Testing for Wisdom?
I noticed an article in Scientific American entitled “Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of Smart Fools?”
They interviewed Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg who annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science they said sounded the alarm about standardized testing.
He addressed problems with IQ tests and college entrance exams that are selecting and rewarding people who have a particular kind of intelligence, but not the intelligence needed to solve significant challenges.
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
He argues we must factor other variables with intelligence to cultivate the problem-solvers our society needs.
What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to isTesting for Wisdom? | Truth in American Education: