking up activities for which they believe they have no ability because of their performance on the tests.
“The problem begins when some who are excluded from the group entitled to these resources take their exclusion to have psychological significance rather than to be the result of convenience for a group of decision makers. Even if more resources become available, we tend to stick to the original criteria as if they had some sense separate from that which decision makers invested them to justify the decision.
“For example, because there are limited places in college classrooms, we need to find a way to exclude some potential students. We create a test, say the SAT, and overlook meaningful alternative criteria for selection. We take things a step further and overlook the alternative criteria for the kinds of questions that could be on the test. We then use scores to exclude. We can justify the use of the scores by studies showing that they predict college performance and ignore the possibility that other tests inquiring into other abilities might do just as well. If Harvard randomly selected students from those who applied, educated them, and granted them a Harvard degree, they might well be as successful as those who get in via their SAT scores. But if we allowed everyone to go to Harvard who wanted to, many would not want to go because the glamour of being “selected” would be gone.
“In this way the relationship between evaluation and the perception of limited resources is reciprocal and interactive, each causing the other. The consequence of these evaluations for all but perhaps the top five percent of applicants is a lifetime of feeling inadequate. People at ages fifty and sixty still degrade themselves based on how they performed on a test they took in their teens. Those who did not score higher on tests like these should look at them once again as adults and consider the questions they could not answer. Do we really care if we don’t know which picture represents the results of unfolding a piece of paper? Would we respect someone simply because she knows the answer to this or some other arbitrary question? As adults, shouldn’t we realize that a group of people decided to ask this question but they could have asked a different one to which we might have known the answer. If we had these people in front of us so that we could judge them the way they had indirectly judged us, what would we find? Couldn’t we think of questions that they would not be able to answer? As long as we’re oblivious to context, we don’t think of things like this.”
Langer, E. (2005). On becoming an artist: reinventing yourself through mindful creativity. New York: Random House., p. 115-116
Click through photo to read on Google Books.
