This week was the start of the WASL testing for something like 85,000 students in Washington. Apparently this is the first year that the WASL will be official used to gauge a students performance against a set of standards.
I have been reading a book called “A Whole New Mind“. Author Daniel Pink is arguing that we are moving from the ‘information age’ to the ‘conceptual age’. The information age has been dominated by knowledge workers who excel at ‘left brain’ thinking. They are programmers, accountants, engineers. The conceptual age will be led by right brain thinking, people who excel at creativity, empathy, design, art, etc… Of course Right brain vs. Left brain is a metaphorical construct that Pink uses to paint his ideas since no person is in reality fully right brained or left brained in their thinking (although I think I know a few people who come close to one or the other extreme).
Pink talks about what he calls the SAT-ocracy; an outdated system of left-brain oriented standardized testing. The SAT and similar tests arguably creates barriers for those who do not excel at left brain specialties such as math, logic, sequential thinking, calculation. Interestingly, though, recent studies have shown that only 4 to 10 percent of job success is dependant on a persons IQ, at least how we traditionally understand IQ as measure of a persons left brain prowess.
Even more interesting is a study being run by at the UW called The Rainbow Project, which seeks to measure and quantify skills related to right brain thinking by asking students to write creative stories based on a given title (e.g. write a story whose title is “The Lion who Squeaked”), and by placing them in social situations such as trying to convince a group to help move a large piece of furniture. According to Pink the early results have shown the test to be twice as successful over the SAT at predicting a students success in college, and the performance gap between whites and minorities narrows as compared to the SAT. The point of the study is not to replace the SATs, but to supplement in order to provide a better picture of person’s strengths and talents.
I don’t remember my SAT scores, I know they were not terrible, but not stellar either. I do know that they helped overcome barriers that allowed me entrance into the UW. I also know that little of what I remember being tested on has had any bearing on my college career, work, or life in general. I appreciate Pink’s book as it is helping me provide a framework for understanding how I am wired to favor right brain thinking. As my daughter grows it will be interesting to learn how we can encourage her creative and ‘emotional’ intelligence. Of course she may turn out to be a logical genius who excels at systems analysis, but based on her parents genetics I don’t forsee that happening.
