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As
policymakers push schools to focus more and more on standardized
testing, they don't seem to be asking one of the big questions about
that push-anyway, what you'd think would be one of the big questions.
Does teaching kids to do well at standardized tests teach them to do
well at other things? Does it make them smarter (whatever "smarter"
means)? Well, add a mark in the "not so much" column. Standardized
tests:
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... are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students
have acquired in school - what psychologists call "crystallized
intelligence." However, schools whose students have the highest gains on
test scores do not produce similar gains in "fluid intelligence" - the
ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically - according to a
new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers
at Harvard University and Brown University.
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In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public
school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully
raised their students' scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive
Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on
students' performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as
working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to
solve abstract problems.
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