Assessing Intelligence with Standardized Testing Has a Purpose, Though Limited

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Transcript - I am certainly very much in favor of assessment. I think anybody who’s at all serious needs to know how he or she is doing. And as you become more of a professional you do more of the assessment yourself. I’m a writer and I don’t have to have as much editing as I did decades ago. On the other hand I probably need more feedback on speaking than on writing because I do more writing than I do speaking. So assessment is great. And testing is a kind of assessment. It tends to be more formal namely you can assess all the time. Testing involves sitting down and doing something in a circumscribed period of time. Standardized testing means this is a test that’s done widely for many, many different kinds of people but it’s done under standard conditions. You show up at ten o’clock in a certain room, maybe with a No. 2 pencil or at a computer station and you click. And there’s certain reasons why we like to do standardized testing. For example if you want to know how American kids in general are doing compared to ten years ago or how American kids are doing compared to Finnish kids or Turkish kids you need to have those kinds of instruments. The problem is in the United States we have excessively valorized a certain kind of test – the short answer multiple choice test. And we do way too much of it.
Somebody once quipped that, you know, if somebody’s sick it doesn’t help to take their temperature all the time. It doesn’t make them any better in America now and even in 2015 President Obama said we’re doing too much testing. The notion kids aren’t doing well, let’s test them over and over again. All that does is waste time that could be done in educating kids, getting them excited about learning and so on. So if you ask Howard Gardner what does he think about the whole environment what I would say is certainly we should assess and we should give feedback to people conveniently in a way they can use it. Read The Full Transcript Here: .