Teaching and Assessing for Successful Intelligence

School Administrator, Jan, 1998 by Robert J. Sternberg

Educators can unearth hidden talents in students by going beyond mastery testing

During a trip to Jamaica, I visited several elementary schools in relatively poor areas of the island. The physical layout of the schools differed drastically from that to which most of us are accustomed. Most were large, one-room schoolhouses. Teachers and students were arrayed around the room, usually with no partitions separating one class from another.

Accordingly, students could listen not only to their own teacher's presentation, but to all the other teachers' lectures as well. If students had the misfortune to sit near the side or back of the class, the students often could hear another teacher better than they could hear their own. Indeed, it was a challenge to discern what their own teacher was saying.

I found myself reflecting on the problem posed to Alfred Binet, the father of intelligence testing, almost a century ago. If one wished to construct tests to predict school achievement, what tests might one construct? I decided that, in the Jamaican setting, two of the most useful test items would measure not skills like vocabulary or arithmetic or spatial visualization--the things Binet measured--but auditory acuity and auditory selective attention.

One needed auditory acuity to hear what the teacher was saying and auditory selective attention to filter out the teachers whose voices competed with one's own teacher. The test probably would predict school achievement well. That's because instruction and even most testing were conducted in the same setting so that one would need the same skills to do well on an auditory ability test in the classroom and on orally administered tests of achievement.

Our Closed System

I believe that schools in other parts of the world, including the United States, echo the Jamaica situation, without being aware of it. In most schools, two abilities are at a premium: memory abilities (those abilities used to memorize, recall and recognize information) and, to a lesser extent, abstract analytical abilities (those abilities used to analyze, judge, evaluate, compare and contrast fairly abstract concepts).

The ability tests measure these skills, learning from instruction in school requires them, and then achievement tests assess the degree to which the abilities have been applied successfully. People who do well on the ability tests tend to do well in school and vice versa because both settings require similar abilities.

The problem is that these abilities are not necessarily the ones that matter most in the life activities for which school is supposed to prepare our children. How many times have you had to memorize a book or a lecture in your job as a school administrator or even during your days as a teacher? Unless you teach math, how many times have you had to remember the theorems you learned in plane geometry? How many times have you seen the extremely obscure words that often occur on vocabulary tests? Probably almost never. But there are other things you have had to do.

Jobs require memory and abstract analytical skills in some degree, but they also require other and arguably more important skills as well. It is no surprise, therefore, that even supporters of current tests who are as traditional as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve admit that conventional tests of abilities and even of achievement predict only about 10 percent of the variation among people in real-world measures of success. In other words, these tests are poor predictors. What happened to the other 90 percent?

Broad Ability Range

In my book, Successful Intelligence, I argue that intelligence in everyday life requires a broader range of abilities than is measured by conventional tests. The problem with these conventional tests is that they spotlight children who have certain abilities (especially memory and abstract-analytical ones), but leave in the dark children with other abilities, such as creative and practical ones.

Children with other abilities may be derailed from the fast track early in life, with the result that they never get the opportunity to show what they really can do. Not only do we disenfranchise these children, but we provide almost limitless opportunities for those individuals who do not necessarily have the broader range of abilities they will need to take advantage of the opportunities they receive.

The best school administrators are not necessarily going to be those who got straight A's in their educational administration courses. Such grades might not hurt. But the practical skills required to handle subordinates firmly but fairly, to negotiate with administrators at higher and lower levels, to deal with parents, to cope with union demands and to maintain a life outside the school are probably going to be a lot more important than the memory and abstract analytical skills that led to A's in courses.

Similarly, the creative skills required to structure or restructure the school, to create favorable working conditions, to deal with unexpected problems and to instill a sense of vitality in your school are also ones not likely to have been rewarded in most classrooms.