Gerri K. Songer is a literacy specialist and Chair of Illinois Township High School District 214. Here she reminds us of the limitations and misuses of standardized testing.
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Songer writes:
What good is a dot that is not connected?
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) proponents assert that consistent, rigorous education standards are key to a competitive business climate. Yet, advocates of CCSS and standardized assessments such as Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and ACT fail to acknowledge that the standards currently imposed on public education are faulty, inappropriate, and inaccessible to most students. They are in no way a means to this idealistic end.
There is no argument curriculum should be consistent and rigorous, yet standards must meet the needs of the population they serve and not pigeonhole students into a category in which they do not belong. Both PARCC and ACT assume all students will pursue a career requiring post-secondary education offered through a four-year college or university. This just simply is not the case. There are multiple intelligences, and students are unique in terms of their goals and aspirations; they do not define success in the same manner and cannot be crammed through the same academic filter. Not to mention, high school students are still in the process of developing cognitively. These are some of the more obvious flaws, yet there is another much more subtle shortcoming.
ACT and PARCC are standardized assessments that are inaccessible to most students, using text that is too complex and requiring a level of cognition that is completely inappropriate. They are designed as a filter and used to skim the “cream” off the top of the bell-shaped curve. Students who fall into the category of “cream” are admitted into the best colleges and are eligible for scholarships based on their “academic merits”.
What advocates of standardized testing fail to understand is that both ACT and PARCC promote students who demonstrate the wrong type of intellectual functioning by filtering for those who are highly developed in mental processing requiring specific parts of the brain, such as rote memory and language for example. Students who display this type of acute cognitive processing function at a lower level of intellect than those who process information conceptually.
Take, for example, a child who was born with sight but later in life became blind – Ray Charles. When a specific part of the brain became inactive, his sight, the neurotransmitters that brought information to and from this part of the brain diverted to support other parts of his brain. Ray Charles lost his sight, but his senses of hearing, touch, and smell became more acute. This is because these senses were enhanced by the neurotransmitters that once supported his sight.
People who have specific areas of their brain that are highly developed, such as the area of the temporal lobe that processes language auditorily, are lacking support from neurotransmitters in other areas of the brain such as the occipital or frontal lobes, which manipulate information visually or implement problem solving and reason. Therefore, these learners remember much, but they are cognitively weak in areas that would support a heightened conceptual ability, and consequently apply this knowledge to very little.
The same memory can be stored in a variety of different areas of the brain, depending upon how that memory is processed. For example, the same memory can be stored in the occipital lobe, temporal lobe, and parietal lobe if it was seen, heard, and manipulated. Yet, research shows that when two tasks are done simultaneously that require different parts of the brain, the amount of brain activation in both brain regions is reduced, “It appears that the brain has limits and can only do so much at one time,” argues Marcel Just, a psychology professor and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “You can’t just keep piping new things through,” he said, and expect the brain to keep up.” Earlier studies show that “. . . when a single area of the brain, like the visual cortex, has to do two things at once, like tracking two objects, there is less brain activation than occurs when it watches one thing at a time,” Just said. This research shows that those who demonstrate heightened ability to perseverate on tasks requiring support from a specific region of the brain will lack the support of other regions of the brain.
A brain that actually is highly cognitively developed is one that processes information conceptually. In this case, neurotransmitters provide balanced support to multiple areas of the brain, not specific areas. This learner may not process information as quickly, and it may take repetition to commit information to memory, but when this learner processes information, he makes connections – his learning is deep learning. A person with such brain functioning can see the whole, and can understand how the parts effect the whole, rather than perseverate on specific details. Those in roles of leadership should be “big picture”, holistic thinkers – the lines. Those in subordinate positions should be “the detail people” – the dots, as is evident in Duncan’s pitiful functioning as Secretary of Education.
Albert Einstein didn’t just regurgitate the academic processes of mathematics and science, rather he understood how a formula produced a parabola; which is a slice of a cone; which is a geometric figure influenced by the physical properties of space and time; and these physical properties not only affected the cone, but also those of similar geometric construction throughout the universe, and etc. Einstein made connections – his mental processes consisted of lines, not dots. In addition, he didn’t just ‘come up with the right answer’, he perfected his formulas over time and persevered despite error after error, setback after setback.
The “cream” that proponents of CCSS and standardized testing should attempt to identify are those found beneath the top ten percent of that bell-shaped curve. They should look for learners who do not perseverate, but those able to contemplate and connect the dots. Dots who are not connected will ineffectually produce imbalance, disharmony, and dysfunction. This would not promote a competitive business climate – just an educated guess, from a line.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I remember a superintendent saying “never try to deal rationally with irrational people.”
The arguments for today’s ed reforms, the testing, CCSS, evaluation, all that, are not built on rational arguments about good education.
In fact, I’m not sure they are built on any arguments.
They are built on money, and the promise of more money.
For sure, they are about money, but that argument only works for us, the choir. It won’t take them down.
“What advocates of standardized testing fail to understand is that both ACT and PARCC promote students who demonstrate the wrong type of intellectual functioning by filtering for those who are highly developed in mental processing requiring specific parts of the brain, such as rote memory and language for example. Students who display this type of acute cognitive processing function at a lower level of intellect than those who process information conceptually.”
Gee, thanks for the insult, Songer. Some of us scored VERY well on those tests when we were in school, thanks. And for the record, my rote memory sucks.
You didn’t give your age — I’m 55, so I took the ACT a long time ago. I think it has changed — the expected math education for kids certainly has. Today, and certainly under Common Core, EVERY SINGLE KID will have to learn a lot of trigonometry and memorize a huge amount of stuff — long lists of “polynomial identities” and their proofs and loads more. So, if your “rote memory sucks”, as you claim, you might not do so well on today’s common core tests.
And part of the point is this: the tests are so fundamentally different from “real life” that what the test is measuring is not an indicator, one way or the other, of how people will be able to perform in professional life activities.
Standardized tests do serve the financial interests of assessment and technology corporations; for individuals, the only “benefit” is practice powering your way through (or not) otherwise totally pointless stress and confusion.
Ha, that is priceless.
I think this is one way high stakes standardized testing maintains its foothold.
There are enough of us (teachers/parents) who were good at them, gained things through them (scholarships, college acceptance, etc.), and thus those scores remain a source of pride, self esteem, for us. It is very hard for us to see these tests as flawed/useless/unimportant since these very tests “selected us”.
Just MHO.
There is an important difference between saying, “People who score high on these tests aren’t necessarily Homo Superior” and saying, “People who score high on these tests function at a lower level of intellect.”
I can agree wholeheartedly with the first statement. I find the second to be insulting.
If it is wrong to state that low test results = low intellect, how can it be acceptable to state that high test results = low intellect?
If one believes that these tests are fundamentally flawed, then the test result are meaningless.
Otherwise, the argument is that the tests are scored incorrectly.
That’s a good point, should parents worry if their child scores high on these tests?
Sure, if they’re living in the world of the short story, “Examination Day”:
http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-henry-seslar/
“. . . CCSS proponents assert that consistent, rigorous education standards are key to a competitive business climate.”
That statement reeks of porcine excrement.
Thank you, Duane: any writer who thinks that a “competitive business climate” is an “idealistic end” for education has accepted the premises of the so-called reformers.
“They are designed as a filter and used to skim the “cream” off the top of the bell-shaped curve. Students who fall into the category of “cream” are admitted into the best colleges and are eligible for scholarships based on their “academic merits”.”
Should public education have the function of sorting and separating, rewarding some and sanctioning others?????
What is the fundamental purpose of public education? Where can one find a statement of the fundamental purpose?
Duane Swacker: your last paragraph is reminiscent of Ionesco—
“It is not the answer that enlightens but the question.”
So if we pin the leading self-styled “education reformers” and their edubully enablers to the wall by querying why the skimming and creaming they mandate for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN is not applied with equal “rigor” to THEIR OWN CHILDREN—
We realize that it is the Potemkin Village Business Plan for $tudent $ucce$$ that is in play. It assumes a two-tiered education system—one for the advantaged few and another for the less advantaged/disadvantaged many—that mirrors and is supported by the labeling, sorting and ranking that is such an integral part of standardized testing.
The fix is in. The system is rigged. Sucker punch. *The leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” only complain when we refuse to sit still and take their low blows. Whatever happened to “grit” and “determination”?*
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. You write above “porcine excrement”—but c’mon, what do you really think?
😉
It’s of the porcine variety because the stench is geometrically greater than the odor of excrement of bovine origin.
“A person with such brain functioning can see the whole, and can understand how the parts effect the whole, rather than perseverate on specific details. Those in roles of leadership should be “big picture”, holistic thinkers – the lines. Those in subordinate positions should be “the detail people” – the dots, as is evident in Duncan’s pitiful functioning as Secretary of Education.”
This reminds me of the MBTI — Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator — distinction between “Sensory” and “iNtuitive” thinkers. I am over-the-top iNtuitive, to the point where it can make it difficult to get the much more Sensory people around me to see what I am seeing.
It’s like being in an art museum and looking at a pointillist painting, where many people are clustered right up close with their noses almost touching the canvass, and some others are standing ten feet back. Both groups see different things even though they are looking at the same thing. The Sensors up close see rows of different colored dots, and fall to discussing the number of rows, the sequence of colors, the size and shape of the dots, etc. Meanwhile, the iNtuitives standing further might see an image of a woman and some dogs in the park. When the two groups try to discuss what they are looking at, each thinks the other must be formed of crazy people, because they are clearly NOT discussing what is so plainly obvious to see!
“Red dots? Green dots? What?”
“A woman and DOGS?!?”
The Sensors think the iNtuitives are “stupid” for not being able to see how many yellow dots are in row fifty-three, and the iNtuitives think the Sensors are “stupid” for not being able to see the woman and her dogs. But the truth is that both groups are seeing what is real, and both groups are also blind in their way.
It is tempting — in some ways especially for iNtuitives like me, who are fewer in number and sometimes harbor a certain resentment toward the majority of other humans who are so easily frustrated with us for not seeing what is obvious to them (while being completely oblivious to the fact that WE just as often look at THEM the same way), to award ourselves medals of superiority. Just like the “dots”, we like to think of ourselves as “superior” — but we sometimes forget where we put our keys, or our dentist appointments, or how to get home from that conference we just attended.
Do Sensors REALLY score higher on standardized tests than iNtuitives? I had always assumed it was the other way around, but I guess it might depend on what the test is measuring. Has there been actual research on this?
And if there has, how come I scored so high on my SAT, ACT, and other similar tests when I’m so iNtuitive that I can get lost in a small parking lot?
Why do I have the feeling that most of the assertions in this piece are debatable, contested, or conjecture? It’s short about 50 citations.
I’m with you FLERP. We don’t know enough about the brain to make definitive statements such as these. I think people get carried away now that we have some tools that allow us to look at brain activity.
There are dots being imposed on our students that we don’t want them connecting and we do not all agree that consistent and rigorous curriculum is desirable as currently defined.
Because they are. Her larger point about standardized testing sifting and winnowing based on narrow conceptions of capability is on target. However, many of the assertions are based on claims that are either contested or in areas where the research is still developing.
There are dots being imposed on our students that we don’t want them connecting and we do not all agree that consistent and rigorous curriculum is desirable as currently
defined. We also no longer trust Common Core to be looking on good faith for “cream” anywhere.
Learning how to make educated guesses is not education. It is a rote process based on how questions are worded and answers formulated–not any real understanding of “content”.
I am probably operating with a different definition of educated guesses. I thought that was what a hypothesis was. Now if you are talking about multiple choice/guess tests…
One final thought, regardless of whether these tests are valid in any way, I agree that they are overused and overvalued. It is never a good idea to teach to the standardized test.
“. . . regardless of whether these tests are valid in any way. . . ”
They aren’t and can’t be as proven by Wilson in his 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Bingo!
I’m having difficulty with the very concept of “cream of the crop.” Our society is strengthened by diversity. We should not be attempting to standardize students as if they were widgets from a factory. The educational process should be a lifelong honing of unique skills and exciting collaborative ventures.
This makes a lot of sense to me because in my study of the brain and how information is processed, stored, and available for recall in real time consciousness; students can only handle one or two concepts or processes at a time. Everything else needs to be available for automatic retrieval that supports the real time activity.
Asian cities and countries excel at high test scores, but they suck at creativity and innovation. It is very clear one type of intelligence or brain training is promoted over the others. When one examines leadership in this country, it sucks in that a very narrow perspective – from Dems and Reps alike – is always dominant in just about all that they do, which is to continue propping up the supremacist, patriarchal system that does not get the bigger picture of planet sustainability. Somewhere, they fail to connect the dots that are very clear and easy to connect for many others and me.
It becomes very obvious one type of intelligence is promoted over the other. One can easily see why; it serves the systemic notion of control, oppress, and suppress even though it ultimately threatens planet sustainability and the continuance of human existence. Also, explains why I – just like many of you – stay in constant trouble and am considered to be a trouble maker because I am always and forever connecting the dots.
You make a very ironic mistake. Neurotransmitters aren’t primarily responsible for the neural functioning. Synapses, the physical connections between neurons, are far more important. If you knew this before writing this blog post, you could make a clever comparison between the physical connectivity in the brain and the more abstract cognitive connectivity required of high level thinkers. Alas, your failure to make this connection reveals the importance of the pedagogical initiatives you attack. Concrete knowledge, such as that tidbit about neurons, is the essential first step to making high level connections. To use your terms, one must first acquire the dots if there is to be any hope of connecting them. This process of acquisition can be tedious, but is essential. I doubt anyone enjoys learning the rules of grammar, nor does that process necessarily engage the higher order thought processes which ought to be an integral part of public education. But every good writer has a strong foundation of grammar, and endured many boring classroom hours in order to become great.
The challenge for educators is not just teaching students to connect the dots. Students must first acquire concrete knowledge, otherwise they may make scientific errors on well read blogs.
Symbolic Logic 101 – You can prove anything you want logically, just start on a faulty premise! From the perspective of the brain, synapses fire randomly without neurons. From the perspective of common sense, dots fire randomly unless there is direction – the pathway, the conceptual thinker. KRL is a case in ‘point’.
What do you mean when you say “synapses fire randomly without neurons”? Synapses don’t fire, neurons fire, and neuronal firing is (generally) not random. Synapses are gaps between neurons which neurotransmitters traverse, often causing excitation or inhibition in the post synaptic neuron. That action then affects post synaptic firing non stochastically.