None of the Above - Why Standardized Testing Fails: Bob Sternberg at TEDxOStateU

good afternoon, I feel especially honored to be here today because when I was little my teachers thought I was a big fool because I have had a weight problem my whole life and a fool because I did poorly on IQ tests when I grew up in New Jersey in the mid 1950's, the tradition was to give group IQ tests to students almost every year or two and the psychologist who came to our classroom to do the test scared the hell out of me, she looked really scary . Yeah, you know, I really freaked out, so I got really anxious about the exams, at least that's why I'd like to think I performed poorly.

I performed poorly on the exam, as a result, my teachers thought I was stupid and since they thought I was stupid, I thought. It was stupid and because I thought it was stupid I did a stupid job and they were happy. I did a stupid job because I was meeting their expectations and I was happy that they were happy and everyone was very happy, so it was a nice, happy environment. Except I was kind of a loser and it wasn't until I was in fourth grade that I had a teacher, Mrs. Alexa that she thought there was more to a student than a test score and she expected more from me and I gave her more.

I really like the lady. Alexa, she was married anyway, so I became a good student and beat that self-fulfilling prophecy, but many students don't have a teacher like Mrs. Alexa and become a victim of that self-fulfilling prophecy now that it was the school exams. elementary school, but the same principle applies to college entrance exams. College admission tests use different acronyms SAT AC T, then you will know what the GRE is, but they all measure the same thing. basically all IQ tests and that's been shown statistically, so the question is what's the story for us. Why do we use them well?

When they were first introduced in the early 1900s, they actually made some sense because most of the students who took the test were fairly homogeneous, they were largely male, they were white, they were upper middle or upper middle class, and they attended good schools, etc., but as the century progressed, three things changed. The first thing that changed is that the populations of students taking the tests became much broader. There weren't as many men there weren't as many whites there were people from diverse cultures diverse linguistic backgrounds diverse learning styles it was just a different world, as you know the second thing that changed is that we learn something surprising and that is the Tests were introduced to create a meritocracy instead of just using your parents' last name or how rich they were or what their social class was to do college admissions, but it turned out that test scores were highly correlated with socioeconomic status, so it seemed like a the replacement of socioeconomic status turned out to be largely more of the same and the third thing we learned is that the skills you need to survive today are much broader than the skills you needed to survive in the early 1900s.

It's a different world. It's a world. It is changing very quickly and in today's world you not only need the memory and analytical skills that are so important in those tests, you also need to be creative, you need to be able to adapt to a rapidly changing environment in a creative and flexible way because if you don't you do, your business closes or you can't keep up with the economy or you can't keep up with your intimate relationship or whatever you need analytical skills to be able to ask if your creative ideas are For any good, you need practical skills to be able to execute your ideas and persuade others of their value because, as we all know, some people are very good analytically or they are creative, but they can't really make anything they don't have work a lot of common sense and it takes wisdom and ethics-based skills to ensure that it is for the greater good, well, if today you need this broader range of skills to adapt flexibly to the environment, why do we still use these tests that are 100? years, well one reason is just inertia, you know, we've been using them for a hundred years, people get used to them, they don't want to change, but imagine if we still used the medical tests from 100 years ago, how many people would that be? dead and as a result of these tests many people end up intellectually dead because they are deprived of opportunities, so one is inertia, a second reason is what I call pseudoquantification, people are very interested in these exact sounding numbers, you know , five seventy. or twenty-six or whatever, and what they sometimes forget is that just because you have a number that sounds accurate doesn't mean it predicts much.

The third reason is what I call the similarity reason and it is the people who make the decisions in many cases. The cases are people themselves and they did well on the exam because otherwise they would not have gotten into university and when they got the job, the fundamental principle of interpersonal attraction is that we are attracted to people like us, so they look for people just like them. like when it was run by very rich people they look for people like them the fourth reason is who pays for it oh well the students do it that is good for the universities yes yes a fifth reason is what I call the reason for publication and that is one magazine that was about to close needed an idea to survive and some marketing people had the good idea of ​​ranking universities and then hospitals and other things so it became a kind of trap and now many universities because of these publications sort of rely on grades and get stuck in a grading system that doesn't really tell you much about anything and the last, sixth reason is basically superstition, people start attributing magical properties to these tests nowadays they just We don't have them, you know, We all have our superstitions.

I wear a gold chain around my neck. I bought it when I was a teenager. My parents told me it would bring me good luck. I don't know if it will bring me good luck, but I still use it. I'm not going to take the risk of taking it off because I think I've been very lucky or maybe you get on an elevator and the buttons already release and you keep pressing it even though you know the elevator will come once and sew it. and the reason you do it is because your role is rewarded for doing it, the elevator always comes so you can, it's partly superstition and it's also a superstition that we can't do it better, so the question is: can we do it better? the answer is yes, when I was a professor at Yale, my colleagues and I created a project called the rainbow project and what we did was devise tests of analytical skills and creative practices and the question was do we do a national project across the country with students from universities ranging from community colleges to mid-level universities, highly prestigious universities, we can do better than

standardized

tests and what we found is that we could double the prediction of first-year GPA over conventional

standardized

tests like the SAT in En AC t-- ii we found that we could reduce the differences between ethnic groups by about half, by a third we found that it was in fact possible to separate creative and practical performance from the types of memory and analytical performance that were tested in a test, so they were excellent. results and I was very happy and they were published as a lead article in the biggest journal in the field and we were funded by a

testing

company and they saw great results and they cut our funding so that's what we call in New Jersey a It's a shame and at that moment I asked you if I wanted to spend 20 more years writing articles that even stopped tweeting, so I decided I have to become administration to be able to do anything, so I went to Tufts I became Dean of Arts and Sciences and we started a project called kaleidoscope and the kaleidoscope was not like the rainbow, the rainbow was a research project, the kaleidoscope was actually used for all undergraduate admissions at Tufts for the years I was there, the five years they were there and they still are. that is being used and what we found by measuring creative analytical practice and our data for theory now based on wisdom and ethical skills is that we could improve the prediction of academic performance improve the prediction of extracurricular and leadership performance essentially eliminate the ethnic group differences in having students apply and their Parents are much happier because we look at the whole person, not just the person as a test result, so I did that for five years, but you know Tufts It's kind of an elite school and it's kind of limited, and then I had this great opportunity. to come to the state of Oklahoma as a chancellor in collaboration with Kyle Ray and others, we started the landscape of July 1, 2012, which is a program that is used at the state of Oklahoma to admit students not only for their CTS or SAT, not not only for your grades but also for your creative ones.

Analytical, practical and wisdom-based skills. Now here's another thing: if you're going to start admitting children with creative abilities, you need to make sure that you're also teaching them and assessing the way they learn, because it would be a disaster if you start admitting creative kids and then only teach them one way. let it be like for memory, so when I took introductory psychology I got a C and my teacher told me, you know there is a famous turmeric in psychology, it is obvious that there will not be another. one, so as a result I switched to mass.

I got worse results in mathematics than in psychology. I returned to psychology with my C in 35 years later. I was president of the American Psychological Association. I told the guy who was president there before, what was he like? I became president when I got a C in introductory psychology. He said he had a C, so what I learned is that we need to teach not only memory and analytical skills like the ACT measures, but also creative analytical practice. and wisdom-based skills that you'll actually need when you're on the job, which is why at Oklahoma State we have the Student Success and Learning Opportunity Center to help students learn in the way that's right for them.

We have the Institute for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. which helps teachers teach the way students learn what do we conclude first that the types of tests we use for college admissions do something but are outdated just like medical tests would be that we can do better than these and that That's what I should do, thank you very much for listening to you.