
Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests - krschultz
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/maker_faire_and_science_education_american_kids_should_be_building_rockets_and_robots_not_taking_standardized_tests_.html
======
jellicle
Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the
world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your
backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take
that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before,
and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than
you can by making all those mistakes yourself. Only by standing on the
shoulders of those who have gone before - that is, by reading their books -
can you hope to push boundaries.

The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a
passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. Has nothing to
do with "teaching science", as the writer asserts. Just because he doesn't
understand the purpose of the test doesn't mean there isn't one. Reading and
comprehending text is one of life's fundamental skills. It is, in fact, useful
to know if schools are teaching that well or not.

Before I get downvoted into oblivion I should say I also think schools should
do hands-on work (which, of course, they do).

~~~
raganwald
_The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a
passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes._

From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply
flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of
microscopes.

One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in
your head of what is being described. You then answer questions about the
model in your head. Experience with microscopes or similar devices is
incredibly valuable to building such a model in your head and answering
questions about it. This was one of the “big problems” in first generation AI:
to answer questions, a computer must be able to construct models, and to
construct models, a computer needs a huge amount of real-world experience.

What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with
microscopes or similar devices. Being able to answer the question without
prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses
period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

Now, there may be a good reason why an entire test full of a variety of such
questions is effective for accomplishing whatever the school board wants
accomplished—getting funding, I imagine—but I stop well short of saying the
author’s complaint is “daft.” I think there are good reasons to be curious
about the biases inherent in this question, and about where schools end up if
they build their entire approach to teaching around scoring well on questions
like this.

~~~
jellicle
> One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model

This test question isn't testing that.

> What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience
> with microscopes or similar devices.

It sure doesn't. It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text.
That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of
microscopes.

> Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a
> microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting
> telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no
prior knowledge of the subject.

~~~
raganwald
My HN friend, my argument was that the writer isn’t _daft_ , and neither is
his complaint, and I stand by that. My argument is that the writer raises
interesting and useful questions, and I stand by that too.

As to the fact that the question doesn’t test internal modelling, of course it
does. If you made it a question about something nobody has ever seen before,
then it wouldn’t test knowledge of microscopes. But it does ask about
microscopes.

Perhaps, in aggregate, the test covers enough subject areas that the students
tested will be exposed to a roughly equal mix of things they have experience
with and things they don’t. But as I noted elsewhere, the fact that it’s
possible to answer this question from the text alone in no way changes the
fact that it’s easier to answer the question with prior experience. And from
that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether this is a good
question.

~~~
calibraxis
Yes, if it were truly just about reading comprehension, then the test-writers
would be horrifically incompetent, and therefore unfit to test anyone. Anyone
who competently designs tests (experimenters, pollsters, etc) knows to address
such biasing factors.

But I think the testers aren't total morons, and know that such a question is
biased towards children with proper (privileged) backgrounds where microscopes
and the respective training are commonplace. They'll be faster at answering
the question and not feel ignorant — crucial advantages on tests.

(The testers may not even like this facet of their jobs, like ad industry
developers who use ad-blockers, but it sure beats unemployment.)

And the whole question smacks of "scientism", where tools are confused with
science. You never see a question like, _"Scientists have believed something
for 200 years. Is it necessarily true?"_

------
krschultz
'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I
could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine
groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. '

When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I
still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also
had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal that surrounded an
egg. The metal shop teacher piled weights on everyone's in the class until the
eggs broke.

In 8th grade (2001), they let us use MIG welders and the project was to make a
crane with the maximum cantilever given a set of counterweights and a limited
amount of 1/8"x1" steel. I remember the entire class standing around watching
as we piled weights up until they failed spectactulary.

It's not a coincidence that those are some of my (few) vivid memories of
middle school. I remember being bored in a lot of classes that simply weren't
challenging enough, but never in metal shop or science class.

They don't even have metal or wood shop in the middle school anymore. They
barely have it in the high school. It's probably some combination of safety
and budget, but can anyone imagine the school allowing basically 13 year olds
to handle MIG welders anymore? It gets hot! Or sheet metal in 11 year olds
hands? It's sharp!

By high school all of the best and brightest are maxing out AP classes for
college applications. There is no time left for 'fun' classes like metal shop
if you aren't going to trade school. (That becomes quite apparent when you get
to college and there are mechanical engineer majors who can't work a hand
drill.)

If we lose all of this stuff, we are going to lose the next generation of
engineers. FIRST robotics is a great program, but we need more things like it.

~~~
smacktoward
Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were
funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now
that we've outsourced the making of things to China, there's no perceived need
for learning how things are made anymore; they just _get made_ , somewhere out
of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.

This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique
grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who
_knew how things worked_ \-- I knew how to _break_ my toys, but only grown-ups
knew how to _fix_ them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into
these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults
striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.

Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D

~~~
scott_s
The US still makes plenty of things. They're just not made by humans.

~~~
bitwize
But if you don't know how to weld, solder, hammer, or hot-glue something
together yourself, how do you expect to teach a machine to?

When my dad was an engineer, engineers knew how to work the machines. Because
a technical drawing isn't just an illustration, it's a set of instructions to
someone on how to make that part. For example, the engineer was likely to
know, through experience, what tolerances the machines in his shop are capable
of, and adjust the tolerances specified on the drawing accordingly (or if the
tolerances are bigger than what is required, say "we can't make that part with
this equipment").

A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart
and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a
machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He
had to teach them.

~~~
kamaal
>>A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart
and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a
machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He
had to teach them.

This happens because no matter what you learn and how much you know in
_general_ , that doesn't say anything about ability to deliver in practical
areas of work in a small narrow fields.

You can learn everything general about programming. But pick up a new language
and you will be hitting the manual very often even to do some very trivial
tasks. Or you will like to read existing real world code in that language, to
learn the idiomatic way of doing things.

When you spend time solving real world problems in any field using any tool.
What you are basically doing is turning yourself into a 'human database' of
problems and solutions to a wide variety of problems. And you get that only by
practice and experience.

------
cryptoz
I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I
think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I
counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic
stats on the questions.

We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and
the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started
doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per
section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like
that.

I got in more trouble than I could have ever imagined. The teacher nearly
screamed at me for doing math, and threatened to take me to the principle to
have me removed from the exam permanently. She feared I was cheating, and
forbade me from doing any more math that day outside the strict testing times.

~~~
ktizo
Reminds me of my primary school's request to my parents that they stop me from
having access to books at home as it was making me difficult to teach.

~~~
domwood
Upvoted a thousand percent. This sums up everything that is wrong with
education.

(EDIT: spellchecking my dumb arse)

~~~
ktizo
My dad had to explain to them how this wasn't really achievable, even should
they want to, as he worked in libraries.

~~~
domwood
Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.

------
chime
I don't like false dichotomies like this. Why can't kids learn to do both
well? Standardized tests are akin to FizzBuzz for college entrance. If you
can't get 500/800 in the Math SATs, you will not be able to keep up in STEM
majors with others who scored 700+.

Given the real constraint of limited resources, you have to implement barriers
to entry. Standardized tests are not perfect but they serve well. Of course,
making rockets and robots is awesome so everyone should be encouraged to
explore that.

~~~
Jun8
Agreed! The situation is similar to professional organizations like ACM and
IEEE who act as gatekeeper and moneymaker for academic journals, which make
people angry (justifiably so). It's a bad solution, but you need _some_ form
of reputation management. You can't have kids who want to enroll to MIT line
up in a stadium and have them build metal boxes, or write code. However, you
can use these as _additional_ input to the standardized test scores.

Articles like this continuously bicker about standardized tests but don't
realize how much better the situation is compared with other countries, like
China, India, Japan, etc. There _nothing_ else matters other than your score,
here at least they look at your application essay, your extracurricular
activities and such.

~~~
gawker
Agreed. And in Malaysia, the mostly the only way to obtain that score is brute
memorization of facts.

------
lukeschlather
I'll preface this by saying that I hate standardized tests, but this is a good
reading comprehension question (and the author clearly has poor reading
comprehension.)

The description clearly says:

> 4\. To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens
> close to the specimen and back off focusing.

This article seems to be celebrating that people can't follow instructions
properly. If I were to get some students to play with robotics kits (which may
or may not include microscopes) step 1 would be making sure that they
understand the instructions for the kits. And a series of questions like this
seems like a pretty valid way to test that. Tests are good. I'd even say tests
can be crucial before you let kids play with expensive electronics and
explosives.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the
> kits

That's not the point of hacking.

If I were to get some students to play with robotic kits, I'd give them the
parts, instructions and let them do whatever they want. If you remove the
"discovery" part, you get something not much different than standarized test
itself. If you have kids follow instructions precisely, well, they may as well
just watch how it's done on youtube. They won't learn much more from it
anyway.

------
japhyr
There are a number of schools which are now refusing to participate in their
states' "mandated" testing. There are a number of conditions that have to be
in place for a school to take this step:

\- The school has to be really good at educating students. It has to be clear
to visitors that high-level learning is happening every day. The school must
be able to prove that all of its students make a successful transition to
their post-high-school lives. A successful transition means the student has
set goals for what they want to do after high school, and their high school
education allows them to move on to these goals.

\- Administrators, and teachers, must not fear losing their jobs. This is much
like the programming world, where the best programmers don't have to submit to
stupid managerial decisions because they can always find meaningful work
elsewhere.

PG encouraged people to replace universities in his PyCon keynote. When asked
about replacing high schools, he laughed and said something along the lines
of, "Don't touch high schools. That is way too difficult." I think we fix high
schools the same way we fix everything else on PG's list - don't attack the
big problem itself, just attack a piece of the problem. Build on your
successes, until your model of how to run high school is so compelling that
everyone else has to use it.

~~~
dreamdu5t
That requires competition. Whenever you mention competition and private
schools people scream, "But the poor children! They have no chance that way!"

------
david_shaw
Here's my simple response to a particularly complicated (and touchy) issue:
children that do extremely well on standardized tests, especially from an
early age, do not need them. If you're consistently in the 90+ percentile in
reading comprehension, critical thinking and mathematics from an early age,
you are probably not only great at standardized tests, but an intelligent
child to boot. These are the kids that should be playing with real-world
physics applications (rockets) or rudimentary robotics (Lego Mindstorm).

If, however, you're a child that does consistently _badly_ in these tests, it
probably makes sense to get the book learning straight before venturing forth
into the practical applications of math and science. After all, the point
isn't supposed to be to play with rockets, it's to understand the physics
behind them (right?).

Unfortunately, this is an unfair line to draw. Should smart kids get to play
with cool science projects while the kids who are struggling--or who were sick
on the day of the standardized test--are stuck inside studying "the basics"
needed to understand these projects? Personally, I don't think that's fair
line to draw.

The result? Everyone needs to be book smart, and hopefully, everyone should
_also_ build cool stuff with science.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Everyone is not of equal aptitude. It's not possible for everyone to be book
smart.

Your attitude about "unfairness" is part of the problem. Schools must stop
treating kids as equals when they are clearly not.

~~~
david_shaw
This issue is where it gets the most complicated for me. I absolutely agree
with you that everyone is not of equal aptitude. There are smart kids and
less-than-smart kids; athletic kids and those with two left feet. I get that,
and agree with it; anyone who doesn't is fooling themselves.

Where I believe we differ in opinion is that kids should be treated
differently--especially at a young age--because of this inequality. Different
skills develop over time, and although certainly we should have Advanced
Placement programs for those in high school, when talking about grade-
schoolers, I think that we should let skill first manifest.

Malcolm Gladwell's _Outliers_ had a pretty big impact in my formulation of
this opinion: small advantages, over time, turn into huge ones. What seems
like a minor issue at first can, through the course of a decade, become many
times compounded. This is why the Dutch school system does not separate
children into "advanced" and "slow" classes until they are at least ten years
old (forgive me if I'm misquoting the text).

Getting a low score on a test, or needing to study for twelve hours instead of
six to get an A+, should not limit a child from being able to reach for
academic excellence. In the same token, however--and this is where I think
many schools fail--the smartest children should not be held back by the less
clever ones.

So, in my opinion, if it helps foster learning to build robots and rockets,
then all children should. If it's a cool part of an Advanced Placement class
that also requires significant knowledge of an advanced subject, sure, keep it
for the "smart kids." Let's just not condemn a child to failure because of a
bad test, or a bad school year when they're young.

------
amcintyre
Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You
can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up
politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce
orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.

~~~
krschultz
Don't forget - realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized
test scores.

Why they can't just show a map of median household income (which is a pretty
good proxy for standardized test scores) is beyond me.

~~~
tokenadult
_realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores._

Note that this phoniness about living in one place being a guarantee of a
child's school success is so ingrained among real estate agents that they
still talk like that even in Minnesota, where there is statewide public school
open enrollment, such that the school district where I live has students come
in from FORTY-ONE other school districts' territories, including neighborhoods
with radically different socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are always
looking for some easy proxy for school quality. Power to shop here in
Minnesota is helping somewhat in focusing parents' attention on what really
matters. (For example, there are more and more school districts now that are
adopting the Singapore Primary Mathematics series

[http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....](http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39.htm)

as elementary mathematics textbooks.)

What's really difficult today is finding out which schools offer genuine added
value above what any child could get from an involved set of parents who value
education. (This is why I homeschool, even in my apparently very desirable
school district, which we live in for employment-based reasons irrespective of
the school system.) The interesting article that you kindly submitted here
makes the case that young people should do more in youth than what can boil
down to answering pencil-and-paper questions on standardized tests, and I
agree, and that is another reason we homeschool--to have time for more hands-
on, constructive activities. But I will point out that is not an either-or
forced choice, as several other comments have also pointed out to you. Indeed,
sometimes open-ended projects favor children from wealthy families much more
than student evaluation based on learning 3 R subjects that can be tested by
standardized tests. The people in my generation in Taiwan were very proud of
their standardized test system. When I first went over to Taiwan in 1982,
several people pointed out to me that the president's son failed the college
entrance exams--in other words, the examination system was above political
corruption, fairly administered to all. It certainly served as a path to
higher education for many young people who grew up in third-world poverty and
had little by way of spare resources for doing projects with anything but
school resources. (There IS project-based learning in all the schools of east
Asia, contrary to the impression of many Americans, but rather than an either-
or forced choice, those schools have a both-and of projects for all, and
rigorous standardized tests for all.)

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make the tests relevant and well
written, and accurately scored, and make the 3 R's learning in school
efficient enough to allow time for challenging projects. And if the school is
resistant to improvement, promote power to shop on the part of parents to
nudge schools to do better, and meanwhile get your own children a good
education however you can, even if it means that they learn outside school.

------
protomyth
Who exactly is going to teach children to build rockets and robots? As a
country we have pretty much run all the vocational teachers out of the
schools. The vocational teachers were good because most did contracting during
the summer. Add to this the decline in schools teaching programming[1]. We
need to figure a way to get qualified technical / vocational people back into
the schools and realize that they need to paid more because of demand in their
field.

Standardized tests suck, but they suck less than every other way we have to
measure schools in a country-wide manner.

[1] I am wondering where the next generation of programmers is going to come
from.

~~~
simonbrown
[1] Training?

~~~
protomyth
by who? when?

~~~
simonbrown
By employers.

------
bgentry
From TFA:

 _It failed to convey that the whole purpose of having a microscope is to see
things that you can’t see with the naked eye._

Umm, the 2nd sentence in the all-caps introduction:

 _BY PRODUCING A MAGNIFIED IMAGE, THE MICROSCOPE REVEALS DETAILS THAT ARE
UNDETECTABLE TO THE NAKED EYE_

I understand that the author is trying to make a point, but proving his
incompetence in a simple reading comprehension example does not help his case.

------
finfun
I have 5 implementable ideas how to bring out schools into the 21st century:

1) Let children solve real world problems. They learn skills that they can use
in most every job.

2) Let the children decide which problem they want to tackle. Excellent skills
to have: Coming up with ideas, convincing your fellow students to focus the
rest of the year on that one problem and focusing on the solution for the rest
of the school year. [I can't wait to find out what they will do.]

3) Share the problem, proposed solution as well as the whole process on the
web with the world Wikipedia style. We live in a networked world, let’s use
that opportunity to the fullest. Track progress weekly for a great review at
the end of the year and for others to learn from everyones else’s progress.

4) Big hand-over of the solution via a presentation in front of students,
teachers, parents, … Great skill to have to be able to present your ideas and
solution in front of a larger audience.

5) Project Fridays: Every Google employees is allowed to focus 20% of their
time on a project of their choosing. Let’s do the same with our children in
school. 20% is the equivalent to one school day a week. Let’s do it on Friday.

My hope is that the first thing the children will do is create the environment
for them to tinker to try out solutions in their schools.

Just presented these 5 ideas at TEDx Creative Coast too:
[http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay-
tedxcc-5-id...](http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay-
tedxcc-5-ideas-that-bring-our-schools-into-the-21st-century/)

Please join the movement to make our schools come alive:
<http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/05/hello-world/>

Thanks, Mark.

~~~
mcpie
Most of those ideas are nice, but not very practical. Some thoughts:

1) Real, actual, real world problems can't be solved in a class room. They are
solved in 'the real world', i.e. business and government. Business and
government won't let kids have a go at such things because it's too expensive,
risky and messy. Companies continually complain about young employees' lack of
(VET/STEM)skills, yet when it comes down to it they're really not prepared to
run the risk that comes with having young kids (not) solving their actual
problems. Now, schools could 'simulate' real problems, and do try to do that,
but it's enormously expensive and difficult and not very practical. Also, in
our services-based economy most problems are solved through repetitive
procedures. This is why there's such a focus on 'transversal' skills these
days. Learning how to do look up information, read texts etc are important
skills to have. They're the foundation underpinning those transversal skills.
The idea is to not let kids learn about just one problem, but about a basic
skill set that can be applied to any problem. Combine this focus with the
hesitancy of companies, and you can see why these dreaded standardized tests
come enter the equation...

2) Many schools already do this or try to do this. The problem is that there
are some essential skills kids need to learn, which cannot be removed from the
curriculum. Teaching those skills takes up a lot of time. This is why there is
little room for such 'free play' in a class room. Creativity is wonderful and
essential, but very hard to consistently implement in schools. Especially with
the complaints that todays students lack the basics: math&english.

3) Schools already track progress. It's the one thing schools are actually
pretty good at, and it has led to a complete focus on metrics that has had the
unfortunate side effect of making the test results more important than actual
learning outcomes and skills. This is also why I'm pretty cynical about web-
based learning: a metrics based system breeds metrics based testing, schooling
and studying. IT is a nice luxury, but not (yet?) the solution to our
problems. 4) I like this idea. Especially involving the parents. 5) This is
really the same idea as option 2. The same issues apply there. I agree that
kids should do projects and have so leeway in their choices, but you
underestimate the real world problems teachers encounter in a class room. Most
students are in fact NOT responsible, smart or capable enough to choose a
(relevant, teachable, educational) project and tackle it. Add social problems,
broken families, shitty reading comprehension and problem kids to the equation
and you can see why this doesn't work for most students. It's a great idea for
excellent students though - add it to the curriculum for the better students
who do well on tests anyway and it would be fantastic. In fact, don't do it on
Fridays. Let them do projects based on what the rest of the class is doing.
When everybody else is learning about the planets and the moon, give those
'smart' kids an advanced project about planetary movements and let them
present the results to the class.

------
blhack
Don't get this stuff backwards.

Schools don't need to build metalshops and have children go through rote
construction of standard pieces. That's _the exact same thing_ as standardized
testing, we just like it more because we're hackers.

What we need are more fab labs: <http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/>

and hackerspaces.

What we really need is for my city to give a $1 Million endowment to my local
hackerspace so that we can properly redo our electrical infrastructure, buy
more tools, and run more classes.

And then we need every other city in the country to find similar programs, and
nurture them in the same way.

Every single time a kid walks past our lab and starts oogling our display
windows, somebody comes out front and gets them inside for a tour.

If it's me touring, and their parents allow it, every single one of them gets
to press the go buttons on our HUGE laser cutter, and gets to take home an
example of a time that they built something in a hackerspace using a big scary
industrial tool: they make a stencil of their name.

That's HUGE.

AND IT WORKS. Remember that kid that was on the front page of a bunch of
things shooting marshmallows with the president? He hangs out in our lab.
Another of the kids at our lab gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix (which is just
like TEDx) about 3d printers (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyZxzkd-Jsk>).

These kids are freaking _awesome_! I wish there were 10 of our labs in
Phoenix.

I'm sorry, but the school system is broken. There are a few teachers doing
beautiful things, but they're few and far between. In my 12 years in the
system, I met one of them.

How many high schools would let me stick around in the shop until 4:00am
building? None? How many would give a 12 year old kids' dad a keycard that
gets him in 24/7 to use industrial machines, DSOs, SCARY POWER SUPPLIES etc.

Would my high school teacher have been fired if people knew she let me and my
friends stay in the computer lab fucking with linux until all hours?

Probably.

Except _that_ fuckery, the thing my teacher probably could have been fired
for, was one of the most important experiences of my high school education.

That's...bad.

We don't need to fix the school system. We need a new system entirely.

OH! I wrote an article about exactly this a couple of years ago:
<http://newslily.com/blogs/104>

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Where is your front located that you have so many kids walking by? My
hackerspace is located in the back of a high-end furniture store so we don't
get that many kids that walk by unfortunately.

~~~
blhack
We're on a main street in an old clothing store.

Here is one of our members giving a video tour:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IMRXXNs1DPU)

------
zwieback
My experience with my kids education (Oregon, 4th and 6th) is that there is
some standardized testing but there's a ton of hands-on project work. In fact,
I think there's maybe too little rigor and too many poster boards and research
projects. They definitely learn how to develop ideas, research and present
them, that's great.

An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available
information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if
standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep
thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.

------
bennesvig
The inventor of the bubble test wanted to get them removed from schools as a
measure of testing knowledge.

[http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/he-invented-
bubble-...](http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/he-invented-bubble-tests-
but-not-for-this/1195625)

------
CognitiveLens
I'm amazed at the short-sightedness apparent in this article and in some of
the comments here. Yes, the American public education system is broken and is
to a large extent too focused on poorly-constructed standardized testing, but
imagining that 1) the system used to be better for students, 2) the resources
exist for universal project-based learning/assessment, and 3) project-based
learning/assessment would fix many/most of the problems ignores the reality of
the education system as a whole.

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

From the article, the question provided is about technical reading
comprehension; it has nothing to do with learning how to use a microscope. The
text states, "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the
lens close to the specimen...". The question is NOT testing your knowledge of
how to use a microscope, it's testing whether you can read an instruction
manual, which is actually an important skill that can be difficult to assess
through project-based learning. Standardized tests try to package the
assessment of a wide range of fundamental skills into a relatively contained,
_standardized_ format so that skills are evaluated relative to some clear
standard as opposed to each individual teacher's ability to identify the
strengths and weaknesses of each of their students. Secondly, the article
states that "Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they
are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom." Tell me
about a time when the biggest problem in schools was not boredom (or worse).
This statement attempts to recall a mythical golden age of education
excellence that can be recaptured if only schools could "remember". This is
not a memory problem. Public education has become a much more complex beast
over the past few decades, and the system is struggling to adapt, not remember
how to teach.

There are over a million high school teachers in the US. How many of them
could competently replace their core curriculum with project-based learning?
What about the ones with 40 students in a classroom? What if half of those
students don't have basic English language skills? What if 2-3 of those
students have behavior problems and regularly destroy the projects of others?

This is just a tiny sample of the challenges that educators and education
researchers are trying to address, and the "make robots" solution only
addresses a few problems with the current system while introducing many
others. Importantly, there are _hundreds_ , if not thousands, of such
initiatives across the country to introduce more hands-on learning. Education
research is not only identifying the most effective interactive, project-based
teaching methods, but actually working with schools to implement them
effectively. This is a long-term, resource-intensive, ongoing development in
education, and it will take awhile to get it right. Trust me, the benefits of
project-based learning identified by this article are old news in a lot of
progressive education research, but the actual implementation is a far more
complex problem, and one that requires understanding the useful role of
standardized testing as well as its disadvantages.

~~~
Tichy
"Standardized tests try to package the assessment of a wide range of
fundamental skills into a relatively contained, standardized format so that
skills are evaluated relative to some clear standard"

Ultimately, what is the point, though? Almost every day there are articles
about hiring on Hacker News. Not once have I read the advice to look at the
results of the applicant in the standardized school tests. If the test results
are not relevant in the real world, why cripple education by aligning it with
the necessity to do such standardized tests.

I think at least for HN affine companies, "I have build a robot" would be a
much better selling point than "I have high marks on the standard test".
Intuitively somebody having too high marks might even raise my suspicions
(little creativity and drive, just does what he is told without questioning it
etc.). Which is of course unfair, some people are simply good. But it is an
emotion that arises.

~~~
CognitiveLens
Standardized tests serve a number of roles in public education, very few of
which relate to either enhancing or testing a student's ability to get a job.

The main applications relate to checking in on students' progress through the
education system relative to their peers. It is also a way to compare the
performance of particular groups of students (or schools) relative to others,
which is very controversial, but obviously easier than trying to judge the
quality of the robots they produce.

By far the greatest advantage of standardized tests over other assessment
methods is that they scale beautifully. When you want to ask the question "how
are we as a country/state/district doing compared to others", standardized
tests provide a reasonably easy-to-interpret, reliable reference point. It's
not just about what a test score says about an individual student (which
ultimately is very little), but what the test scores indicate in aggregate.

~~~
Tichy
None of these seem to benefit the actual students/pupils much, though? What
would happen if kids could pick the schools they want to go to themselves?

------
byoung2
Having spent a decade of my life in for-profit education, specifically
standardized test preparation (Sylvan, Kaplan, College Network, Grockit,
Veritas Prep), I can say that there is more data that could be collected from
tests. For example, instead of looking who got the "right" answer, you could
look at which wrong answers people selected and why. For example, students who
chose "A" probably have experience with microscopes, perhaps don't read
instructions carefully.

More interestingly, you could learn a lot about a student's thought process by
analyzing the time spent on a particular question, or whether they chose
another answer choice before settling on one, or whether It's possible that
the computer adaptive exams (GRE, GMAT, NCLEX, etc.) take this into account
because the computer can collect this data, but paper and pencil tests simply
cannot.

A student who chose answer choice "A" after 5 seconds is probably careless or
overconfident, whereas a student who chose "A" after a minute of waffling
between "A" and "C" possibly lacks confidence.

I think standardized tests could become a lot more useful if we could collect
more data from them.

~~~
simonbrown
How would this data be used?

~~~
saraid216
Ideally, as student feedback.

------
macspoofing
Yes, they should be. It also would be nice if they had personalized attention
of highly qualified education professionals, as well. But they don't. The
unions, bureaucracy, politics, and funding is what it is.

~~~
kbolino
I think you are unwittingly peddling an insidious idea that may be just as
bad, if not worse, than standardized testing.

A "highly qualified education professional" is a disinterested drone whose
only accomplishments were meeting the arcane state requirements for a teaching
certificate. If you're really lucky, they might have been adept at stringing
together a bunch of useless "research" conclusions into incoherent prose in
order to impress an academic who hasn't taught in any meaningful sense for
decades.

The qualities that make for a good teacher--intelligence, patience, curiosity,
and creativity--are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a "highly
qualified education professional."

~~~
gavinlynch
I agree with you on the academia aspect, and it sounds like you are referring
mostly to higher education, right? Or else, why would we want those from
academia teaching our children in middle school and high school.

"intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity"

Are those really the qualities of a good teacher? In my mind, I don't really
care of the teacher is curious or intelligent. I just want them to know how to
deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible. It would
be nice if the children were engaged, and if the teacher had a clever way to
even make it "fun" at times, great. But it's not a prerequisite.

~~~
kbolino
>>> it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right?

Actually, no. The qualifications for becoming a professor are generally:
doctoral degree in subject + publications to name. At least where I live, the
requirements for becoming a teacher are generally: approved course of study
(in education, not necessarily subject areas) + baccalaureate degree +
teaching certificate.

>>> I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the
most efficient way possible.

Then what you want is Google, or Wikipedia, or a good textbook. When, however,
it comes time to teach your child how to find the information, how to assess
it critically, how to reason about it, and how to use it effectively, then you
need a teacher.

Also, teachers play the important role of exposing students to ideas and
information that they would not otherwise be searching for, and thus to
cultivate previously unknown interests and foster an appreciation for
learning.

------
bootload
By 4 poking speakers with pencils, by 7 burning raw sulphur to investigate the
blue flame & burning holes in test tubes, by 8 taking photos of bugs &
crystals down microscopes, by 9 re-wiring light switches into 240 volts, by 10
hacking electric motors with propellers, by 12 building & flying balloons &
model aircraft & programming.

------
Retric
Sorry, but I thought that was a great question. If you have ever used a
microscope before it's obvious and if you have not you can still figure it out
in under 30 seconds of logical thought.

~~~
maxerickson
It's also explicitly stated in the fourth caution item.

The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that
students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of
self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that
aren't real exciting.

To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive.
Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when
they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before
they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher
level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).

~~~
Retric
I agree, but assume standardized testing takes a full 2 days / year and you
either do it every 4 years (3th, 9th, 11th) or every year. Well every year
costs an extra 2 days on 3 / 4 years and assuming 180 school days a year
that's (2*3/4)/180 = 0.83%.

So, yea it's probably not that useful, but if you want to get upset over
something focus on the terrible quality of textbooks or something that can
have a slightly larger impact. Even the school lunch program has a larger
impact on student performance.

PS: Or just mandate that standardized testing does not count as part of the
minimum required instruction time per year.

~~~
maxerickson
Good news is I'm not terrifically upset about it.

I did carefully leave "standardized" out of my comment. I have a problem with
the whole process of present->practice->see what stuck. It has been the most
practical method for teaching large groups of people for a long time, but I
think there is a lot of potential in using adaptive testing to mechanize the
evaluation and tracking of what students understand, which hopefully leads to
students getting more and better personal attention.

------
stretchwithme
That photo says it all. Someone that's actually made something has confidence
that cannot be instilled by positive, "you're a winner" affirmations. The
individual is left with joy, not relief at having suffered through it.

The most important thing to be learned is that you can. And the most important
thing that you can do is do.

------
grannyg00se
I find it hard to believe that the author had trouble with the question. The
answer is provided perfectly in the supplied text. If I say that dogs bark
when they are cold and then ask a five year old why dogs bark I think I'd be
pretty disappointed if they couldn't regurgitate what I just said. Is it so
different when written rather than spoken? Can we really be sure that this is
a reading comprehension problem as opposed to a basic reading and language
problem? I'd like to see if the students who got it wrong could even read the
full text. If they can't read it then it is nothing to do with comprehension.
They just can't read.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's the way we're killing thinking in children.

If I say that dogs bark when they're cold and then ask a five year old why
dogs bark, I'd expect something like, "when they're cold! and when they're
angry! and when Amy [sister of this 5yo] steps on his tail, hahaha". Or
whatever. Reality is not bound by what someone written or said few moments
ago. If you want to test reading comprehension, you _have_ to control for
prior experience in the subject which might be (and probably often is) greater
than test author's.

------
dinkumthinkum
Just because you can compete in some rocket building competition or can
program your Arduino to light an a 3x3x3 LED cube does not mean you have
achieved a knowledge level to be successful in STEM. It's the details; I would
think that our community would recognize that the most.

Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence to
many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't mean you
understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that are Knuth's
"Art," right?

It's fun to say "Who cares about solving these dumb, boring algebra problems,
I can build a rocket by researching most of the things on the Internet." Sure
someone who builds these kinds of things is probably more intelligent or
perhaps had the chance to be more technical than your average everyday
American but when you get into the details, I think we're talking about people
that will successful in STEM and I just don't take seriously this romanticism
of "project based learning."

I mean, just because you can follow directions and build a rocket, doesn't
mean you're going to be fit to work as a Quant or something like that. This
just seems obvious to me.

Of course, it goes without saying that you probably should have these kinds of
projects. Definitely. These are great experiences. I doubt computer science
would have even existed if people just had the attitude that "book learning"
was for the birds or whatever and just "built stuff."

~~~
TeMPOraL
> Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence
> to many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't
> mean you understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that
> are Knuth's "Art," right?

But not programming a pong game and just learning from the book also doesn't
mean you _understand_ serious computer concepts. I've seen examples of it at
my university. "Understand" does not mean "repeat it on the next test", nor
does it mean "repeat the definition you memorized from the book". It means
being able to manipulate the concept in your mind, to infer consequences, to
think of alternatives, and most importantly, to put it into use.

So my belief still is that bulding stuff correlates with understanding more,
than book-learning alone. (I'm not saying builders don't learn - they do, but
not what they're told when they're told, but what they need when they need
it).

------
Swizec
As a guy who's just been building a robot for a class instead of doing an exam
- YES PLEASE!

But I'm probably not a "kid" anymore and college exams have never been all
that standardized ...

------
ericssmith
I'm opposed to standardized tests more than most people, however I have to
take issue with this article. The author of this article stated early on that
this was a 'reading comprehension question', and then goes onto to critique
the question as if it was about learning about microscopes. He also says that
he 'couldn't figure it out' by guessing. He should've tried reading.

As an aside, I did know the correct answer because I had been trained numerous
times on microscope use. I didn't even look at the question until after
reading the rest of the article. The test makers wouldn't have been testing my
reading comprehension. I suspect this would be true of most people who got the
correct answer. Interestingly, anyone who has been trained in taking such
tests knows to read the answers first, as well as to guess the correct one.
Then scan the actual question to find the relevant bit, as well as the
'trick', if it exists.

Like many people, I believe this author confuses learning with being a
student. A student's job is to be a student, and that includes trying to score
higher than average on tests by any legal means. Learning is something else
altogether, and I have my doubts about being able to get far with that in an
institutionalized setting.

~~~
danielweber
I'm not too opposed to standardized tests, but I completely agree that they
don't teach. That's what the rest of school is for. Saying "tests don't teach"
is almost a tautology.

(Okay, when there is a reading comprehension section you will often learn
something. That's just a bonus, though.)

------
mncolinlee
I should point out that several top tech innovators were trained, not in
traditional boring schools, but in Montessori. These schools emphasize the
Learn By Doing model without grades or tests.

Look at the minds produced: Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google, Amazon's
Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, etc.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-
montessori-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-
mafia/)

------
jaldoretta
I think a lot of these comments are focusing on the wrong part of the text. I
think what the author is really trying to convey is that taking standardized
tests is not going to make a child want to grow up to build rockets or robots.

I'm a mechanical engineer and attended a technical university, and from my
experience, most of the other students in technical fields are ones that grew
up with an innate interest in building things and creating things. Not all
children do things like that in their spare time. And not all parents give
their children the opportunity to do things like that in their spare time.

Spending time in school taking standardized tests instead of performing
scientific experiments and building things makes children bored with science
and math. It is, very sadly, a wasted opportunity. Most children have no idea
how exciting science and technology can be. All they know is sitting in class,
reading books, working boring problems.

When a child gets to high school and starts applying (or not applying) for
colleges, they are going to choose a subject that they remember being
interesting. Most children that I have met do not find taking tests and
reading about science to be interesting.

If children were more involved in the learning process through hands-on
experiences, imagine the kind of excitement that would be generated among the
young people. Imagine the kinds of things we would be capable of as a species
if there were more people excited and invested in science and technology.

I realize that most of the readers of Hacker News were probably the children
that grew up wanting to build and create. But there are so many children out
there who need to be inspired in order to succeed, and those are the ones that
are being failed by our flawed education system.

------
Jgrubb
Why does Slate magazine hate me so much that they made every possible attempt
to move my eye away from the article I was trying to read?

------
libraryatnight
I liked the article but I couldn't take issue with the test question.

Is it a sign of a certain way of thinking that I read the test question, read
the provided instructions, answered correctly, and then wondered how on earth
anyone could miss a question where the answer is printed above?

I'm not being snarky or mean spirited, I honestly do not understand how anyone
- whether they'd used a microscope or not - could look at a piece of provided
text, look at a question regarding the text, and then answer incorrectly when
a multiple choice selection is provided that is essentially snipped verbatim
from the source text that addresses the question exactly. They literally give
the answer. I used to wonder this when I took standardized tests as a kid,
too.

Are they preying indecisiveness, or trying to make them feel it's a trick
question? Maybe that's where I should be taking issue? That if they were
familiar with a microscope they'd feel more confident in choosing the clear
answer?

------
beefman
Comments here so far seem to agree that the article goes too far, that we need
both abstract and experiential learning in schools, and the article
misunderstood the purpose of the microscope test question (reading
comprehension).

Yes, we do need both abstract and experiential learning. But we need different
ratios of them at different ages. Teenagers are much better at abstract
learning than young children, and young children are much better at learning
_skills_ than teenagers or adults. That is why young children can be piano
prodigies, become multilingual, etc. There is nothing wrong with book
learning, but it is currently close to 100% of the school day in our
elementary schools. At least 50% of class time should be devoted to practicing
skills at this age -- painting, singing, playing drums, athletics, building
robots. With four years to learn something like physics in university, 100%
book learning makes more sense.

------
hack_edu
Kids should be building rockets and robots, not making iPhone apps.

------
mmaunder
Not sure that the article conveys the message well, but I agree vehemently
with the sentiment of the article's sub-heading (the title of the HN post).
Standardized tests do a great job of ensuring we end up with standardized kids
that will safely perpetuate the status quo.

~~~
krschultz
As a side note - I can tell Slate A/B tests their headlines because I
originally read this on a mobile device with one header, then opened it on my
desktop and it had a different header. The subheader was constant so I chose
that as the title for this submission.

------
eragnew
After attending the Seattle Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, all I can say
is that I agree 100% with OP. You internalize the lessons much more thoroughly
when you actively (rather than passively) participate in the learning process.

The kids were the happiest people at the Faire, because they hadn't convinced
themselves yet that they couldn't build these things. They were excited. It
was great to see.

Pessimism is for suckers :)

------
jpiasetz
Title is misleading. Articles seems to be picking on one particular
standardized test. Does anyone want to invest in a startup that doesn't
believe in collecting metrics let alone A/B testing? Why would anyone besides
the teachers union advocate for no standardizing tests then? Sure testing
sucks in a lot of places but that's not an argument against the idea of
benchmarking.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not. You make what you measure. But it works both ways, because it's a
feedback loop (otherwise measurements would be useless).

And standarized test are poorly calibrated to real understanding and makes the
whole school system produce more and more dumb kids with each year.

------
harrylove
How Schools Kill Creativity (2006)
[http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

Summary: Around the world, our present education system was set up to meet the
needs of the industrial revolution, it does not meet our current needs, and
certainly won't meet our future needs.

------
bencevans
I agree to a point but I believe everything should be project base so people
are given problems to solve in all subjects.

The reason for this is people get a better understanding of how to manage
something properly and something that people can get stuck into rather than
knowledge just being thrown at students without learning skills required to
actually put the knowledge into action.

------
taliesinb
I have a relevant story about the topic of this post. It's actually my life
story.

When I was about 12 or 13 I dropped out of school.. I was too bored, too
frustrated, and too unhappy to actually stomach it any longer: the unsightly
pleasure adults took in dominating children, the teachers who knew less than I
did but refused to admit it, the way smart kids often ended up at the bottom
of the pecking order... The only thing I enjoyed was writing simple QBasic
games for my friends and me to play.

After a protracted fight with my parents (I actually went on strike on the
roof of our house) I got what I wanted and they let me drop out of school.
This was probably the best single decision of my life, and the credit really
goes to them for being brave enough to allow it.

I started out teaching myself C++ templates, and the basics of electronics. I
got obsessed with high voltage, and started dumpster diving to find good
parts. Once, after I took a (harmless) 40kV shock, my mom started to worry
she'd come back from her teaching job to find me dead on the floor. I
convinced her I knew the actual parameters of heart stoppage well enough to
avoid this!

I built plasma globes and an improvised vacuum pump. I started rewiring our
telephone lines. I made an amplifier. I built a coil gun and tuned it using my
computer's sound card as a digital storage oscilloscope. I taught myself
Python, and dived into the theory of digital signal processing.

I even had the good fortune of acquiring some Perl contract work through a
family friend. Using the money to buy my own computer at 14 was probably the
most satisfying experience of my life. Old school-friends would come to visit
and oggle my enormous 21" CRT. That made me realize that I didn't have to
follow the ordinary rules to survive in this world.

All the while I took distance education courses, a measure my parents insisted
on (luckily). When I got high grades on A-level physics, I got the opportunity
to attend university. Still a year young, I ended up studying pure math at the
best math university on my continent (lots of Soviet bloc math emigres who
moved to Africa for the sun).

The weirdest contradiction for me was hanging out with many of the other
"nerdy kids" in math and physics who had gone the traditional route, and
finding out that they really weren't all that interested in what they were
doing. They seemed to be more consumed with perpetuating their high marks.
Most frustrating of all was that achieving those high marks often boiled down
to the most 'mercenary' kind of pillaging of old exam papers -- actual
understanding didn't have much bearing on it.

Pure math was different -- you really had to think, be creative, and
understand things to achieve good grades, at least in the more advanced
courses. And sure enough, that was the one discipline I got very good grades
in. But funnily enough, only when it got hard. For the first 2 years I didn't
realize I had any interest in math at all.

By and large, my experience of formal education is best summed up by one
little anecdote: I once handed in a 3rd-year physics practical in which I had
taken an extraordinary large amount of care: I did the experiment several
times because to better resolution on the spectrometer, I researched error
propagation and did a more principled error analysis, I wrote it up carefully
in LaTeX, and so on.

I got a mediocre grade for the practical. In fact, my explanation of how I had
used a genetic algorithm to fit Gaussians to the spectrographic peaks had the
word 'genetic' crossed out and replaced with 'generic' -- the ignorant tutor
thought I had just misspelled it!

In contrast, a classmate put some last-minute work together that had
(illegitimately) small error bars, and got 90%. At that point I lost interest
in getting good grades in that subject, and stopped trying.

There is a happy ending: industry proved to be very meritocratic indeed. And
my current job means I can actually bring all this random knowledge I have to
bear, and bootstrap my way into new fields (like, recently, graphical models).

What are my conclusion here? I think the main conclusions are:

* Teaching yourself on your own has the benefit that you get used to doing what you do because you love it, not because people reward you for it. And this is what really matters in the end.

* Metrics to reward behavior will _almost always_ tend to corrupt the behavior they are meant to be promoting (this has been enshrined as <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_law>). Grades are _the_ best example of this.

------
puranjay
There are kids who want to build rockets, write plays and create art. Then
there are kids who want to get jobs in IBM and HP.

I think we ought to give both these kids an equal opportunity to get what they
want. It's wrong to assume that we all want to create; some of us are happy
handling the running and the finances of someone else's creation.

------
droithomme
I agree with the article and would go further. In the modern era of
information availability and the incredibly high quality of online courses and
resources, school is obsolete for all but the really dumb kids that just
aren't motivated because their parents are stupid or on drugs.

~~~
jkn
In the modern era of more and more families having only one child, I don't
think replacing school by online learning at home is a good idea. Children
need to be exposed to other children, kids with diverse backgrounds if
possible.

Also, there is a time to be free and focus exclusively on what you like, but
I'd rather have kids exposed to a variety of disciplines first.

Perhaps more importantly, I would not trust most parents to provide a good
learning environment to their children, especially in poor families.

And online learning might be the most efficient for some students but I expect
that other students benefit a lot from the personal contact with a teacher.
Ideally we should be able to give each student what works best for her.

------
onemoment
People are talking about how this test is biased against poor kids and how
kids with no context won't understand. Does anyone here know of a middle
school without microscopes? I went to a poor grade school and we had
microscopes (granted they were old)

------
k-mcgrady
What is with the deluge of articles telling people what they should do? If
people want to build rockets, robots, or learn to code they can. They should
be doing what excites them and interests them whether thats science, writing,
music, or coding.

------
donniezazen
Answer is simple, a bigger population will require pruning and leaving few
people behind, natural selection through standardized test. In a smaller
popular, individuals will get to decide their interests and future.

------
johnchristopher
Well.. if 60% of pupils got the answer wrong, given the full explanation
before the multiple choice answers, maybe it has more to do with reading
ability than STEM disposition or method of questionning :/

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except that in real-life I wouldn't put the lens too close to the glass,
because a) the microscope seems (by the description) to be able to crush the
glass, and b) I wouldn't bet on myself remembering which way to turn the knob
to raise the lens instead of lowering it.

IMO this is a thinking vs. saying what they want you to say problem. It pops
up often when a kid has more experience with subject matter than the test
author.

~~~
johnchristopher
I can only speak from personnal experience: the first time I used a microscope
I did break a glass by trying to zoom in first. I had no manual but I wouldn't
have read it anyway (nowadays I do read instructions before using anything).
When I read this particular article I "played" the game and answered correctly
(hooray for me). I agree this kind of test has nothing to do with STEM because
it is interchangeable and could be devised for any courses ; my point is that
it's "just" a comprehensive reading test and if you fail it it means you fail
at comprehensive reading which is one of the most basic skills one pupil
should acquire. I agree it has nothing to do with validating specific STEM
knowledge but nevertheless the explanations are correct and useful in the STEM
field and understanding them is important. Now, if american science courses
are only about those kind of tests it's a little bit concerning: Scoring A's
in every courses just because you understand the questions versus scoring A
because you understand the courses.

Not: I am not american so I don't know how education is organised in the US.

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bhewes
A standardized test is bureaucratic mechanism of control. It is a way to grade
and rank a whole populace with a simple abstraction. They have nothing to do
with learning.

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pcote
A lot of the discussion here focuses on critical thinking development which is
an interesting topic. Does compulsory testing or even compulsory education in
general do children any service in that regard? Are critical thinking skills
better developed when a kid's education is self-directed? I think these are
all fair questions.

Personally, I'm a fan of self-directed learning but that doesn't mean I'm
right. Still, it strikes me that teaching people to think critically is like
teaching them to be happy or to love. It seems kind of difficult to quantify.

~~~
pcote
Someone didn't like my comment. Fair enough. I'll put it another way.

Are children, left to their own devices, naturally deficient when it comes to
critical thinking?

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tete
"American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized
tests."

I agree on anything, but the first word. ;)

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run4yourlives
Standardized tests aren't there to measure students, they are there to measure
teachers.

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wqfeng
I think Udacity does a good job on this learning by making.

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api
Education is remarkably outdated.

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planetguy
Article fails to take into account the full intellectual diversity of the
students in the average classroom.

Some students need to build rockets and robots. Others need standardized tests
to make sure they can read.

