A measure of intelligenc.., p.19
A Measure of Intelligence, page 19
Our school district in rural Ohio couldn’t be more different than the New York City Public Schools, the largest and possibly most segregated school system in the country. The tension I feel in our school district is less racial and more socioeconomic. The university where I teach is surrounded by rural farms and trailer parks. The children of relatively affluent families learn alongside children from poorer rural communities. Children of liberal academics learn with kids whose parents wear MAGA hats. It is not without its challenges. But unlike New York City schools that have put children as young as four on a separate educational track, students in the gifted program at Louisa’s school meet one hour a day during an intervention period. Other kids might go to a group for non-native English speakers during this time. Some might get extra help in reading. Louisa works with her intervention specialist. No student is put under scrutiny for leaving the room, and hopefully, all students are getting their individual needs met.
I don’t think that gifted programs are somehow limiting the funds and resources for Louisa’s education. At her school, it doesn’t seem like the gifted program and the intervention for students with disabilities have much to do with each other. But maybe that is the problem. The segregation of school programs in terms of intelligence or academic ability reinforces the idea that these types of students shouldn’t be part of the same cultural and educational circles. Gifted programs show that an educational system so enamored with the information gleaned from IQ tests leads to segregation. It models specific hierarchies of classism, racism, and ableism to students. It perpetuates a flawed and damaging logic that some opportunities are only available to some kinds of students. We eventually believe that this is inherently true and understand our place in society and the opportunities available to us as inevitable, determined by a test score and its measurement of presumed natural aptitude. The separation for an hour a day at Louisa’s school is different than the full segregation in the New York City School District. But we all could use a new approach that prioritizes collaboration and learning together rather than the improvement of test scores.
***
Louisa, Andy, and I were playing a board game one night. Between rounds, while we were shuffling cards and setting up game pieces, Andy and I talked about how neither of us was gifted and how this now seemed meaningless to us. We talked about the value we see other parents placing on this identity, and how people often talk about gifted programs with us, as if they were something that we would personally see a need for too. “Guys! No one in this house is gifted!” Louisa suddenly intervened. The interruption was necessary. We had lost focus and abandoned the game for adult conversation. I hadn’t considered whether she knew what being gifted meant, or if she was aware of which friends were gifted, or if she knew that our world defined gifted as the opposite of what it meant to have an intellectual disability. Clearly, the labels and what they meant were seeping into her consciousness in ways I wasn’t fully in control of. But to Louisa, it hardly mattered. She just wanted to play the game.
Does being gifted matter? Yes and no. It matters if you are a person of color whose children never seem to get the educational opportunities they deserve. If you are a white middle-class parent like me, it simply becomes a sign of status. In the end, the separation between those who are gifted and those who are not is largely superficial. It is a difference that was created by the belief that some people deserve more opportunities than others, and the degree to which they deserve more can be measured by an IQ test. But kids are kids, humans are humans. Opportunities to learn from each other are what should matter the most.
High Stakes
I have just returned to my office after teaching a class of 150 students. My stomach is growling because I haven’t eaten lunch, but the line of students that starts at my office door is already extending down the hall. They are all silent, leaning against the wall and scrolling on their phones. They took their first midterm last week. I posted the results to the online gradebook right before class, which makes me wonder how all these students have had time to process the results on their own. Maybe this is what they were doing during class. In the next hour, I will talk to at least twenty students about their exams. They will ask me what the average grade was, why b isn’t the correct answer on question 12, and how they can study better next time. In the midst of all of these questions, I wish we could talk about what they are learning in this class and whether it impacts the way they think and understand the world around them. But that is not what they want to talk about, or at least it doesn’t occur to them to do so.
“What do I need to do to get a C in this class?” one student asks me.
“Well, from a quick look at your exam, it seems like you missed the questions about the primary texts that we studied, like the one about Michelangelo’s sonnets. These texts help us put art in a historical context, so make sure you write down the main points of our discussion about them. Maybe we should talk about this. Where does Michelangelo think creativity comes from?”
“No, I mean what do I need to get on the next exam to get a C in the class.”
“Oh,” I say, slightly rattled because I don’t know the answer, and I wonder if I’m supposed to. “I’m not going to do the math for you, but if you have any questions about studying or the content of the course, I’m happy to help,” I reply with a smile. From the quiet rustling sounds in the hall, I try to gauge how many more students are waiting. I have had roughly the same conversation about ten times so far this afternoon. I feel like students value my help in gaming out their grade more than what I can teach them about the history of art.
What my students expect to get out of college and what it is possible for me to deliver are legacies of the IQ test. While I would never say that I give an IQ test to 150 students each semester, the format of the tests I use and the way that it shapes a particularly modern way of learning originates, I have discovered, in the work of psychologist Robert Yerkes. As the United States prepared to enter World War I in 1917, psychologists transformed Binet’s intelligence test into a way of identifying which recruits should be officers and which should be soldiers. At first, they proposed to test only recruits suspected of mental incompetence and feeble-mindedness. But Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, developed a more ambitious plan. “We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives,” Yerkes wrote in 1917, “but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed in the military service.” The sheer numbers of recruits made administering the individualized testing procedures of Binet’s intelligence test impossible. So, under Yerkes’s leadership, the members of the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits, which included Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, began meeting at the Vineland Training School during the afternoon of May 28, 1917, to find an alternative. They needed to devise a way to transform test answers from idiosyncratic written responses to correct choices among fixed alternatives that could easily be graded and scored by a team of clerical workers.
The stress of needing to grade quickly and efficiently is not foreign to me. When I see my students lined up at my office door, it is easy to imagine how Yerkes and his team felt when they faced the daunting task of testing almost 2 million Army recruits. As much as I would like to, I cannot have a one-on-one conversation with all of my students to assess what they have learned in my course. So three times a semester my introduction to art history students answer sixty-five multiple choice questions on a bubble sheet to test if they know that Diego Velàzquez painted Las Meninas and the Dada art movement was primarily a response to World War I. It is a struggle to draft questions that get beyond testing factual information and evaluate what meaning they find in the history of art. How do Jacques Louis-David’s paintings address the volatile politics of the French Revolution? How do Nam June Paik’s jury-rigged televisions respond to the spread of media technology in the late twentieth century? I want my students to think about questions like these, and they are not easily answered in multiple choice format. But unless I want to do nothing else except grade essay exams all semester, multiple choice is the best option available. It has the added advantage that it is a format my students are familiar with. For better or worse, multiple choice has become synonymous with American education.
So pervasive is the concept of multiple choice today—including its more recent conversion into drop-down menus on online interfaces—it is hard to believe that there was once a time when no one had yet thought of such a format. In a report published in 1918, Arthur Otis, one of Yerkes’s assistants, described an intelligence test that allowed for answers to be given without writing any words. “The chief object of testing in groups, of course, is economy of time,” he wrote. Otis described how his format generated only one correct answer to each question, which could be indicated “merely by making a letter or figure or drawing a line.” He studied several earlier experiments in ways to efficiently evaluate reading. For example, the Kansas State Normal School developed a Silent Reading Test in 1915 that presented questions about the comprehension of individual words. “Below are given the names of four animals,” one question on the exam asks. “Draw a line around the name of each animal that is useful on the farm: cow; tiger; rat; wolf.” The instruction manual reveals that the test was meant to evaluate how well children followed instructions as much as their knowledge about barnyard animals. If a line is drawn under cow instead of around it, the answer is wrong. The test required no written answers, only marks, which could be easily and quickly graded.
Otis’s group test questions assessed various skills that he believed were good measures of intelligence, including labeling pairs of words as synonyms (S) or antonyms (A), matching particular proverbs (make hay while the sun shines) to the statement that explains its meaning, and a relations test that resembles the analogies students see today on college entrance exams (hand: arm: foot: . . .). Yerkes eventually based his Alpha Army Test on these types of questions, as well as arithmetic problems, true-false questions, and lists of words that had to be resequenced to make sentences. One of the subtests claimed to be a test of common sense, although some of the questions seem to assess whether a recruit is brave enough to fight in a war:
It is better to fight than to run, because
a) Cowards are shot
b) It is more honorable
c) If you run you may get shot in the back.
The Beta Army Test, given to recruits who could not read, included picture-completion tasks, tracing the correct path through a maze, and drawing in the missing element in a picture of a common object, like a violin missing its strings. Yerkes and many other psychologists believed that measuring intelligence was different than measuring education. But still, those who took the Beta exam rarely got high marks. One grader noted that, “It was touching to see the intense effort . . . put into answering the questions, often by men who never before had held a pencil in their hands.”
At the moment of mass production of the automobile and military equipment, multiple choice brought the evaluation of human intelligence under the logic of the assembly line. Clerical workers used answer keys to grade hundreds of exams within minutes. In May 1918, the monthly testing rate of recruits jumped from 12,000 to 200,000. By the end of the war in November 1918, over 1.7 million men had taken one of Yerkes’s tests. The Army was not always willing to comply with the directives of the testing results, and the results did not consistently determine placement as officers or soldiers. Nonetheless, the efforts of Yerkes and his team changed perceptions of IQ tests. No longer were they only given to the feeble-minded to determine genetic deficiency. Now they were legitimate evidence for the aptitude and potential of everyone. The results of Yerkes’s Army Exams were widely publicized, setting off debates about the country’s national intelligence. But more resonant than the details or accuracy of the results was the fact that Americans had just experienced their first form of high-stakes standardized testing.
At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Training School’s research laboratory in 1931, Goddard claimed that “the knowledge derived from the testing of the 1,700,000 men in the Army is probably the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever acquired about itself.” In 2012, a group of prominent psychologists published an article that summarized what is known about intelligence. When I read it, I got the sense that psychologists’ pride and enthusiasm for IQ tests has hardly waned since the days of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes. “The measurement of intelligence is one of psychology’s greatest achievements and one of its most controversial,” the article states. Psychologists still see IQ tests as a triumph, but they are not as adamant about the distinction between intelligence and education. They point out the strong correlation between IQ scores and performance on other standardized tests, such as the SAT. They assert that “the measurement of intelligence—which has been done primarily by IQ tests—has utilitarian value because it is a reasonably good predictor of grades at school, performance at work, and many other aspects of success in life.” But this correlation is no coincidence. The IQ test is a reasonably good predictor of success because modern life, including our education system, has been shaped to value qualities measured on an IQ test.
The Yerkes Alpha Army Test constituted a fork in the road for intelligence assessment. The one-on-one tests—like the one I took with Harris or Louisa took with Leila—persist in clinical contexts. But every student who has passed through public education in the last seventy years has been touched by the logic and ambitions of IQ testing. Standardized tests—the SAT, the ACT, the PSAT/NMSQT, the CogAT, the NWEA MAP test, the DAS, the NAEP, the ITBS, PISA, and many others—do the work of IQ tests. Even though psychologists might not consider them valid cognitive assessments and they are not used for clinical diagnosis, they subtly shape future success and prosperity, place a person within a social hierarchy, and translate human experience into statistics.
After World War I, Terman and Yerkes worked with a committee organized by the National Research Council to develop the National Intelligence Tests for grades three to eight. Terman also developed a similar test for high school students, the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability. Debates about multiple choice testing in the early twentieth century grappled with the same concerns that preoccupy me and other educators today. Critics pointed out that the tests emphasized the memorization of facts and encouraged guessing. Others feared that multiple choice changed the expectations for learning by asking test-takers to respond to information but not to produce it themselves. Nonetheless, these concerns did little to stop the spread of standardized testing, which was increasingly supported by experts.
By the 1920s, some universities allowed prospective students to submit IQ test results as part of their admissions applications. After working with Yerkes during World War I, Carl Brigham took up the position of secretary of the College Entrance Exam Board, where he designed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, which was first given to those students seeking entrance into colleges and universities in 1926. Five of its nine subtests were taken from Yerkes’s Alpha Army exam.
Soon a fully-fledged testing industry developed around the SAT. Publishers provided test-takers with booklets of multiple choice questions to prepare to strategically make their best guess on the test. After the war, Otis became an editor at the World Book Company, one of the first publishers to recognize the market potential of test prep material. By supervising the publication of study guides to intelligence and achievement tests, Otis not only helped develop the multiple choice exam. He made a living teaching the public how to do well on them. Parents and students alike understood that these tests were more than assessments of a person’s natural mental capacity. They were opportunities to get ahead, and those with the most money and privilege paid Otis and others to help them add high test scores to their list of social advantages.
“Teachers must learn to use tests,” said Terman in 1919. If they don’t, “the universal grading of children according to mental ability must remain a Utopian dream.” Within thirty months of the publication of the first group intelligence test, some 4 million children had been tested. In 1957, Wechsler predicted that by 1960, at least one of every two persons in the United States between the ages of five and fifty will have taken an intelligence test. In this estimate, Wechsler included the several hundred thousand children given IQ tests as part of the adoption process and for admission to private schools. He also included high school students taking college admissions tests like the SAT that he claimed “differ only in part from standard group intelligence tests.”
It is fair to say we have learned to use tests. A 1966 study showed that over 90 percent of the nation’s pupils had been given at least one intelligence or achievement test during their time in public school. In 1962, most took three to five standardized tests per year, which sounds negligent compared to statistics for students in 2014, when one study found that some eleventh graders spend up to 15 percent of the school year taking national and state standardized assessments, not counting Advanced Placement (AP) or college entrance exams.
State and national standardized assessments are particular kinds of tests referred to as high stakes. It is not necessarily the content that makes a test so high stakes, but the decisions that are determined by it. High stakes were born from the strong belief in the prophetic nature of IQ tests and the pressure of that prediction. High stakes are embedded in the purpose of standardized intelligence testing, to determine people’s futures in a way that is beyond their immediate will or control. These tests make all of us feel judged, as if we have no power over our future and no ability to change it.
Most high-stakes standardized tests are administered in multiple choice format, which does not tolerate idiosyncrasy or individuality. It also carries the message that the goal of learning is to get the right answer, rather than grapple with ambiguity, become more comfortable with various perspectives on a problem, or make decisions based on complex conditions. It is no wonder it can be so difficult to tease out my students’ own ideas about a painting that we study or a text that we read. They have spent their lives seeing the assessment of what they’ve learned expressed as a test score and worrying whether what they have to say will be the correct answer. My students and I share an understanding that these tests matter. But I have grown to see high-stakes tests as a barrier that prevents my students from telling me what matters to them or how they have found any purpose or meaning in what they have learned.
