Why Am I Disagreeing With Someone Who Doesn’t Like Standardized Tests?
Jonah Lehrer is a very talented writer who creatively applies research from the human sciences to real-life problems. I’ve often linked to his columns from this blog.
Today, though, he wrote an odd column about the somewhat odd column that appeared in the New York Times earlier this week about testing (which I wrote about in “Scientifically Tested Tests”).
My summary of what he wrote is that the standardized tests we use now don’t really measure knowledge. Instead, what it really measures — less than perfectly — is grit, self control, and perseverance. Those are the qualities schools should really be focusing on, and we should develop tests to more accurately measure those
