The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who think that the world can be divided into two kinds of people and those who don’t. No, let me try that again: those who think that everything that matters can be measured, and those who think that what matters most cannot be measured. Count me in the latter group. What matters most is love, friendship, family, imagination, joy….I see no reason to develop measures for those things. And if they were developed, I would doubt their value or accuracy.
But here comes another attempt to measure creativity. This comment was posted by Laura Chapman in response to a discussion of the PISA problem-solving test:
“The PISA examples are math and logic problems. They are not tests of creativity. Look up the tests and informed theoretical work of Joseph W. Getzels and E. Paul Torrance.
“The Torrance tests, available from Scholastic http://ststesting.com/2005giftttct.html, are most often used to identify children, adults, and “special populations” as gifted. The pictorial and verbal tests measure three strengths in thinking: fluency, flexibility, and originality. In the figural tests, participants create simple drawings and respond to images. Scores are derived from evidence of qualities such as elaboration, expressiveness, storytelling, humor, and fantasy.
“Relatively few people are aware that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a developing a web-based scale for measuring creativity, one of several in the “EdSteps” project—funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and operated by the CCSSO
“EdSteps had a low profile until July, 2010 when Newsweek announced a “The Creativity Crisis,” citing a steady decline in scores on the Torrance Tests of Creativity since 1990. The tests are widely used and respected, in part, because records have been kept on the childhood scores and the later-in-life creative accomplishments of each cohort of test takers since the late 1950s (e.g., citations in art publications, patents and awards, books and articles published).
“In response to inquiries, the CCSSO issued a press release that dismissed the Torrance tests and referred its own work on creativity, emphasizing that EdSteps is a project to “advance creativity to the highest possible international standards, and measure creativity in a way that is situated in a context of actual activity.” Creativity is defined as “the valued uses and outcomes of originality driven by imagination, invention, and curiosity.”
“The Edsteps creativity scale a work-in process. The website solicits work samples on any subject from people of all ages and abilities, “globally”…”in any form, genre, or media”…” “writing, videos, images, charts, or other graphics.” People who visit the site are asked to compare two submissions and decide which is the most “effective” (undefined, but the favorite word of Bill Gates).
“That process is carried out in multiple iterations, by multiple judges, with multiple examples. This process is supposed to result in a scale representing a progression of achievement from novice to expert, without the need for written criteria or explanations.
“The process is not different from a popularity contest, with samples of work identified by age, gender, ability level, geographic region, type of work, and the like.
“I could not discover how the EdSteps addresses this fact: Works created by children can be judged more creative than work produced by well-trained adults (e.g., a quote attributed to Picasso: ”It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”). I cannot imagine how a single scale of creative achievement can be constructed from an “anything goes” basket of work from around the world, subject to further editing by EdSteps into web-friendly snippets. The release forms for the project are horrific.
“I think this effort is a crock, but I could be wrong. My sources: Bronson, P. & Merryman, A. (2010, July 10). The creativity crisis. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html .///. Council of Chief State School Officers (2010). CCSSO response to ‘The creativity crisis.’ Press release Retrieved from http://www.ccsso.org/News_and_Events/Current_News/CCSSO_Response_to_the_Creativity_Crisis.html //// EdSteps. (2010b). February 22). Developing the EdSteps continuum: Report of the EdSteps technical advisory group. Retrieved from http://www.edsteps.org/CCSSO/DownloadPopUp.aspx?url=SampleWorks/EdStepsScalingApproach_Long.pdf // EdSteps. (2011b). Creativity launches. Retrieved from http://www.edsteps.org/CCSSO/ManageContent.aspx?system_name=nP6iGdNaft7MEwLG6uDXXA==&selected_system_name=DRkDdjiObdU=”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
An important question and discussion…
Wow! I can be an expert at creativity?! Who would have thunk it!
So we are supposed to accept their surrogate measure of creativity why?
Because it is theirs, built around a statistical procedure of paired comparisons and random sampling of submissions that does not require attention to each submission.
The same basic procedure was first used to evaluate samples of writing. There was moderate success in getting agreement so…let’s try it on “creativity,” also “problem solving,” also “global awareness” (recently dropped).
The panel of advisors for “creativity” included people with high-end reputations for thinking about this topic (e.g. Howard Gardner) but the tone of the technical report buried the specific views of these advisors in a narrative marked by excessive use of the word “impact” as the essential feature of any measure of creativity.
For example, Diane’s grandchildren could do a drawing that “impacted” her. A Kindergartener’s creative work could “impact” his or her peers. Poor Vincent Van Gogh died before “impactful recognition” in much of the world.
Part of the backstory on this whole EdSteps program can be discerned in how the CCSSO was in need of a way to deal with the competing meme and mishmash of ideas promoted by Ken Kay as “21st Century Skills (P-21)” Among his 4 Cs was “creativity.” Educators swooned. Many in the business community appreciated P-21, especialy the CEOs of tech companies for whom Kay had served as as lobbiest since the 1980s. Sorry to be longwinded on this. I works on behalf of arts education in public schools
Fascinating background, Laura. Thank you!
Unlike the general factor of intelligence there is no accepted test for creativity or even any agreement on what “creativity” means. The psychologist Richard Lynn believes that “creativity” is essentially identical with the character trait of “psychopathy”. While some personality tests for “psychopathy” have been developed there is nowhere near the degree of empirical support for such tests as for IQ tests.
I agree with this in the sense that once a person has become “fragmented” by trauma in adulthood, and their Narcissistic shell (faux front) is shattered, they may have psychosis from PTSD for a while, but it is possible for them to recover their childhood spirit (imagination) that was repressed throughout most of their life if they are in a safe environment where healing can occur.
For autistic adults, this is sometimes called “emergence”.
Jim, is there some practical use for IQ testing? (I mean, apart from in human resources departments.)
For many jobs the expensive need for credentialing could probably be largely eliminated by the use of IQ tests.
That sounds like human resources, essentially.
Yes, selection for jobs and admission to colleges, armed forces etc. are the principal present day practical applications of IQ tests. However aside from practical uses it is interesting at least to some people to attempt to understand the nature of biological intelligence. The data provided by IQ tests can be helpful here. For example correlations of IQ tests with genetic factors can provide clues to the neurological basis of biological intelligence.
I have a very high IQ. That qualifies me for, uh, taking IQ tests.
You measure the thing you’re measuring, yes.
And when someone is especially gifted, like Harrison Bergeron http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html in Kurt Vonnegut’s prescient peripatetic imagination…
lol! a classic!
you know, just by virtue of being omnivorous readers, we have a coded language that most people don’t have access to. How often does “Have you read….?” elicit “No, but I’ve seen the movie.”
I’m curious, Michael, if you have ever seen a movie based on a book that you thought was better than the book? I was fascinated by the film version of Women in Love. The filmmaker didn’t just try to do the book. He or she (I don’t know which) massively mined Lawrence’s letters, diaries, poems, and other works. So, the film was an original creation hung on the novel’s plot frame. Not entirely successful, but quite good, I thought, though I haven’t seen it in many, many years.
I believe the movie version of All The Pretty Horses comes close, but I’m still waiting for the other two books to go into production. A River Runs Through It; Redford did a great job directing that. Generally, most of our acquaintances will accept the movie without reading the book, never taking time to compare. I saw Master And Commander, read all of Patrick O’Brian…
It took me a while–until I was in my thirties–to figure out that the person next to me with half my IQ had intelligences and understandings that I shall never dream of having. Such tests are used, primarily, as instruments of command and control by people who have very sick, very rigid worldviews, by people with a rage for order and predictability, by totalitarians. It’s no accident that intelligence and aptitude testing were seized upon and promoted by eugenicists, the military, and oligarch industrialists. Benet had a very low view of such people and of such uses of his creation.
FLERP: A challenge for you. What is the referent of “thing” in that statement: “You measure the thing you are measuring”? There’s the rub.
Creativity = psychopathy. Wow. That’s a new one. Guess no one ever told Dr. Suess.
Most peoples beliefs and practices tend to be strongly affected by social norms and expectations. For most of us the opinions of others are very important. Both psychopaths and creative people seem to care less about how they are perceived by others. That is one commonality. I hasten to add though that we are still in the very early stages of understanding creativity.
Actually, you’re wrong: psychopaths care very much how they are perceived by others, and go to great lengths to manipulate that perception.
That “general factor of intelligence” is quite contested, Jim. I direct you to the discussion on the nature of what is real and our feeble attempts at describing/measuring mental constructs, referenced by B. Sheperd earlier, http://paceni.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/knewton-claims-of-adaptive-learning-have-no-scientific-merit/ .
Here is a self indictment of Common Core from CCSSO in their own words:
If our children are to succeed in a world that is increasingly diverse, globalized, and technology‐rich, they require experiences and environments for learning that are radically different from those that
[the current system was designed to deliver]. –
But, Diane, how can we speed up the creative process if we don’t first learn to reduce it to measurable bits? 🙂
Pansy & Dr. Torrence would be outraged with Bill Gates. I worked directly with Dr. Torrence in graduate school at UGA. Although, most tests don’t last forever, but Torrence understood creativity and valued it, especially in his über-creative wife, Pansy.
Gates is into everything! Time & Money allows all doors to open, and the doors to Gates remain open to EVERYTHING related to children.
We should all be HUGELY concerned, even ALARMED, about his obsession and control with all children.
Depends of what “measured” means. A number on a scale, no. For the purpose of rating kids or teachers or countries, no.
But we indirectly “measure” creativity when we give kids tasks that require creativity. And maybe we look for it, rather than measure it.
What makes more sense to me is that we evaluate, measure, whatever, the tasks, curriculum, instruction, materials, to the extent that they foster creativity.
But what is creativity?
Peter commonly asks the essential question. He has a talent for this.
Ken Robinson defines it as, “The process of having original ideas that have value.”
I think that’s a very useful definition. Note that it has an unusualness component AND a values component. It involves that which is unexpected and rare and that which matters to someone.
Unusual… relative to what else? Is this an apples-to-apples comparison or an apples-to-oranges comparison or an apples-to automobiles comparison? What is the difference between unusual and rare? For example, which cards in a deck are unusual? Which are rare?
Expected… by whom? Does the character of the expectation matter?Should the person who has the expectation be informed in some special way or not? I am thinking of a Kindergarten teacher who thinks a child is creative because she can color between the lines and that kind of performance is rare, unusual, unexpected.
Value… to whom? When? Under what conditions? Do the conditions matter? Are you bothered if I call Hitler a creative person and cite a few of the rare, unexpected, and enduring consequences of his mind acting upon his values?
Process…but the process is not always known (or unverifiable). More often judgments focus on products and some enduring influence known to others, usually many others, as in Andy Warhol’s quip that “Fame is a function of publicity.”
Just food for thought, no need to reply.
Sir Ken Robinson is a great storyteller on TED. I’d like to ask him these and other questions.
such a great list of questions, Laura. You always delight and inform. Thank you for your contributions on this blog. What a pleasure they are to read. Always thoughtful like this.
I love these questions, Laura, for they get at the essential point that it’s ALWAYS going to be original to whom? of value to whom? We must resist the insane ideology that assumes that there is one thing to be measured in one way for all in all circumstances. Thank you for making this clear with these questions. That’s the point, I think, as well, of Ken Robinson’s delightful talks. Schools should help kids to discover their passions and proclivities and interests and to build upon those.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @Laura Chapman – “value” especially an essential, glad you brought it into the questioning. The effort of measuring creativity would have been dismissed– by the same oligarchs who now seek to quantify/ rubricize it– in a not-distant past as trying to count the angels on the head of a pin.
While still trying to quantify productivity, the paradigm shifted under the feet of the captains of industry. Now they tap-dance on the moving ball of evolving industry, trying to retrofit assembly-line algorithms to the ineffable, which new data shows to have dollar-signs attached.
If they want to encourage creativity in public education, they’d be better off looking at how business is actually practiced: corporations have always known to give their thinkers money, top-notch equipment, a comfortable environment, & let them have at it.
Well said, S&F. Another factor: Typically, the breakthrough innovation comes not from someone working within the in-house R&D dept but from someone working on his or her own, in off hours, at home, and then trying to sell the idea within the company. Steve Jobs created two teams of 400 software engineers to compete with one another to write OS 7, the first object-oriented Apple OS. They worked for a couple years. In the end, the company went with something written by a staffer, on his own, at home–by someone who had gotten fed up with the in-house crap.
Laura, I created, a number of years ago, a massive collection of materials on heuristics for creativity. Rules of thumb like matrices for discovering creative juxtapositions and applications of a concept, technique, or device from one field in some other, wildly divergent field. I would be interested in hearing your ideas about using such heuristics. I think that those can be really useful for helping kids to create. Any thoughts about that?
Laura, thinking of your first question. Definitions of unusual and rare.
Rarity: to be found elsewhere only infrequently, if at all.
Unusualness: Peculiarity, oddity, strangeness. Harold Bloom says in his book Genius is that the single characteristic that all really great writers have in common is that they are Strange. And he makes a good case for this–Rumi, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Emerson–these were pretty weird people.
Rarity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for unusualness.
Bob,
But did those writers consider themselves strange, peculiar or odd? Just because they happened to be a bit different than most others?
What I am getting at is our “labelling/naming” of people and things and how that ties into our perception of those people and things and how accurate that perception might be.
This should encourage creativity:
Lately, I have been reading books to kids and find them to be so tragic and dreary. In one class it was about a poor girl whose brother is trying to entertain her with a puppet that has a real character. He goes to her bed side and after much discussion she is dead. Her father who is hated steals her body to bury it. The brother goes to Memphis and dances his puppet on a string to raise money on the street.
Another book is about a child born with no facial bones in his head and the details of putting his head back together in detail (Wonder), so graphic. I had to stop, feeling it was inappropriate for children.
Here is a review of Espernaza Rising by one 10 year old.
Publishers are trying to mess kids up.
10 Year Old Tired of Death and Sadness in School Required Reading, November 17, 2013
By Cynthia C. – See all my reviews.This review is from: Esperanza Rising (Kindle Edition)
Review from a ten-year old boy reading this book for the Common Core Curriculum in New York State partnered with the unit on the Unified Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR is not a developmentally appropriate reading level for 10 year old students):
“I mean really, in the first chapter someone that the main character loves dies. I mean, come on, that is pretty stupid. Then her uncle burns down her house, they have to move away from her grandmother, her mother gets sick with a near fatal disease called valley fever which inflames the lungs and causes them to deflate and collapse. She has to work in the valley that she lives in and she has to stay away from her mom for months on end so that her mom doesn’t catch any other diseases. Strikers make her work deadly by putting rattlesnakes in the harvests and other deadly things like brown recluses, rabid animals, bee hives, hornets nest, wasp nest, even sticks of dynamite. Sticks of Dynamite!
Oh, yeah, and only in the last chapter something good finally happens. Her grandmother comes and her mom gets well. The book made me feel really upset, nearly as upset as Bridge to Terabithia. All I learned from the book was the different harvest seasons. It really annoys me that we have to read books that are always sad with people the characters love dying for school. It makes me feel depressed like I am in the story and someone I love is going to die soon. “
I don’t care for all the sad books either, although I did like Esperanza Rising. The librarian should be able to help him find some “less depressing” books. And if he doesn’t want to go to the library, maybe his parents can go, explain the situation, and then bring home some books he might like.
thanks Diane, the revolution is beginning with OPT OUT Long Island. Let’s talk my honored colleague.. Meeting with Greens on Saturday and my beloved Republican Senator on Friday.
Thank you for stating the obvious. My daughter’s 9th grade class read Lord of the Flies, A Thousand Splendid Suns (horrible depiction of Afghanistan), Things Fall Apart (tribe in Africa undone by European colonialism), Anthem by Ayn Rand (please!) and To Kill a Mockingbird. Nothing wrong with any one of these stories, but in combination, what feelings will a young student have toward the world?
Anthem?
Ayn Rand wrote comic books. Breathless, cliched comic books.
Not sure if A Thousand Splendid Suns is appropriate for 9th grade, but our regular ed juniors love it. Could be their family members served there in military deployments and it lent understanding about the terrible treatment of women and how fortunate many Americans are. It helped students understand why family members were in that war. It actually sounds like your ninth grader is reading some thoughtful literature, except for Rand, and much better than NY’s Romeo and Juliet through 5 excerpts or 17 days on a short story about werewolves. But this is the world of Cuomo Core.TKAM, by the way, is one of my physician daughter’s all-time favorites, and she read it as a 7th grader.
At least they have read some novels. My 10th grade son has not read a single novel ALL YEAR. The reason given? More need for “informational text.” This summer, he and I are going to read the books that he SHOULD have read this year.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Have to agree, Joseph, the selections mentioned are so off for 10-y.o.’s. Help me understand: are these readings as you suggest based on Common Core lists for 10-yr-olds? My youngest found Bridge to Terabithia thought-provoking, but he was 13 when he read it (public sch 10 yrs ago)…
I was thinking, Joseph, reading your post, that it will be a wonderful thing when Ed Deform is finally defeated and we can go back to having our discussion be not about the standards and the tests and the evaluation rubric and about really valuable, interesting, useful stuff like what books kids like and don’t and why!
As Einstein is alleged to have said, “not everything that counts is countable, and not everything that is countable counts.”
Creativity through regimentation and standardization!!!
Bullet lists of creativity standards!
Creativity rubrics!
The particular problems from this PISA test, btw, can be approached in completely algorithmic ways. In other words, a procedure can be spelled out for arriving, without any thought at all, at the solution. Any Turing-equivalent machine can do it. A machine.
Do a search on Seven Bridges of Königsberg Algorithm. You’ll find many papers on this.
Bob – I’m puzzled by the relevance of this to what we’re talking about.
Jim, two of the sample PISA tests questions were group theory problems.
Bob – In virtually all math exams that have been given throughout history the problems given can be done by known algorithms. Since there are thousands of unsolved problems in mathematics one could of course compose a math exam consisting solely of unsolved problems. I’m not sure though that one’s students would appreciate this.
What I am saying, Jim, is that these problems on a supposed test of creativity turn out to be ones that can be solved through application of a decidedly uncreative, algorithmic procedure.
The unholy alliance of some computer moguls, some educational publishers, and government has decided that the way to approach training of children of the proles is via bullet lists and teaching machines. Personalization means coming up with a bullet list of stuff to be learned and continually testing kids to determine their progress toward mastery of the list and feeding them preprogrammed lessons on those items for which they have not yet achieved mastery. In the breathtakingly Orwellian Doublespeak of education “reform,” this regimentation is called “personalization of instruction.”
And as Orwell long ago pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” obliterating a village with fire bombs, killing every living thing, and irradiating the surface so that nothing will live in health there for hundreds of thousands of years is called “pacification.”
It sickens me to think of creative process as “measured” and part of the age of “data driven drivel”! But don’t forget that teachers in the creative content areas are being required to “quantify” student growth in creativity through the student learning objectives (SLO’s) required. Thanks to the one-size-fits-all approach (using Charlotte Danielson’s giant rubrik for teachers) coupled with the quest for data to prove student learning… art teachers must actually design lessons around establishing a baseline for creativity and chart a select group of students throughout the year “to show growth” and… teachers’ professional evaluations depend on this. The ultimate insult to injury is that most specialists have a very disjointed flow of teaching throughout the year DUE TO ALL THE TESTING. It is so entirely insulting as a professional in a creative subject with years of experience as both a student in the arts and a professional teacher of the arts. It is vile to be forced to waste so much time on such nonsense and to have the nature of classwork changed not for the benefit of students but for meaningless data collection on teacher’s supposed capabilities!
It is a mistake to think of measurement as simply a matter of observing characteristics of an object of measurement. TE and Duane have had endless fruitless debates about this topic, and they continually talk past one another. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein brings much clarity to this issue in his great work, the Philosophical Investigations. The gist of Wittgenstein’s argument is that measurement always involves an interaction between the thing measured and a whole system of socially determined usages. He famously said that the one thing we cannot say is a meter long is the physical object that is the standard meter in Paris. Why not? Well, it’s the object that defined, in Wittgenstein’s day, what a standard meter was. It was a convention that something would be said to be a meter long if it were as long as that object in Paris.
Since, then, of course, the meter has been redefined in terms of physical law. So, in the current SI system, a meter is “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.” But still, this is a convention that we set, by fiat. Let a meter equal this.
And there’s the rub. When we operationalize a definition–let creativity be what this test measures, let intelligence be what this test measures, we had better be very, very careful about what, precisely, that operationalized equivalent really means, what the consequences are of adopting it.
We are currently in the process of redefining all of U.S. education in terms of operationalized equivalents as determined by certain extremely dubious tests of mastery of a bullet list of standards.
This is the technocratic philistine replacement for the human processes of teaching and learning, scholarship and research and for the countless judgments made by teachers.
Learning becomes mastery of the bullet list
Teaching becomes software
The software does continual testing in order to dole out extrinsic punishments and rewards to measure progress toward that mastery
So we must always ask, what are the consequences of making the thing we are measuring equivalent to whatever is produced by this means of measurement? That is precisely the question that was never asked by the Ed Deformers. The answer to that question is, the consequences are truly horrific.
Bob – Philosophical skepticism has not been a useful way to try to understand reality. If physicists in the past had spent too much time worrying about the definition of the meter we probably would never had gotten beyond everyday experience.
Jim, philosophical skepticism in general has nothing to do with the critique that I made above. What I said is that one must look at the consequences and social uses of the measurement, that measurement can only be understood in context. I also made the further claim that if one recognizes this and starts to examine the validity of the measurements that we are currently using and the uses of those measurements, one sees a) that the instruments are not validly measuring what they claim to be measuring and b) that there are very, very disturbing and dangerous consequences.
I brought up Wittgenstein simply because he articulated clearly, and famously, this point that measurement systems can only be understood in the context of a system of socially adopted usages. The reason I brought up that, is that we have to look very closely at those usage, at why we are adopting these particular systems and what the consequences of those uses are. They turn out to be based upon a political and economic agenda and to have very dangerous consequences.
Not sure that TE and I necessarily argue past each other. He doesn’t understand what Wilson is saying and I’m not sure that he has read it completely to understand it.
But as you brought out in response to another post with the Knewton debunking article any measurement is an interaction between the measuring device and the thing/person being “measured”. And I am one to argue that certain aspects of human behaviour cannot be “measured”-see Diane’s examples of love, caring, aesthetics, etc. . . .
Please bear with my copy and paste from that article but the following stuck out to me:
http://paceni.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/knewton-claims-of-adaptive-learning-have-no-scientific-merit/
Suppose that Einstein and a student at an American high school both produced a perfect score on a high school mathematics examination paper. Surely to claim that the student had the same mathematical ability as Einstein would be to communicate ambiguously. The student has nothing to match Einstein’s contributions to special and general relativity, to say nothing of quantum theory. However, unambiguous communication can be restored if we simply take account of the measuring instrument and say, “Einstein and the student have the same mathematical ability relative to this particular examination paper.” Mathematical ability, indeed any ability, is not an intrinsic property of the individual; rather, it’s a joint property of the individual and the measuring instrument.
In short, ability isn’t a property of the person being measured; it’s a property of the interaction of the person with the measuring instrument. . . Bohr referred to this as “subject/object holism.” If this is accepted then (as illustrated in the case of Einstein and the high school student) one cannot meaningfully divorce what is measured from the measuring instrument in psychology.
But a central tenet of Item Response Theory is that the measuring instrument and the measurement outcome must be viewed as entirely independent. This puts Item Response Theory at odds with Bohr’s teachings.
Wittgenstein‘s point is only that, when such lessons do succeed, as they often do in real life, they draw on a resource that is presupposed by the verbal interpretations and definitions but not mentioned in them. That extra resource, to put it at first quite generally and vaguely, is human nature. (Pears, 2006, p. 19)
How can human nature rescue the situation? The distinguished American physicist David Mermin sets out Bohr’s case:
What does it mean for a property to be real? When you study an object how can you be sure you are learning something about the object itself, and not merely discovering some irrelevant feature of the instrument you used in your study? This is a question that has plagued generations of psychologists. When you measure IQ are you learning something about an inherent quality of a person called “intelligence,” or are you merely acquiring information about how a person responds to something you have fancifully called an IQ Test?
This passage derives from a famous debate in the history of physics between the two greatest physicists of the twentieth-century: Bohr and Einstein. The debate centred on a fundamental question, namely, “what is it for something to have a property?” The outcome favoured Bohr’s cautious position that the result of a quantum measurement is best thought of as the property of an interaction between the measuring tool and the entity mesured. Bohr believed that this was also true for measurement in psychology.
Wittgenstein’s philosophy arrives at precisely the same conclusion. Bohr taught that it was wrong to think that the task of physics was to find out how nature is by which he meant that quantum physics cannot be tasked with investigating the intrinsic properties of electrons, photons, and so on. The cautious position to take is that we must settle for the interaction between the electron and the instrument designed by the experimental physicist.
Heisenberg (1958, p. 58) writes:
This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring tool has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means at our disposal. In this way quantum theory reminds us, as Bohr has put it, of the old wisdom that when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators.
The calculation “20 times 20 = 400” is only true against a background mathematical practice of multiplication. Without this human background, the notions of “right” and “wrong” in mathematics lose their meaning. According to Bohr and Wittgenstein, it is incorrect to treat mastery of the multiplication concept as a property of the individual. Rather, one should define concept mastery as a joint property of the student and the mathematical practice.
And Wittgenstein’s contention is precisely that, with the demise of Platonism, there can be such a thing as adding correctly – such a thing as a determinate requirement imposed by the rules of addition – only within a framework of extensive institutional activity and agreement in the judgements which participation in those institutions involves us in making. The very existence of our concepts depends on such activity. (Wright, 2001, pp. 155-156).
Recall that the learning paradox arose when concepts like “green” and “colour” were ascribed to the individual. Here the paradox can be avoided because a concept is now the property of an interaction. In short, one escapes the learning paradox by treating what is measured and the measuring tool as an indivisible whole, the all-important measuring tool being founded in human customs and practices.
I’m picturing chimps in lab coats running experiments on chimps without lab coats.
Or aliens visiting Earth and blowing it all to smithereens, before our best psychometricians even have a chance to present the aliens with their findings.
LOL. OMG, that is FUNNY!!!
FLERP & Bob Shepherd: let’s change our terms slightly so we can “control” for other “variables” and “isolate” what we are looking for so we can “figure” it out.
How do you “measure” the humor of the comment and the response? I’m talking here full blown, hard data-driven, a 95% probability of it not being the result of chance.
Perhaps an old dead Greek guy can help us out here:
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” [Plato]
😎
Those crazy Greeks again! I’m sorry, Krazy, but my galvanic skin response wrist bracelet provided by the U.S. Department of Education under a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wasn’t functioning properly during my reading of the joke, so I don’t have any hard data to provide on this. I thought it was funny.
I remember a pbs show and book that came out years ago about creativity. What I remember most about it was that creativity requires an incubation period where it takes some time for creative ideas to form. I think I’m pretty creative, but it usually takes one or two days or more to come up with a creative idea for a given situation. I’m not good with witty, on-the-spot creative ideas. If this incubation period idea is accurate, I don’t think there is any way creativity could be measured on a test during one sitting.
NOTHING can be measured well in one test during one sitting. That’s part of the reason that standardized tests are so awful.
NOTHING
These testing situations are entirely bizarre, unnatural, inauthentic. Nothing done during these sessions is even remotely related to anything that we would call real reading and writing.
I like the idea of an incubation period. I wish we applied it to more of what we require students to do. Today’s scripted curricula require that we complete tasks within in a certain time framework. Too many teachers do not have the luxury of exploring an idea from a different angle. Tests are usually timed which certainly dilutes incubation as a marker for creativity in today’s reformist atmosphere. They are really into the efficient collection of data. Any task which encourages more than cursory attention is likely to receive less weight. I know I am overstating the case, but I’m really tired of this attempt to turn learning into quantifiable exercise.
I don’t think that you are overstating the case. One major way in which the tests and the test prep that these encourage distort reading and writing is precisely by not allowing for the time that it takes to read and write well, for the incubation.
seeing to many comments from the brain and not from the heart.
The longer I teach, the stronger becomes a belief that I hold. Each child comes into the world with their own special gifts. We don’t t know what those gifts necessarily are right away, but if they experience a babyhood and early childhood and the deserved (lately not-so-common with statistical measures showing about 1 in 3 children in the U.S. lives in poverty) childhood free of extreme stressors, and are given the time to explore materials and spaces with like minded-peers, they will all show us what they are good at naturally. We spend way too much time forcing kids into molds, giving them labels, reducing them to one blip on flood of data yet to be disaggregated, delivering canned curriculums, instead of noticing the earliest glimmers of their innate capabilities and strengths. Once we notice those things, we need to then get them running to create great skill sets based on great interest over time. All kids are “gifted” in this way. G & T programs are just programs with labels to make some kids and their families feel superior, never really any good for anyone.
Yes. I bet you are a great teacher, Denise. This understanding is a prerequisite.
Call me cynical but any day now I will be expected to have 100% of my kids being creative 100% of the time…but only the kind of creative that can be detected with a Gates created measurement instrument. This is just sick.
In NC, we are on our 4th try to create MSL’s in the arts. That’s 4 in 5 years people, it started as a partnership with Discovery Education but failed miserable when they couldn’t quantify the rubric, I mean one of their ideas for theatre was “Projects and articulates with 50% or 75% or 100% accuracy.” I mean by who’s standard? It was pretty hysterical how much they wanted out of that room with 4 drama teachers, like they were on fire and there was no water to be found. Now we are doing ‘Portfolio Assessments.” How about this, sometime in my room we just CREATE, just because it’s fun and exciting and we do get a lot out of it and shame on those that need to quantify it.
Amen
Here’s the short answer: No.
🙂
“Can creativity be measured?” Most measurement questions involve first defining what you want to measure and why you want to measure it. The second question helps refine what you actually want to measure and defines the context for the measurement effort. Because these basic questions are pretty difficult for all but the most trivial feature or characteristic, we can assume that the resultant measures will always be partial, ambiguous and plagued with errors. That said for a given purpose such “poor” measures may still have utility. The history of chronometers and the determination of longitude illustrates the point.
My answer to the question, therefore, is “It depends”.
Caedmon: “Hwæt sceal ic singan?”
Angel: “Sing me frumsceaft.”
If we can measure GRIT, why can’t we measure CREATIVITY. Sense of HUMOR can’t be too far behind. I hear those Estonian kids are hilarious.
Are our students falling behind in the humor department? Are we a nation at risk because our humor has devolved to such a point that its primary expression is the lolcat meme? I mean, like, LOL, whatever.
Better create a public-private partnership to look into these. And, it goes without saying, some new tests.
Bob,
I am currently developing a set of “state” standards for humor. We just can afford to be less funny than other nations. The standarized tests in humor are mainly MC items reqiring students to identify the “funniest” punchline among a set of plausibly humorous distractors.
Sample items to be released soon.
Sample Item N0. 1
1) An ancient Roman walks into a bar, looks directly at the bartender, holds up two fingers
and says. “__”
a) Peace ovt
b) Table for two, please
c) I’ll take five beers
d) Et tu bibit
Creativity cannot be measured because it involves emotions, and like pain, only the person who is experiencing that emotion is capable of recognizing the level on their own scale.
For example, when a psychiatrist asked, “What is your sadness today on a scale of
1 – 10? Then the doctor only has a clue to the level of intensity for that individual person.
Emotions are the result of a person’a perception of “their world”, and everyone’s perception is not the same, since it is interpreted and processed individually. Hence, “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder” is very true. Same with creativity. I can create something that others may appreciate and enjoy, but their judgement will come from how they are able to relate it to their own world. That is why cultures often share similar perceptions.
Therefore, the culture of the “Asperger” billionaires who are driving the reform movement should not be allowed to influence or determine what is creative in our greater society of children. The culture of the Asperger billionaires has already determined that creativity is “sitting and starring at blank walls” for long periods.
A child’s creativity and self expression should be determined by each child, and cannot and should not be judged by someone else. The value of a child’s creative work needs to be an intrinsic measure determined by their own perception. Having outside judgement placed on a child’s attempt at creativity will diminish both freedom of expression and motivation.
I believe true and valid assessments for both cognitive and affective growth should be done on an individual basis, especially with young children in elementary school, rather than competitively. Portfolios encourage holistic growth and self expression, while standardized test diminish self expression through fear and intimidation, create competition, repress imagination, and leave the child with negative feelings of “loser/winner”. (shame, anger, guilt, jealousy, disappointment vs pride & greed).
I think the the obsession with data, assessments, and measuring is the “culture” of the elite group of corporate billionaires and it is directly related to Gates Aspergers (ASD).
Can we measure “Asperger” on the spectrum? The greater an ASD person’a emotional regression, desensitization, and social insecurity, the greater their need for rigidity, conformity, and control (which includes measuring and quantifying everything possible in their environment that they can gain control over and put into “compartments”).
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is one of the traits of ASD.
It can be recognized by those familiar with Aspergers (ASD), that Bill Gates’ influence with the Corporate Raiders is behind this obsession with measuring, processing, and packaging all the school children in America?
Next Question: What is his destination for all these “packaged” children?
“Can we measure “Asperger” on the spectrum? The greater an ASD person’a emotional regression, desensitization, and social insecurity, the greater their need for rigidity, conformity, and control (which includes measuring and quantifying everything possible in their environment that they can gain control over and put into “compartments”).”
Thank you! That is a very profound observation and explains a lot about the “bias” of the billionaire “culture” as well as the invalidity of Pearson’s tests and content of Common Core materials overall.
This is so true and amazingly insightful!
This is another reason we can say that “real learning” for a child involves a connection to and “scientific thinking” for interpretation of their own environment. Imagination is required for scientific thinking and higher level thinking for “creating” and “inventing”.
When children have freedom for cooperative leaning and social engagement with peers in activities they create and design, they have appreciation for themselves and their abilities, and place value on learning. It becomes inspirational and joyful when connected with “positive” emotions to themselves and positive emotions to others. They make social “attachments” in the process. It imparts real “knowledge”, rather than memorization of facts that are unrelated except to “testing” and will soon be forgotten.
When they are forced to perform punitive tasks in isolation that are boring and regimented and fragmented from “their world”, in an authoritarian environment without freedom of expression. the natural tendency is to” resist”. However, the authoritarian “discipline” using reward/punishment (fear and intimidation), forces them to become compliant. In that punitive environment of reward/punishment, their imagination and creativity is repressed, which leads to emotional desensitization and regression. This environment creates “Asperger”
How can we get this message out to people who are not listening?
“Creativity cannot be measured because it involves emotions, and like pain, only the person who is experiencing that emotion is capable of recognizing the level on their own scale. ”
Do you supposed that is why Gates is so interested in somatic sensors? They can try to develop profiles/scales indicative of certain emotional states. Score high on the creativity scale? Bingo! Why they could start developing curricula that produce certain reactions! Think of the miracles of modern science that can guide our pedagogy to new heights of excellence!
We have the mathematical constructs to measure anything we desire. Furthermore, those who construct these measurement regimes will tell you that some phenomena can be measured accurately (e.g. height/weight/etc.–although there is measurement error even in this types of measurements) and then there other phenomena that are unmeasurable (creativity, teacher quality, etc.). All measuring/ranking/setting of standards, etc. involves some form of asymmetrical relationship between those who do the measuring and those who are being measured. In other words, all measurement, particularly in the social sciences is a form of violence–with one party who is in power placing groups of people or knowledge, etc. into a ranking system that depends on a testing system that fits into some internal states (e.g. I.Q, etc.) that they have determined to be valuable and worthwhile (confusing more or less with better and worse). The problem professional educators confront is debating processes and outcomes with a vocabulary and methodologies that from the onset are a statistically invalid. But we have long ago left the professional world of Kansas and entered the Alice and Wonder Land of standards, VAM scores, no excuses, reconstitution, etc led by our very own wizard —Arnie Duncan–whatever the Wizard says can me measured, can be measured.
Debating this gives it a level of credence it does not deserve.
We might as well be dicussing if pigs can fly or if the Easter Buuny might be real. The only attention that the preposterous notion of measuring creativity deserves is derision, contempt, or ridicule.
measurement . . . in the social sciences is a form of violence
yes
If only stupidity could be measured.
But stupidity can be measured–as I stated in my post, any phenomena can be measured. But with any quantitative outcome, one must judge the value of the measurement based on knowing who is defining stupidity, who designs the stupidity scale (and cut-off scale), and what goals the measurement is pursuing. Whenever any educational measurement indicator appears, I always ask those fundamental post-modern questions:1) who is benefitting from the measurement; and 2) who designed the measurement—In all standardized measurement regimes #2 will align with #1. Even when the #2/#1 alignment becomes so absurd, as is the case with the SAT/ACT tests, the #2’s will admit that the test doesn’t measure what it is supposed to, they retain the power to declare, so what, that test gets our #1 children into elite schools, and that is that—oh, we are redesigning parts of the test to be fairer to non #1’s — REALLY…
all too often, it is a form of violence; certainly that is the case with the standardized testing
Creativity can certainly be measured.
It’s called don’t tell Rembrandt what to do.
🙂
Reblogged this on Life of a Writer and commented:
This is really something to look into. Can creativity actually be measured by standards set forth by the same adults who say that children are more creative than adults? Seems like a contradiction to me.
Then again, I just don’t believe that tests can really tell you about he character of a person or what they are ultimately capable of.