STANDARDIZATION
Standardized testing and Common Core State and National Standards are giving standardization a bad name. Standardization has many facets that are necessary for the conduct of everyday life. Consider what would be happening if we did not have standard time; would the bus schedule be so complicated that it would be incomprehensible? Would the buses arrive at a predictable time?
Standardizing our road signs across state lines has its usefulness. A stop sign means stop. This standard is applied to everyone and a violation of this will bring about a predictable response. Examples of standardization go on and on in an enlightened society. Even our Constitution is an example of standardizing the criteria for guiding the conduct of our political affairs; it is based on a set of principles that are considered important and consistent with democratic ideals and justice for everyone. Even though this standard of conduct is often debated, the Supreme Court is responsible to decide legal matters that come before its review.
The standardized tests used in today’s schools and the standard core curriculum proposed for each and every child, violate sound principles of learning, biological development, the nature of motivation, group processes and communication, and the nature of knowledge and knowing. Principles that are based on validated and shared insights that are continuously drawn from scholarly literature and research, offer legitimate standards to be applied to the school and the conduct of education.
In contrast, what is being proposed and underway is a movement that is grossly in violation of sound principles. The legitimacy of this movement must be questioned from this perspective and placed in its proper context. It is not standardization that is at fault, it is the application of standard criteria that are based on faulty assumptions and arbitrary, politically-endorsed and business-motivated procedures.
Current standardized tests and testing, and the standardization of common core subjects, are based on standards that are in error. Imposing a common core of pre-defined information, however important it may be considered to be, is to subordinate the individual learner to the arbitrary biases of a pre-ordained few. This position relegates students to second-class citizenship and fails to provide widespread motivation for learning.
Let’s join in an effort to standardize an assessment, recordkeeping and evaluation procedure that will guarantee an open-ended process, allowing individual creativity, and demonstrate the ability to determine how creative products meet a legitimate and dynamic standard.
One way of doing this can be found in the “Constructive Assessment, Record-Keeping and Evaluation System” (Cares)© Robert L. Arnold. Utilizing the latest communication and electronic storage technologies, this system treats every individual as an individual, capable of constructing meaning in life as it is experienced within and outside of school, every day of the year throughout one’s lifetime. The products of this system are judged against criteria that are consistent with sound principles of learning, biological development, the nature of motivation, group processes and communication, and the nature of knowledge and knowing. The result of its use is sustainable competency that leads to the development of effective problem solving abilities and improved personal health.
THE DANGERS OF ILL-CONCEIVED STANDARDIZATION, STANDARDIZED TESTS, AND A STANDARDIZED COMMON CORE CURRICULUM
The American Public, including our children, grandchildren, parents and teachers, are gradually being absorbed into a grand scheme to help corporations take over public education. This is being accomplished with the blessings of complicit, short-sighted politicians who claim it will save us lots of money, with tacit endorsement by many educators who ought to know better.
The first part of this scheme has been achieved. The charter school guidelines are in-place that allow corporations to run schools for profit, using public money from your taxes and mine to support their efforts.
The second part of this scheme is to standardize the common core subjects. Since these core-subjects will be offered to thousands upon thousands of students in profit making charter schools across this land, and perhaps around this world, it guarantees a hugely expanded, profitable market for educational products and services.
In addition, assessment of what is supposedly "learned." essentially through the use of worksheets. will require expensive one-size-fits-all standardized tests. Since all groups of individuals will be considered homogenous (ignoring the existence of vitally important individual differences) this imposed uniformity lends itself to a common market strategy.
The third part of this scheme is to further-develop "teacher-proof" instructional materials, making it possible to hire almost anyone willing to follow the mandated procedures designed to meet the so-called higher standards, work for a much reduced salary, with or without teaching credentials. To counter any objections from professional educators, there will be more well-publicized political moves to eliminate collective bargaining rights.
How will profit-making efficiencies be maintained and monitored in this new system of public education?
Picture this analogy: Here is the perfect, field-tested model for managing this new system of education, familiar to everyone who owns a car or truck. Keep in mind that this computerized system is designed to maintain safety standards for the traveling public.
Citizens know from experience, the New York State Department of Transportation, as in other states, mandates periodic inspections of our automobiles. This is accomplished by first defining acceptable standards for emissions and equipment functioning in all cars. These standards are presumably based on criteria backed by a validated, research-based rationale. Evaluative criteria based on these standards are maintained in the state’s computers; our personal cars are connected to that computer system and a satisfactory score is absolutely required to pass the test. In the event of failure, a certain amount of time is allowed for conforming to the mandated requirements or be fined and possibly prosecuted.
How does this system for maintaining automotive safety relate to this latest scheme for education?
Each student and their teachers has an identification number registered with the department of education, just as is now happening with our cars and is already in place in the conventional system of education. Every teacher will be required to teach a pre-selected common core curriculum slated to be fully implemented in 2014 in NYS. Longer and more comprehensive standardized tests will be administered frequently. The test results will be scored by the state’s computers and an immediate report of aggregate scores will be furnished each teacher, the parents and officers with law enforcement powers. The scores and personal data will be forwarded to a data cloud controlled by InBloom, Inc. (This provision is on the verge of full implementation).
The use of computer systems for the benefit of individual safety is legitimate. However, there is a most important distinction that must be made between this envisioned educational procedure and the car inspection example. Instead of a research-based rationale that seeks to protect our individual lives, the up-coming educational procedure is instead based on a set of assumptions and beliefs about the nature of human growth and development, including learning that cannot be validated by those who have studied these matters in depth. In addition, the use of standardized tests, designed to measure what individuals have retained from the teachings of a common-core curriculum, has the potential for destroying human uniqueness, curiosity, inventiveness and creativity. To complicate matters, the standardized tests cannot differentiate between learners who may be somewhat competent and those who have managed to retain enough short-term memory to produce "correct" answers on the test.
This system will foster a mindless obedience to authority that is antithetical to a democratic society. Its authoritarian provisions for compliance places the masses in a vulnerable position from which they may be unable to escape.
What motivates such an authoritarian move?
Aside from a strong incentive to make money, achievement of satisfactory learning outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, has lagged behind the rest of the industrialized world, leaving this country with a perceived need for dramatic and immediate changes. Importantly, these proposed changes have been carefully articulated by hedge fund managers, foundation entities, the Chamber of Commerce, the chief school administrators and various corporate interests with profit motives that appear to transcend any real concern for the welfare of individual learners. The changes lack any vision of the possible destruction of the "American Dream."
The facts of the matter are clear. Our present conventional public schools are stuck in an eighteenth century educational time warp. Color has been added to the textbooks, computer instruction is sandwiched in between other demands giving an appearance of modernization, and electronic smart-boards now support teacher-dominated presentations, more and more disconnected, isolated, departmental and compartmentalized specialties are added, requiring more staff, more space and more equipment and materials. Tax caps seem to be the most popular solution to the burgeoning costs that have not resulted in satisfactory student achievement. The well-documented needs of individual learners are lost in the shuffle.
Each short-lived "innovation," created out of the recognition of problems with the conventional school, simply tampers with an ailing conventional system that is in need of a complete overhaul. The potential for remaking our public schools without "throwing the baby out with the bath" is not a matter of priority for advocates of the "Race to the Top."
Unfortunately, teacher education programs and the structures and procedures of the conventional school have been steadfastly resistant to systemic change, even in the face of this perceived emergency. This has resulted in an increased level of frustration that creates a political climate for the drastic measures, now proposed.
If you are concerned about the implications of this movement then you need to concentrate on three things:
(1) Facilitate a grassroots movement to influence the congress to reduce or eliminate funding for the "Race to the Top" when renewal legislation comes up.
(2) Spread the message to as many people as the social networks can accommodate. Now, not six months from now or later. The public must be informed about the truth that underlies this grandiose scheme to revamp our educational systems, all in the name of change we can believe in.
(3) Demand that teacher education programs at our colleges and universities begin immediately to institute programs revamped for the education and training of those who are now working with students and those who will be working in the schools that reflects systemic changes required of the task of remaking our schools for the 21st century. (Provided relatively independent teacher education entities are still recognized as having a role in the educational scheme of things to come.)
At the very least, there should be provisions in our laws to allow and encourage alternative plans, especially those that are consistent with what we know and can verify about human development and behavior, including learning. Unlike the invalid and even simple-minded underpinning of the current corporate scheme, there are available verifiable assumptions and beliefs that will guarantee the rights of individuals, allowing and encouraging them to be creative and unique in a cost-effective, reformed school system for the 21st century.
There are now available plans for remaking our schools for the 21st century. These plans look much different from those of the existing conventional school and the proposed corporate-sponsored plans. Most importantly, they will not violate well known principles of human productivity.
Anything less is a prescription for disaster in our democratic society that is assumed to be built and sustained on a need among all our citizens for the free pursuit of curiosity, imagination, entrepreneurial spirit, honesty and open-mindedness.
The Dangers of Standardization by Robert L. Arnold and Marion Brady
There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of selected "educators" assembled around our country to engage in defining a standardized, common core curriculum for our elementary, middle and secondary schools.
These groups of educators, many of whom are college professors of mathematics and science, are enticed to participate since their attendance has its rewards. States have been coerced into accepting the premises put forth by the Feds to conform to a "standardization mentality" required to receive educational funding.
Why a standardized core curriculum?
Identifying a standardized core curriculum makes it easier to construct standardized tests that will be made "longer and more comprehensive," according to David Abrams, Assistant Commissioner of the New York State Education Department." "These longer and more comprehensive" (standardized) tests (emphasis added) will be utilized to measure improvements in "learning outcomes." According to Abrams, "These changes are in preparation for the transition into assessments based on the New York State Common Core Standards, which will begin in 2013." He says: "We are also moving toward the use of growth metrics for institutional, principal, and teacher accountability." (Code words for using student scores on standardized tests to identify failing schools, principals and teachers!)
This is being repeated across the USA. New York State, after initially rejecting the standardization premises, finally gave in and agreed to participate in return for money. (Is anyone considering the costs for purchasing these tests, loss of instructional time and increased stress for students and their teachers?)
How can thousands of adults, congressman, senators, governors, presidents, school superintendents, chancellors, commissioners, assistant commissioners, the Secretary of Education and members of the public be so wrong?
THIS CAN BE EASILY EXPLAINED!
If deliberations and actions are based on a set of invalid assumptions and beliefs, conclusions and plans will be wrong.
For instance, everyone knows there are no two people alike in this world; not their genetics, not their experiences nor what they have done with their experiences. Yet, all these people are willing to ignore this fundamental truth and under the slogan "Race to the Top" plan to arbitrarily impose on an innocent public, on parents and their children, a misinformed and arrogant position that supports standardization; believing a one-size-fits-all.
A standardized common core of content for the school curriculum and the standardized tests designed to measure performance by students ignores developmental differences in individual learners. Human development is known to occur along an invariant sequence, unless of course, this sequence is driven off course by life’s trauma, developmentally inappropriate experiences imposed by educators or some malady that interferes with the usual growth patterns. Emergence of advancing levels of biological development is unpredictable and cannot be accelerated by instruction. If you need proof of this consider accelerating the arrival of puberty.
Development is fundamentally shaped by a unique genetic code, supplemented by a unique set of experiences and a unique transformation of those experiences absorbed into the neurological mechanisms of each individual. Intellectual development is a part of the composite of elements of biologically controlled human growth and development.
A well known and validated developmental sequence of cognitive capabilities has been around for at least sixty years, developed by the late Jean Piaget. This sequence has four highlighted and observable levels of performance in the cognitive behavior of learners. These points along a cumulative developmental sequence were labeled by Piaget as first a motor response to sensory input (experience), followed by a pre-operational (pre-logical) imaginative capability for defining sensory input from experience, followed by a concrete operational (logical) capability for acting upon one’s direct experience, and finally formal operational capabilities characterized by abstract manipulation of sensory (experiential) data including logical thought, hypothetical deduction and critical/creative thinking. These mature capabilities are necessary for advanced problem solving.
Full development at each point on the continuum is dependent on full development at each prior level.
What does a fourth grade teacher face EVERY DAY?
In a group of ten year olds, one can typically find three levels of developmental capabilities based on Piaget’s schematic. There will be a few pre-operational (pre- logical) youngsters, many concrete operational youngsters (capable of logical operations applied to concrete experience) and a few formal operational youngsters who are fully capable of hypothetical deduction and abstract, critical and creative reasoning.
How will a standardized, arbitrarily-defined body of core curricular content and accompanying tests respond to these developmental realities?
Youngsters who are developmentally at the pre-operational (pre-logical) level of functioning will likely fail to even guess what the writers of test questions had in mind. This group will most likely be destined to receive remedial instruction, when in fact, what they require is more time to develop biologically and be allowed to process their personal experiences in their unique, perceptually-based fashion.
The consequence of misunderstanding the results gleaned from standardized tests label these students "below grade level," therefore needing remediation. Not only will this information be used erroneously to grade teacher and school performance, it will label these individuals with the stereotype of deficiency that will likely last for a lifetime. It will also necessitate costly remedial programs that can be avoided if only there can be patience shown with the principles of human growth and development.
The concrete operational youngster will (with beginning capabilities for logical manipulation of concrete, direct experience) be able to answer predictably, questions that bear some resemblance to this individual’s direct experience. Any questions that require comprehending hypothetical or abstract ideas will not likely be answered correctly by this learner, although some educated-guesses may be possible.
An analysis of current standardized tests indicates that a large percentage of questions require experiences with events, objects and processes that are beyond the repertoire of a concrete operational youngster.
Answering these questions correctly is limited by the current intellectual capabilities of the individual, and the extent and quality of experiences acted upon at his or her level of development. The concrete operational youngster will not perform at the expected level demanded by the advocates of standardization. The results from these tests will lower the acceptable performance-indicators of the classroom and the school.
Failures are predominately due to developmental capabilities, biologically based and shaped somewhat by the quality and quantity of experience. The concrete operational youngsters will be labeled "on grade level" statistically allowing for a certain amount of failure consistent with an average of scores on the tests.
The individual with formal operational (abstractly logical) capabilities will be capable of answering questions correctly that require logical connections, abstract reasoning and educated guesses, provided there has been experience with direct or related content.
This experience need not be in-depth. Most school experiences are superficial and yet correct answers on tests are still possible.
The sub-group of developmentally advanced learners will be showered with accolades for meeting the standards. However, this individualized performance is primarily due to advanced developmental capabilities, ushered in as a result of this individual’s more accelerated biological, gene-driven growth, differing from fellow ten year olds. This happens regardless of innate neurological differences that may also exist. These youngsters will be considered "above grade level."
What is the goal?
All the learners in the current standardized paradigm will be asked to try and reach the performance of formal operational youngsters. This achievement for most ten year olds is impossible due largely to developmental differences (and often due to a lack of exposure to developmentally appropriate experiences).
When an arbitrary grade level definition is applied it takes into account the average performance of learners. Due to its imposed definition, the scores bear little resemblance to the real performance of individuals regardless of their age.
What other problems exist with the current "Standardization Mentality?
If these developmental shortcomings in the use and interpretations of standardized test results, based on a standardized common core curriculum, are not troubling enough, consider this thoughtful treatment of "Unanswered Questions About Standardized Tests" written by Marion Brady and published in the April 27th edition of the Washington Post. (Content unedited but emphases added with permission from Marion Brady)
"UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS"
Wednesday 27 April 2011 by Marion Brady, the Washington Post
"Standardized tests are enhancing and destroying reputations, opening and closing doors of opportunity, raising and lowering property values, starting and ending professional careers, determining the life chances of the young, and shaping the intellectual resources upon which America’s future largely hinges.
You might think that with so much riding on the tests, every civic-minded person in the country would be demanding transparency, proof of validity, assurance that every item on every test had been examined from every possible perspective.
If you think that, you are wrong.
The corporately engineered education "reform" campaign has been so slick that standardized testing is now taken for granted. The issue isn’t to test or not to test, but how to squeeze them all in.
America has bought an education pig in a poke peddled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies, and packaged by Congress. The animal is a freak, shaped by naiveté, political ideology, unexamined assumptions, ignorance of history, and myths.
This vast experiment with kids’ minds and America’s future was put in place without broad national debate, without in-depth research, without trial pilot programs, and without answering questions posed again and again by those who know something about teaching – know about it because, unlike those making policy, they’ve actually taught.
Questions, it goes without saying, are important. All human-made disasters have at least one thing in common – those responsible acted without first asking good questions.
Here are some of the questions educators ask that have yet to be answered. Decide for yourself if ignoring them doesn’t guarantee educational and cultural disaster.
1. Given the near-instant accessibility of information made possible by the internet, the traditional emphasis on learners storing information in their heads no longer makes much sense. The young need to learn to process and apply information, tasks that require them to infer, hypothesize, relate, generalize, value, and so on.
Questions: Have standardized tests made the switch from measuring how much information test-takers can remember, to measuring their ability to process and apply information? If so, are the computers that process the tests able to tell the difference between, say, good hypotheses, generalizations, the value judgments, and fair or poor ones?
2. As small children and illiterates prove, and everyone’s daily experiences demonstrates, there are myriad ways of learning that don’t involve reading words or playing with numbers. Indeed, most of what most people know hasn’t been learned that way.
Questions: Are test items that require mere manipulation of symbols robbing America of broad and deep pools of talent and experience more complex than paper-and-pencil tests can measure? Are those who learn in ways that aren’t tested being stamped "Not Very Smart" and shoved aside or out?
3. In times of rapid and accelerating social change such as the present era, the ability to abandon attachment to the status quo and adapt to complicated, unexpected realities is essential to survival. Adaptation requires imagination, creativity, originality, ingenuity, vision.
Questions: Can standardized tests measure and attach useful numbers to gradations of these qualities? If they can, why are they not already doing so?
4. It’s assumed that standardized tests measure test-takers knowledge. What they actually measure is something else – test-taker ability to guess what the writer of a particular test item was thinking.
Standardized tests are created by and for the dominant culture. They will, then, reflect that culture. Even the sequence in which words appear in a sentence can make a difference in the ability of a test-taker reared in a subculture to guess what the dominant-culture writer of the test item was thinking. To be fair and useful, writer and reader must be culturally aligned.
Questions: How likely is it that in a society as culturally diverse as is ours, anything even close to an acceptable level of writer-reader alignment can be achieved? Is lack of alignment a major reason for the so-called "achievement gap," or is it merely illustrating what Albert Einstein was talking about when he said that if we judged a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it would spend its whole life believing it was stupid?
Those barely begin a list of unanswered questions about standardized test items. Who decides what’s important enough to test? Using what criteria? How wise is it to hand schools over to corporations or other organizations with their own agendas? Since "hands-on" learning doesn’t lend itself to standardized testing, are the tests shoving education even farther away from how humans learn best? Is the drive to standardize kids stifling the human diversity essential to societal functioning?
Does limiting teacher autonomy by simplistic "remote" testing make the profession unappealing to those with the most to offer the young?
Is ever-greater centralization of decision-making at odds with democratic values?
Are standardized tests diverting attention from a whole range of valuable skills, such as the ability to play a musical instrument, draw a picture, tell a story, swim a stream, repair an air conditioner, nurture a plant, care for others?
Where’s the research proving there’s a relationship between standardized test scores and making a living and a life?
These and similar questions about standardized testing are central to educating. For at least two decades, the questions have been directed to the U.S. Department of Education, Congress, a succession of Administrations, liberal and conservative think tanks, and officials in several states. I know this for a fact because I’ve asked the questions myself, beginning pre-internet, when doing so required hard copy letters and U. S. postage.
The questions remain not just unanswered, but unacknowledged.
Choose your explanation for the refusal of those in authority to answer the questions. I’ve chosen mine: Policymaker ignorance and arrogance. It may also be that certain corporate types think standardized tests help shape an amiable, compliant workforce.
Do educators need to be held accountable? Absolutely. But using standardized tests for that purpose parallels the Vietnam-era logic of destroying a village in order to save it."
If we do not do something drastic to stop this devastating plan that will rob every individual of his or her individual uniqueness, we are in for a vastly-increased troublesome future for individuals and for this country. This focused, arbitrarily conceived plan to standardize our youth uses arbitrary and erroneous criteria that defies any known concept of the nature of learning and human development.
Educators have no excuse for conforming to its ill-conceived content and assessment/evaluation provisions. They must prepare an offense that will counteract this movement, based on what every teacher knows; learners are all different. Anything less will not result in real improvement in education in this country.
Educators must act now or be subjected to more and more ridicule and loss of opportunities for competent practices that meet the needs of all learners.
Are there alternatives that can be tapped to replace the ill-conceived standardized assessment and evaluation provisions of the "Race to the Top?"
Absolutely.
One such field-tested model is "The Constructive, Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System" (CARES) developed by Robert L. Arnold, Professor of Education, Emeritus.
To contact this author e-mail to: [email protected]
Take note:
Public education is under attack and teachers are unfairly getting the brunt of the criticism. The teachers are only part of our system of public education that needs our immediate attention. The system is outdated and largely ineffective, especially in general (reality-based) education and basic skills development; it needs a complete overhaul.
You may disagree, but if you take the time to examine the contents of this website, our blogs and books, you will gain new insights into the basic problems in our schools and how to fix them.Today, the "Race to the Top" is the federally sponsored effort to reform education, this time by mandating the use of standardized tests and a standardized core curriculum. This is a devastating assault on the uniqueness of individual learners and their opportunities for healthy growth and development.
"The Race to the Top" is a top down scheme to force schools and teachers to conform to a seriously-flawed set of assumptions and beliefs about learning and development. Changing the direction of this movement must be met with new vigor if we expect anything to happen that will create a sustainable, effective, and cost-effective, reformed educational system.
I invite your participation in just such an effort. Our children, grandchildren and the future of our democracy are at stake.
Join in if you want to improve schools and positively affect the future of our country. Contact your friends and urge them to contact their friends – help us build a broad network of grassroots support for systemic change in our public educational systems.
Think of this effort as a way to demand systemic changes that will have a critical impact on the future of this country. Social media have demonstrated the power to do this.
What do we know about the New York State Standards for implementation of the common core curriculum?
How many four year olds in Pre-K have you seen who can (1) reason abstractly and quantitatively, (2) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, (3) model with mathematics, (4) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning, and (5) analyze, compare, and sort two and three-dimensional shapes and objects, in different sizes, using informal language to describe their similarities?
I doubt even Einstein was capable of these intellectual feats, when he was four.
Did you know these are some of the expected learning outcomes in mathematics for Pre-K (four year old) students across New York State Schools? That is, according to the Board of Regents’ and the State Education Department’s published standards for newly-defined common core subjects.
You may recall that the decision makers of our State were enticed by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, with a mere seven hundred million of our tax dollars, if the State Education Department would adopt the new standards and move instruction farther and farther down toward infancy, under the banners of “Race to the Top” and “No Child Left Behind.”
What’s wrong with this? Don’t we need to raise the standards so that students will be successful engineers when they grow up? Is there anything wrong with that? No, but there is a great deal wrong with mandating the teaching of advanced math concepts at the Pre-K level. But what do we know? They claim that many approved these new standards, including a hundred selected individuals (probably paid for their services), five PhDs and five EdDs and others from the Board of Regents including one MD, along with five hundred fifty invited survey-contributors from the educational ranks. HOW CAN THEY ALL BE WRONG?
The truth is, to be able to perform anything close to those five standards a learner would need to have matured to the level of intellectual capabilities for abstract, logical reasoning and critical thinking - higher thought processes. In the sixty years I spent studying school-age children I never found learners at the age of four who were capable of these intellectual tasks, nor five year olds, six year olds or even many ten year olds. So what, you ask?
The pre-logical phase (where most Pre-K learners operate, and where older learners operate who are at this stage of development) is characterized by an inability to consistently deal logically with their experiences, but they thrive on experiences that allow a freedom of expression, creativity and imaginative play that does not require empirical validation from observations, logical judgments or experimentations.
Their pre-logical experiences, however, are essential to full development of logical capabilities that will eventually emerge. Their capabilities that include an insatiable curiosity, an active imagination, creativity and a propensity for free associations must be preserved and utilized throughout the early developmental phases of each child, if we expect these abilities to be used later in the study of mathematics. To insist that learners at the pre-operational/pre-logical phase, regardless of their age, demonstrate logical solutions to problems is not only pre-mature; it is harmful to the developing intellect. Whitehead (a noted philosopher/mathematician) told us that back in the 1920’s.
Expecting pre-operational (pre-logical) youngsters to intellectually process sophisticated concepts of mathematics, such as those listed in the five standards, will likely result in feelings of inadequacy and lowered self-worth. Avoidance, due to a fear of math, will be the likely result.
Those finding mathematics too difficult in engineering school will likely exhibit restrictions in their thinking left over from their Pre-K days, if these days are filled with developmentally inappropriate instruction in mathematics. Developmentally inappropriate instruction has been found to cause problems with advanced mathematical concepts.
Memorization, reinforced by repetition, is the only alternative available for pre-logical/Pre-K learners who are required to intellectually process advanced mathematical concepts. A steady diet of this type of experience will render learners damaged in ways they may never recover from.
There is a well-known reference, A Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Cognitive Domain, arranged from simplest to complex cognition (referred to as “Bloom’s Taxonomy”) that sheds some light on these new standards for Pre-K and for other pre-logical learners where the standards for desired learning outcomes are frequently described using the general term “understanding.” “Understanding,” whatever that means, is cognition which is defined as the act of coming to know and it is much more than just understanding.
The least complex level of cognition is “knowledge of specifics” or simple awareness of an object, event or process. If the Pre-K learners are instructed in the five standards outlined in the first paragraph, they will have an awareness of their existence. What that awareness entails is anyone’s guess. If their “knowledge of specifics” is repeated enough times, learners will recite the information much like Pavlov’s famous dogs would salivate.
Questions on standardized tests that ask for the recall of “knowledge of specifics,” represent this lowest level of cognition. A correct answer does indicate an aspect of learning, but it is learning at the lowest, simplest level of cognition – information that is simply taken into the mind and never put into fresh combinations – information that is easily forgotten.
The next more complex level of cognition is commonly referred to as “comprehension” or “understanding.” Comprehension or understanding is actually composed of three ascending levels of cognition - translation, interpretation and extrapolation. We need to ask, can pre-logical learners functioning at this level of cognition process the mathematical concepts outlined in the five statements of new standards? Can they translate that language into the language of a four year old? Can they interpret the meanings that this sophisticated language contains? Can they extrapolate from their translation and interpretations to see other possibilities? No, but they can recite relatively meaningless specifics, if that information has been repeated enough times.
The next level is “application” which involves using abstractions in specific and concrete life situations. This is followed by the “analysis” of the elements, relationships and organizational principles found in the prior “understandings” and applications. Can you picture four year olds processing at this level of cognition in mathematics or any other subject for that matter?
The next level of cognitive thought-processing is called “synthesis.” Synthesis involves putting together elements and parts to make a whole. Synthesis involves producing a unique communication, a plan or proposed set of operations. Achieving a synthesis enables the learner to make quantitative and qualitative judgments in terms of internal and external criteria. This is called critical thinking or critical, creative evaluation.
These last two higher levels of cognition, synthesis and critical evaluation, cannot be measured by a “standardized” test since they are unique constructions created by each individual learner. They are not standardized.
It is absurd to think that pre-logical learners can meaningfully engage the higher levels of cognition required of these State standards. They will not internalize these concepts until they have reached the formal operational level of development with capabilities for reasoning, abstract critical thinking, and hypothetical deduction. This will not happen much before ten or twelve years of age, if then. Only about 12% of the twelve year olds will reach this level of capability.
It will not likely happen at all if restrictions in thinking are built up through developmentally inappropriate instruction starting at the early stages of intellectual development. Memorizing relatively meaningless information while at the stage of pre-operations leaves the learner with learning disabilities that may never be rectified.
Learning to read the significance of children’s drawings, and paying attention to their thought processes, would likely result in a much different judgment about what is or is not appropriate instruction for learners at various stages of their development. Adults who impose on children unattainable expectations that do not take into account the realities of human development, are making a serious, serious mistake.
Moving developmentally inappropriate instruction (even legitimate mathematical concepts) to lower and lower age groups is most likely based on ignorance of or disregard for human development. The potential for long term damage to individual learners from these errors should be of grave concern to all of us.
During each semester over a span of nearly thirty years, about twenty-five elementary teacher-education candidates and I fanned out to area schools to study the behavior of children as part of a “foundations of education” experience. Each candidate was asked to pick a child in grade levels from nursery school to the sixth grade and study the results obtained from a battery of simple tests. We studied about fifteen hundred learners (1500). We focused on collecting and cataloguing these children’s drawings, observing and recording their uses or non-uses of logical thinking. We used ideas that were drawn from the research of two major developmental theorists, Jean Piaget and Viktor Lowenfeld.
Viktor Lowenfeld’s ideas dealt with non-verbal, visual artistic expressions. These expressions begin with scribbles, first occurring when the infant/toddler can grasp a marking instrument and apply it to a surface. Every parent has observed this behavior. Parents may not be aware of this but there is a gradual, biologically-based invariant sequence in maturation that follows from the scribbling stages.
The next more sophisticated level to develop is called pre-schematic drawings, leading to schematic drawings and to drawings that show a dawning sense of realism and eventually realism, culminating in an ability to utilize prior capabilities abstractly to communicate a particular message.
Visual expressions are very important to learners in organizing and communicating personal meanings and should be important to those charged with assessment and evaluation of intellectual capabilities and intellectual achievements. But do standardized tests include children’s drawings? No.
Authentic drawings of familiar experiences reveal the levels of children’s intellectual operations as defined by Viktor Lowenfeld and Jean Piaget, and this evidence of developmental capabilities can be easily observed in each child’s drawings that reflects that individual’s developmental sequence.
Producing random scribbles on a surface is a most important achievement for any child. Its origins reflect physical/neurological growth that relates to an ability to grasp an object. We all remember the infant banging a rattle against the crib until it falls. Small and larger muscle growth and neurological pathways develop that eventually enable the infant to grasp the object and then voluntarily let it go.
Likewise as more sophisticated growth occurs in the muscles and in neurological/ intellectual pathways, the child is able to control scribbles as a deliberate skill. A son or daughter at this level might even practice this skill by using the marker to re-decorate the walls of their bedrooms, much to the consternation of mom and dad.
As each child is developing a growing and expanding awareness of his or her surroundings, the ability to represent what is perceived in life is revealed in a picture drawn by the child. This can be the first evidence in a child’s drawings that represents what is being experienced in the life of that child. For instance, a controlled set of lines drawn anywhere on the page becomes a representation of a house, even if an adult does not recognize its form. The child will insist, and rightly so, those lines indeed represent a house. This is an example of a late pre-schematic drawing featuring controlled scribbles that mark a beginning schematic drawing that represents the child’s thoughts and images.
Gradually, as more sophisticated neurological capabilities emerge they are reflected in drawings that are fully schematic, that is, they are deliberately drawn so as to reflect a schema (a mental image) of what is viewed or perceived at the time.
At this level of intellectual capacity, the child will draw a two-dimensional house (absent depth) invariably placed at the bottom of the page, on a baseline. Nothing will be drawn in front of the house. Proportionality will not reflect logic but rather what is intuitively important in the life of the child. For instance, if mother is in the picture she might be taller than the house. Three-dimensionality, the way adults view a house, is not intellectually available to a child at this developmental level.
The first signs of three-dimensionality (applied logic) are seen in drawings that show a dawning sense of realism. The learner is becoming aware that the house is not anchored to a baseline in the picture; it is set back away from the bottom of the page, on a base plane, beginning to show three dimensions, that is, height, width and depth. However at this stage, the learner will only draw the front portion of the house in three dimensions; the rear of the house will still be in two dimensions.
A familiar house drawn at the dawning-realism stage will not show vanishing points as the scene would appear to adults, but will have an abruptly-drawn straight line from the roof to the ground at the rear of the house. This learner is not applying logic that would suggest that the rear of the house would reflect that which is imagined to exist even if it cannot be seen directly. This picture is the beginning of logical analysis, but not having completely matured to this level, the child will remain partially at the prior level of two-dimensional perception. This in-between stage is also reflected in other behaviors of this individual – sometimes logical sometimes not.
When full capabilities for logic emerge, the learner will deliberately draw a house in three-dimensions, showing acceptable proportionality, overlapping and depth that adults would recognize and approve of.
In our research, Piaget’s schematic was used to further describe children’s intellectual behavior in ways consistent with Lowenfeld’s findings. Piaget described intellectual development as beginning with automatic motor/physical responses to sensory stimuli (experiences). He found this to be the forerunner of deliberate operational intelligence which he called pre-operations, or pre-logical intelligence.
A learner at the pre-operational level of intellectual capabilities will decide the truth of something on the basis of perception (how it appears to be) rather than conception (how it is proven to be). To study this, along with other of Piaget’s conservation experiments, we used two beakers of the same size and filled them to the same level with water. We asked the learners who were able to engage in our experiment to agree that there was the same amount of water in each beaker and we adjusted the levels to get this agreement. Then we poured the contents of one beaker into another taller, skinnier beaker. The level of the water appeared much higher.
We then asked the learner if there was possibly the same amount of water in each, now that they appeared to be different. The pre-operational learner insisted the taller one had more water, even though he or she had just agreed that the beakers contained the same amounts of water. This answer was based on how the subject at the moment appeared to or was perceived by that learner.
This level of pre-operational intelligence does not include an ability to hold in the mind or “conserve” a concept of the agreement while the appearance changes and then apply this to the solution of the problem posed as to whether there is more water since it appears to be more. To determine that the amount of water has not changed requires the application of logical intelligence that emerges at the concrete operations level of development, usually somewhere for most learners between ages seven and ten.
The concretely logical learner explained that if no water was lost, the amount will be the same even though it appears to be different. In this case the concept of “sameness” is presumed to be conserved in the mind and applied to the solution of the problem put before the learner. This represents a basic application of logic; if this is equal, and nothing has been lost, then the result is also equal. This intellectual capability is needed to understand (comprehend) principles in arithmetic like the associative and distributive principles.
The learners who were formal operational looked at the so-called empty beaker to see if there was a drop of water remaining and then insisted that the amounts had changed, but not because the water appeared to be taller in the skinnier beaker, but because some water, even just a droplet, remained in the original beaker.
This judgment requires a more sophisticated intellectual capability than is available to the concrete operational youngster. The concrete operational youngster is limited to concrete or direct experience with fewer experiences in life, those more subtle points are not available. The formal operational youngster is capable of hypothetical deduction and abstract thinking.
The full development of logical intelligence does not generally emerge until approximately the ten year age level. Rousseau believed this, centuries ago. Piaget and other developmental theorists have validated this claim. Subjecting pre-operational learners to requirements that demand intellectual capabilities beyond the learner’s operational level, such as “reasoning abstractly and quantitatively,” is devastating, and the negative results will likely manifest themselves in later life.
This also is true of pre-maturely parsing the language into its syllables and letters, and analyzing sentence structure and themes in written works. This is comparable to memorizing the arithmetic facts that are not conceptualized and have little if any real use to the young learner. Little wonder it has been reported that nearly seventy percent of our beginning engineering students in college flunk out because they cannot deal with calculus. This is believed to relate directly to misguided instruction imposed on early learners with developmentally inappropriate procedures and irrelevant information.
You see, calculus requires a maximized creative mind, free to manipulate concepts of quantity and spatial relationships. Success with calculus requires a developmental level of formal operations, when the learner is capable of relatively unencumbered hypothetical deduction and abstract thought. These capabilities are available for most of us if they are not distorted or destroyed by inappropriate instruction.
I had the fortunate opportunity to discuss this in some depth with Dr. Robert Davis when he was at Rutgers University during his declining years. Coming from a scholar of his stature, it lends considerable credibility to concerns about the likely results from pre-mature, developmentally inappropriate instruction in mathematics. (The same holds true unfortunately for many other areas of the common core school curriculum as well).
The late Robert Davis, former researcher and Director of the Madison (Post-Sputnik) Project in Mathematics of the 1950’s, conducted at Syracuse University, stated that he and his colleagues from the University of Illinois found that engineering students, whose educational experience had resulted in the development of rigidly-held algorithms likely developed from a practice of memorization and repetitions at an early age, will fail to function creatively at this more advanced level of mathematics. They found as many as 70% of otherwise capable students enrolled in calculus will likely flunk out of that course.
What is clear is that human intellectual development occurs in an invariant sequence, like creeping that comes before walking and walking that comes before running. Progression along this sequence is grounded in each person’s unique genetic makeup. Full development at any stage is dependent upon full development at the prior stages. Some individuals mature earlier than others. Some learners have access to growth-encouraging experiences; some are neglected or miss-instructed.
Those who experience a misguided plan that demands performance on developmentally inappropriate standards will most certainly be short changed. When we hear the statement, standardized tests ignore developmental differences in learners this is what is being referred to.
Any parent recognizes that a sequence of biological development for each individual is real, and knows that it cannot be significantly accelerated, but it can be diminished. If you don’t agree with this statement, insist that puberty begin at seven and then deal with individual guilt feelings resulting from that person not having performed up to your expectations. Or demand that baby teeth fall out on cue; don’t be patient for the teeth to naturally fall out for new ones to take their place. Although it is not often thought about this way, intellectual development is also biologically based.
Those responsible for the creation and approval of these new standards should have known the facts about human development, but I guess the lure of big money from the feds skewed their “critical thinking.”
Had they studied children, as my students and I did, they would have discovered that even within a group of ten year olds (fourth graders) there is a range of developmental differences. The majority of learners would be concretely logical, able to see the world in its realistic, multidimensional form, but largely that world which is directly, concretely experienced. They would be considered “average.” A few would be operating at the formal operational level, fully capable of logic, abstract reasoning and hypothetical deduction and that would surely enlist the exaggerated accolades of uninformed adults and professionals. A few would still be pre-operational (pre-logical) and probably mistakenly being provided remedial assistance.
The capabilities of each of these different individuals depend upon their biological development that is positively or negatively influenced by the quality and quantity of their experiences. If there are few serious physical or psychological or instructional impediments to learning, those who are pre-operational will eventually become logical and capable of higher level thought processes. That is, if their development is not driven off course by well-meaning but misinformed adults.
It has been consistently found that approximately 85% of 5 year olds are pre-operational and 15% are only at the onset of concrete operations. 60% of the 6 year olds are pre-operational, 35% are at the onset of concrete operations and only 5% are at a mature level of concrete operations, capable of logical operations. None of the six year olds are generally found to be at the formal operations level. Hypothetical situations are not within their purview at this level.
12% of the 10 year olds are still at the pre-operations level, 52% at the onset of concrete operations and 35% have reached the mature level of concrete operations, only 1% function at the onset of formal operations. Even 1% of 14 year olds have been found to exhibit pre-operational capabilities, 32% are at the onset of concrete-operations, 43% are at the mature concrete operational level, 15% are at the onset of formal operations and only 9% are at the mature level of formal operations.
Given the realities of individual development, does a one-size-fits-all achievement test make any sense? Does instruction in the common core, mandated curriculum for all students, as if they are all alike, make sense? Does pushing instruction farther and farther down into the primary levels with expectations that learners meet these higher standards make sense? For instance, being able to (1) reason abstractly and quantitatively, (2) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, (3) model with mathematics, (4) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning, and (5) analyze, compare, and sort two and three-dimensional shapes and objects, in different sizes, using informal language to describe their similarities? The answer is a resounding, NO.
These standards of the NYSED are way beyond the capabilities of Pre-K youngsters, and many older youngsters; they invite instructional practices that will be the cause of irreparable damage to individual learners. Is this what is meant by “raising” standards? Do you think the results of administering achievement tests that attempt to measure what has been learned at the lowest levels of cognition regardless of their developmental readiness should be used to judge individual learner-success or the success or failure of the school? I hope not, now that “you know the rest of the story.” But what do you plan to do about it?
Standardized testing and Common Core State and National Standards are giving standardization a bad name. Standardization has many facets that are necessary for the conduct of everyday life. Consider what would be happening if we did not have standard time; would the bus schedule be so complicated that it would be incomprehensible? Would the buses arrive at a predictable time?
Standardizing our road signs across state lines has its usefulness. A stop sign means stop. This standard is applied to everyone and a violation of this will bring about a predictable response. Examples of standardization go on and on in an enlightened society. Even our Constitution is an example of standardizing the criteria for guiding the conduct of our political affairs; it is based on a set of principles that are considered important and consistent with democratic ideals and justice for everyone. Even though this standard of conduct is often debated, the Supreme Court is responsible to decide legal matters that come before its review.
The standardized tests used in today’s schools and the standard core curriculum proposed for each and every child, violate sound principles of learning, biological development, the nature of motivation, group processes and communication, and the nature of knowledge and knowing. Principles that are based on validated and shared insights that are continuously drawn from scholarly literature and research, offer legitimate standards to be applied to the school and the conduct of education.
In contrast, what is being proposed and underway is a movement that is grossly in violation of sound principles. The legitimacy of this movement must be questioned from this perspective and placed in its proper context. It is not standardization that is at fault, it is the application of standard criteria that are based on faulty assumptions and arbitrary, politically-endorsed and business-motivated procedures.
Current standardized tests and testing, and the standardization of common core subjects, are based on standards that are in error. Imposing a common core of pre-defined information, however important it may be considered to be, is to subordinate the individual learner to the arbitrary biases of a pre-ordained few. This position relegates students to second-class citizenship and fails to provide widespread motivation for learning.
Let’s join in an effort to standardize an assessment, recordkeeping and evaluation procedure that will guarantee an open-ended process, allowing individual creativity, and demonstrate the ability to determine how creative products meet a legitimate and dynamic standard.
One way of doing this can be found in the “Constructive Assessment, Record-Keeping and Evaluation System” (Cares)© Robert L. Arnold. Utilizing the latest communication and electronic storage technologies, this system treats every individual as an individual, capable of constructing meaning in life as it is experienced within and outside of school, every day of the year throughout one’s lifetime. The products of this system are judged against criteria that are consistent with sound principles of learning, biological development, the nature of motivation, group processes and communication, and the nature of knowledge and knowing. The result of its use is sustainable competency that leads to the development of effective problem solving abilities and improved personal health.
THE DANGERS OF ILL-CONCEIVED STANDARDIZATION, STANDARDIZED TESTS, AND A STANDARDIZED COMMON CORE CURRICULUM
The American Public, including our children, grandchildren, parents and teachers, are gradually being absorbed into a grand scheme to help corporations take over public education. This is being accomplished with the blessings of complicit, short-sighted politicians who claim it will save us lots of money, with tacit endorsement by many educators who ought to know better.
The first part of this scheme has been achieved. The charter school guidelines are in-place that allow corporations to run schools for profit, using public money from your taxes and mine to support their efforts.
The second part of this scheme is to standardize the common core subjects. Since these core-subjects will be offered to thousands upon thousands of students in profit making charter schools across this land, and perhaps around this world, it guarantees a hugely expanded, profitable market for educational products and services.
In addition, assessment of what is supposedly "learned." essentially through the use of worksheets. will require expensive one-size-fits-all standardized tests. Since all groups of individuals will be considered homogenous (ignoring the existence of vitally important individual differences) this imposed uniformity lends itself to a common market strategy.
The third part of this scheme is to further-develop "teacher-proof" instructional materials, making it possible to hire almost anyone willing to follow the mandated procedures designed to meet the so-called higher standards, work for a much reduced salary, with or without teaching credentials. To counter any objections from professional educators, there will be more well-publicized political moves to eliminate collective bargaining rights.
How will profit-making efficiencies be maintained and monitored in this new system of public education?
Picture this analogy: Here is the perfect, field-tested model for managing this new system of education, familiar to everyone who owns a car or truck. Keep in mind that this computerized system is designed to maintain safety standards for the traveling public.
Citizens know from experience, the New York State Department of Transportation, as in other states, mandates periodic inspections of our automobiles. This is accomplished by first defining acceptable standards for emissions and equipment functioning in all cars. These standards are presumably based on criteria backed by a validated, research-based rationale. Evaluative criteria based on these standards are maintained in the state’s computers; our personal cars are connected to that computer system and a satisfactory score is absolutely required to pass the test. In the event of failure, a certain amount of time is allowed for conforming to the mandated requirements or be fined and possibly prosecuted.
How does this system for maintaining automotive safety relate to this latest scheme for education?
Each student and their teachers has an identification number registered with the department of education, just as is now happening with our cars and is already in place in the conventional system of education. Every teacher will be required to teach a pre-selected common core curriculum slated to be fully implemented in 2014 in NYS. Longer and more comprehensive standardized tests will be administered frequently. The test results will be scored by the state’s computers and an immediate report of aggregate scores will be furnished each teacher, the parents and officers with law enforcement powers. The scores and personal data will be forwarded to a data cloud controlled by InBloom, Inc. (This provision is on the verge of full implementation).
The use of computer systems for the benefit of individual safety is legitimate. However, there is a most important distinction that must be made between this envisioned educational procedure and the car inspection example. Instead of a research-based rationale that seeks to protect our individual lives, the up-coming educational procedure is instead based on a set of assumptions and beliefs about the nature of human growth and development, including learning that cannot be validated by those who have studied these matters in depth. In addition, the use of standardized tests, designed to measure what individuals have retained from the teachings of a common-core curriculum, has the potential for destroying human uniqueness, curiosity, inventiveness and creativity. To complicate matters, the standardized tests cannot differentiate between learners who may be somewhat competent and those who have managed to retain enough short-term memory to produce "correct" answers on the test.
This system will foster a mindless obedience to authority that is antithetical to a democratic society. Its authoritarian provisions for compliance places the masses in a vulnerable position from which they may be unable to escape.
What motivates such an authoritarian move?
Aside from a strong incentive to make money, achievement of satisfactory learning outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, has lagged behind the rest of the industrialized world, leaving this country with a perceived need for dramatic and immediate changes. Importantly, these proposed changes have been carefully articulated by hedge fund managers, foundation entities, the Chamber of Commerce, the chief school administrators and various corporate interests with profit motives that appear to transcend any real concern for the welfare of individual learners. The changes lack any vision of the possible destruction of the "American Dream."
The facts of the matter are clear. Our present conventional public schools are stuck in an eighteenth century educational time warp. Color has been added to the textbooks, computer instruction is sandwiched in between other demands giving an appearance of modernization, and electronic smart-boards now support teacher-dominated presentations, more and more disconnected, isolated, departmental and compartmentalized specialties are added, requiring more staff, more space and more equipment and materials. Tax caps seem to be the most popular solution to the burgeoning costs that have not resulted in satisfactory student achievement. The well-documented needs of individual learners are lost in the shuffle.
Each short-lived "innovation," created out of the recognition of problems with the conventional school, simply tampers with an ailing conventional system that is in need of a complete overhaul. The potential for remaking our public schools without "throwing the baby out with the bath" is not a matter of priority for advocates of the "Race to the Top."
Unfortunately, teacher education programs and the structures and procedures of the conventional school have been steadfastly resistant to systemic change, even in the face of this perceived emergency. This has resulted in an increased level of frustration that creates a political climate for the drastic measures, now proposed.
If you are concerned about the implications of this movement then you need to concentrate on three things:
(1) Facilitate a grassroots movement to influence the congress to reduce or eliminate funding for the "Race to the Top" when renewal legislation comes up.
(2) Spread the message to as many people as the social networks can accommodate. Now, not six months from now or later. The public must be informed about the truth that underlies this grandiose scheme to revamp our educational systems, all in the name of change we can believe in.
(3) Demand that teacher education programs at our colleges and universities begin immediately to institute programs revamped for the education and training of those who are now working with students and those who will be working in the schools that reflects systemic changes required of the task of remaking our schools for the 21st century. (Provided relatively independent teacher education entities are still recognized as having a role in the educational scheme of things to come.)
At the very least, there should be provisions in our laws to allow and encourage alternative plans, especially those that are consistent with what we know and can verify about human development and behavior, including learning. Unlike the invalid and even simple-minded underpinning of the current corporate scheme, there are available verifiable assumptions and beliefs that will guarantee the rights of individuals, allowing and encouraging them to be creative and unique in a cost-effective, reformed school system for the 21st century.
There are now available plans for remaking our schools for the 21st century. These plans look much different from those of the existing conventional school and the proposed corporate-sponsored plans. Most importantly, they will not violate well known principles of human productivity.
Anything less is a prescription for disaster in our democratic society that is assumed to be built and sustained on a need among all our citizens for the free pursuit of curiosity, imagination, entrepreneurial spirit, honesty and open-mindedness.
The Dangers of Standardization by Robert L. Arnold and Marion Brady
There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of selected "educators" assembled around our country to engage in defining a standardized, common core curriculum for our elementary, middle and secondary schools.
These groups of educators, many of whom are college professors of mathematics and science, are enticed to participate since their attendance has its rewards. States have been coerced into accepting the premises put forth by the Feds to conform to a "standardization mentality" required to receive educational funding.
Why a standardized core curriculum?
Identifying a standardized core curriculum makes it easier to construct standardized tests that will be made "longer and more comprehensive," according to David Abrams, Assistant Commissioner of the New York State Education Department." "These longer and more comprehensive" (standardized) tests (emphasis added) will be utilized to measure improvements in "learning outcomes." According to Abrams, "These changes are in preparation for the transition into assessments based on the New York State Common Core Standards, which will begin in 2013." He says: "We are also moving toward the use of growth metrics for institutional, principal, and teacher accountability." (Code words for using student scores on standardized tests to identify failing schools, principals and teachers!)
This is being repeated across the USA. New York State, after initially rejecting the standardization premises, finally gave in and agreed to participate in return for money. (Is anyone considering the costs for purchasing these tests, loss of instructional time and increased stress for students and their teachers?)
How can thousands of adults, congressman, senators, governors, presidents, school superintendents, chancellors, commissioners, assistant commissioners, the Secretary of Education and members of the public be so wrong?
THIS CAN BE EASILY EXPLAINED!
If deliberations and actions are based on a set of invalid assumptions and beliefs, conclusions and plans will be wrong.
For instance, everyone knows there are no two people alike in this world; not their genetics, not their experiences nor what they have done with their experiences. Yet, all these people are willing to ignore this fundamental truth and under the slogan "Race to the Top" plan to arbitrarily impose on an innocent public, on parents and their children, a misinformed and arrogant position that supports standardization; believing a one-size-fits-all.
A standardized common core of content for the school curriculum and the standardized tests designed to measure performance by students ignores developmental differences in individual learners. Human development is known to occur along an invariant sequence, unless of course, this sequence is driven off course by life’s trauma, developmentally inappropriate experiences imposed by educators or some malady that interferes with the usual growth patterns. Emergence of advancing levels of biological development is unpredictable and cannot be accelerated by instruction. If you need proof of this consider accelerating the arrival of puberty.
Development is fundamentally shaped by a unique genetic code, supplemented by a unique set of experiences and a unique transformation of those experiences absorbed into the neurological mechanisms of each individual. Intellectual development is a part of the composite of elements of biologically controlled human growth and development.
A well known and validated developmental sequence of cognitive capabilities has been around for at least sixty years, developed by the late Jean Piaget. This sequence has four highlighted and observable levels of performance in the cognitive behavior of learners. These points along a cumulative developmental sequence were labeled by Piaget as first a motor response to sensory input (experience), followed by a pre-operational (pre-logical) imaginative capability for defining sensory input from experience, followed by a concrete operational (logical) capability for acting upon one’s direct experience, and finally formal operational capabilities characterized by abstract manipulation of sensory (experiential) data including logical thought, hypothetical deduction and critical/creative thinking. These mature capabilities are necessary for advanced problem solving.
Full development at each point on the continuum is dependent on full development at each prior level.
What does a fourth grade teacher face EVERY DAY?
In a group of ten year olds, one can typically find three levels of developmental capabilities based on Piaget’s schematic. There will be a few pre-operational (pre- logical) youngsters, many concrete operational youngsters (capable of logical operations applied to concrete experience) and a few formal operational youngsters who are fully capable of hypothetical deduction and abstract, critical and creative reasoning.
How will a standardized, arbitrarily-defined body of core curricular content and accompanying tests respond to these developmental realities?
Youngsters who are developmentally at the pre-operational (pre-logical) level of functioning will likely fail to even guess what the writers of test questions had in mind. This group will most likely be destined to receive remedial instruction, when in fact, what they require is more time to develop biologically and be allowed to process their personal experiences in their unique, perceptually-based fashion.
The consequence of misunderstanding the results gleaned from standardized tests label these students "below grade level," therefore needing remediation. Not only will this information be used erroneously to grade teacher and school performance, it will label these individuals with the stereotype of deficiency that will likely last for a lifetime. It will also necessitate costly remedial programs that can be avoided if only there can be patience shown with the principles of human growth and development.
The concrete operational youngster will (with beginning capabilities for logical manipulation of concrete, direct experience) be able to answer predictably, questions that bear some resemblance to this individual’s direct experience. Any questions that require comprehending hypothetical or abstract ideas will not likely be answered correctly by this learner, although some educated-guesses may be possible.
An analysis of current standardized tests indicates that a large percentage of questions require experiences with events, objects and processes that are beyond the repertoire of a concrete operational youngster.
Answering these questions correctly is limited by the current intellectual capabilities of the individual, and the extent and quality of experiences acted upon at his or her level of development. The concrete operational youngster will not perform at the expected level demanded by the advocates of standardization. The results from these tests will lower the acceptable performance-indicators of the classroom and the school.
Failures are predominately due to developmental capabilities, biologically based and shaped somewhat by the quality and quantity of experience. The concrete operational youngsters will be labeled "on grade level" statistically allowing for a certain amount of failure consistent with an average of scores on the tests.
The individual with formal operational (abstractly logical) capabilities will be capable of answering questions correctly that require logical connections, abstract reasoning and educated guesses, provided there has been experience with direct or related content.
This experience need not be in-depth. Most school experiences are superficial and yet correct answers on tests are still possible.
The sub-group of developmentally advanced learners will be showered with accolades for meeting the standards. However, this individualized performance is primarily due to advanced developmental capabilities, ushered in as a result of this individual’s more accelerated biological, gene-driven growth, differing from fellow ten year olds. This happens regardless of innate neurological differences that may also exist. These youngsters will be considered "above grade level."
What is the goal?
All the learners in the current standardized paradigm will be asked to try and reach the performance of formal operational youngsters. This achievement for most ten year olds is impossible due largely to developmental differences (and often due to a lack of exposure to developmentally appropriate experiences).
When an arbitrary grade level definition is applied it takes into account the average performance of learners. Due to its imposed definition, the scores bear little resemblance to the real performance of individuals regardless of their age.
What other problems exist with the current "Standardization Mentality?
If these developmental shortcomings in the use and interpretations of standardized test results, based on a standardized common core curriculum, are not troubling enough, consider this thoughtful treatment of "Unanswered Questions About Standardized Tests" written by Marion Brady and published in the April 27th edition of the Washington Post. (Content unedited but emphases added with permission from Marion Brady)
"UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS"
Wednesday 27 April 2011 by Marion Brady, the Washington Post
"Standardized tests are enhancing and destroying reputations, opening and closing doors of opportunity, raising and lowering property values, starting and ending professional careers, determining the life chances of the young, and shaping the intellectual resources upon which America’s future largely hinges.
You might think that with so much riding on the tests, every civic-minded person in the country would be demanding transparency, proof of validity, assurance that every item on every test had been examined from every possible perspective.
If you think that, you are wrong.
The corporately engineered education "reform" campaign has been so slick that standardized testing is now taken for granted. The issue isn’t to test or not to test, but how to squeeze them all in.
America has bought an education pig in a poke peddled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies, and packaged by Congress. The animal is a freak, shaped by naiveté, political ideology, unexamined assumptions, ignorance of history, and myths.
This vast experiment with kids’ minds and America’s future was put in place without broad national debate, without in-depth research, without trial pilot programs, and without answering questions posed again and again by those who know something about teaching – know about it because, unlike those making policy, they’ve actually taught.
Questions, it goes without saying, are important. All human-made disasters have at least one thing in common – those responsible acted without first asking good questions.
Here are some of the questions educators ask that have yet to be answered. Decide for yourself if ignoring them doesn’t guarantee educational and cultural disaster.
1. Given the near-instant accessibility of information made possible by the internet, the traditional emphasis on learners storing information in their heads no longer makes much sense. The young need to learn to process and apply information, tasks that require them to infer, hypothesize, relate, generalize, value, and so on.
Questions: Have standardized tests made the switch from measuring how much information test-takers can remember, to measuring their ability to process and apply information? If so, are the computers that process the tests able to tell the difference between, say, good hypotheses, generalizations, the value judgments, and fair or poor ones?
2. As small children and illiterates prove, and everyone’s daily experiences demonstrates, there are myriad ways of learning that don’t involve reading words or playing with numbers. Indeed, most of what most people know hasn’t been learned that way.
Questions: Are test items that require mere manipulation of symbols robbing America of broad and deep pools of talent and experience more complex than paper-and-pencil tests can measure? Are those who learn in ways that aren’t tested being stamped "Not Very Smart" and shoved aside or out?
3. In times of rapid and accelerating social change such as the present era, the ability to abandon attachment to the status quo and adapt to complicated, unexpected realities is essential to survival. Adaptation requires imagination, creativity, originality, ingenuity, vision.
Questions: Can standardized tests measure and attach useful numbers to gradations of these qualities? If they can, why are they not already doing so?
4. It’s assumed that standardized tests measure test-takers knowledge. What they actually measure is something else – test-taker ability to guess what the writer of a particular test item was thinking.
Standardized tests are created by and for the dominant culture. They will, then, reflect that culture. Even the sequence in which words appear in a sentence can make a difference in the ability of a test-taker reared in a subculture to guess what the dominant-culture writer of the test item was thinking. To be fair and useful, writer and reader must be culturally aligned.
Questions: How likely is it that in a society as culturally diverse as is ours, anything even close to an acceptable level of writer-reader alignment can be achieved? Is lack of alignment a major reason for the so-called "achievement gap," or is it merely illustrating what Albert Einstein was talking about when he said that if we judged a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it would spend its whole life believing it was stupid?
Those barely begin a list of unanswered questions about standardized test items. Who decides what’s important enough to test? Using what criteria? How wise is it to hand schools over to corporations or other organizations with their own agendas? Since "hands-on" learning doesn’t lend itself to standardized testing, are the tests shoving education even farther away from how humans learn best? Is the drive to standardize kids stifling the human diversity essential to societal functioning?
Does limiting teacher autonomy by simplistic "remote" testing make the profession unappealing to those with the most to offer the young?
Is ever-greater centralization of decision-making at odds with democratic values?
Are standardized tests diverting attention from a whole range of valuable skills, such as the ability to play a musical instrument, draw a picture, tell a story, swim a stream, repair an air conditioner, nurture a plant, care for others?
Where’s the research proving there’s a relationship between standardized test scores and making a living and a life?
These and similar questions about standardized testing are central to educating. For at least two decades, the questions have been directed to the U.S. Department of Education, Congress, a succession of Administrations, liberal and conservative think tanks, and officials in several states. I know this for a fact because I’ve asked the questions myself, beginning pre-internet, when doing so required hard copy letters and U. S. postage.
The questions remain not just unanswered, but unacknowledged.
Choose your explanation for the refusal of those in authority to answer the questions. I’ve chosen mine: Policymaker ignorance and arrogance. It may also be that certain corporate types think standardized tests help shape an amiable, compliant workforce.
Do educators need to be held accountable? Absolutely. But using standardized tests for that purpose parallels the Vietnam-era logic of destroying a village in order to save it."
If we do not do something drastic to stop this devastating plan that will rob every individual of his or her individual uniqueness, we are in for a vastly-increased troublesome future for individuals and for this country. This focused, arbitrarily conceived plan to standardize our youth uses arbitrary and erroneous criteria that defies any known concept of the nature of learning and human development.
Educators have no excuse for conforming to its ill-conceived content and assessment/evaluation provisions. They must prepare an offense that will counteract this movement, based on what every teacher knows; learners are all different. Anything less will not result in real improvement in education in this country.
Educators must act now or be subjected to more and more ridicule and loss of opportunities for competent practices that meet the needs of all learners.
Are there alternatives that can be tapped to replace the ill-conceived standardized assessment and evaluation provisions of the "Race to the Top?"
Absolutely.
One such field-tested model is "The Constructive, Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System" (CARES) developed by Robert L. Arnold, Professor of Education, Emeritus.
To contact this author e-mail to: [email protected]
Take note:
Public education is under attack and teachers are unfairly getting the brunt of the criticism. The teachers are only part of our system of public education that needs our immediate attention. The system is outdated and largely ineffective, especially in general (reality-based) education and basic skills development; it needs a complete overhaul.
You may disagree, but if you take the time to examine the contents of this website, our blogs and books, you will gain new insights into the basic problems in our schools and how to fix them.Today, the "Race to the Top" is the federally sponsored effort to reform education, this time by mandating the use of standardized tests and a standardized core curriculum. This is a devastating assault on the uniqueness of individual learners and their opportunities for healthy growth and development.
"The Race to the Top" is a top down scheme to force schools and teachers to conform to a seriously-flawed set of assumptions and beliefs about learning and development. Changing the direction of this movement must be met with new vigor if we expect anything to happen that will create a sustainable, effective, and cost-effective, reformed educational system.
I invite your participation in just such an effort. Our children, grandchildren and the future of our democracy are at stake.
Join in if you want to improve schools and positively affect the future of our country. Contact your friends and urge them to contact their friends – help us build a broad network of grassroots support for systemic change in our public educational systems.
Think of this effort as a way to demand systemic changes that will have a critical impact on the future of this country. Social media have demonstrated the power to do this.
What do we know about the New York State Standards for implementation of the common core curriculum?
How many four year olds in Pre-K have you seen who can (1) reason abstractly and quantitatively, (2) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, (3) model with mathematics, (4) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning, and (5) analyze, compare, and sort two and three-dimensional shapes and objects, in different sizes, using informal language to describe their similarities?
I doubt even Einstein was capable of these intellectual feats, when he was four.
Did you know these are some of the expected learning outcomes in mathematics for Pre-K (four year old) students across New York State Schools? That is, according to the Board of Regents’ and the State Education Department’s published standards for newly-defined common core subjects.
You may recall that the decision makers of our State were enticed by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, with a mere seven hundred million of our tax dollars, if the State Education Department would adopt the new standards and move instruction farther and farther down toward infancy, under the banners of “Race to the Top” and “No Child Left Behind.”
What’s wrong with this? Don’t we need to raise the standards so that students will be successful engineers when they grow up? Is there anything wrong with that? No, but there is a great deal wrong with mandating the teaching of advanced math concepts at the Pre-K level. But what do we know? They claim that many approved these new standards, including a hundred selected individuals (probably paid for their services), five PhDs and five EdDs and others from the Board of Regents including one MD, along with five hundred fifty invited survey-contributors from the educational ranks. HOW CAN THEY ALL BE WRONG?
The truth is, to be able to perform anything close to those five standards a learner would need to have matured to the level of intellectual capabilities for abstract, logical reasoning and critical thinking - higher thought processes. In the sixty years I spent studying school-age children I never found learners at the age of four who were capable of these intellectual tasks, nor five year olds, six year olds or even many ten year olds. So what, you ask?
The pre-logical phase (where most Pre-K learners operate, and where older learners operate who are at this stage of development) is characterized by an inability to consistently deal logically with their experiences, but they thrive on experiences that allow a freedom of expression, creativity and imaginative play that does not require empirical validation from observations, logical judgments or experimentations.
Their pre-logical experiences, however, are essential to full development of logical capabilities that will eventually emerge. Their capabilities that include an insatiable curiosity, an active imagination, creativity and a propensity for free associations must be preserved and utilized throughout the early developmental phases of each child, if we expect these abilities to be used later in the study of mathematics. To insist that learners at the pre-operational/pre-logical phase, regardless of their age, demonstrate logical solutions to problems is not only pre-mature; it is harmful to the developing intellect. Whitehead (a noted philosopher/mathematician) told us that back in the 1920’s.
Expecting pre-operational (pre-logical) youngsters to intellectually process sophisticated concepts of mathematics, such as those listed in the five standards, will likely result in feelings of inadequacy and lowered self-worth. Avoidance, due to a fear of math, will be the likely result.
Those finding mathematics too difficult in engineering school will likely exhibit restrictions in their thinking left over from their Pre-K days, if these days are filled with developmentally inappropriate instruction in mathematics. Developmentally inappropriate instruction has been found to cause problems with advanced mathematical concepts.
Memorization, reinforced by repetition, is the only alternative available for pre-logical/Pre-K learners who are required to intellectually process advanced mathematical concepts. A steady diet of this type of experience will render learners damaged in ways they may never recover from.
There is a well-known reference, A Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Cognitive Domain, arranged from simplest to complex cognition (referred to as “Bloom’s Taxonomy”) that sheds some light on these new standards for Pre-K and for other pre-logical learners where the standards for desired learning outcomes are frequently described using the general term “understanding.” “Understanding,” whatever that means, is cognition which is defined as the act of coming to know and it is much more than just understanding.
The least complex level of cognition is “knowledge of specifics” or simple awareness of an object, event or process. If the Pre-K learners are instructed in the five standards outlined in the first paragraph, they will have an awareness of their existence. What that awareness entails is anyone’s guess. If their “knowledge of specifics” is repeated enough times, learners will recite the information much like Pavlov’s famous dogs would salivate.
Questions on standardized tests that ask for the recall of “knowledge of specifics,” represent this lowest level of cognition. A correct answer does indicate an aspect of learning, but it is learning at the lowest, simplest level of cognition – information that is simply taken into the mind and never put into fresh combinations – information that is easily forgotten.
The next more complex level of cognition is commonly referred to as “comprehension” or “understanding.” Comprehension or understanding is actually composed of three ascending levels of cognition - translation, interpretation and extrapolation. We need to ask, can pre-logical learners functioning at this level of cognition process the mathematical concepts outlined in the five statements of new standards? Can they translate that language into the language of a four year old? Can they interpret the meanings that this sophisticated language contains? Can they extrapolate from their translation and interpretations to see other possibilities? No, but they can recite relatively meaningless specifics, if that information has been repeated enough times.
The next level is “application” which involves using abstractions in specific and concrete life situations. This is followed by the “analysis” of the elements, relationships and organizational principles found in the prior “understandings” and applications. Can you picture four year olds processing at this level of cognition in mathematics or any other subject for that matter?
The next level of cognitive thought-processing is called “synthesis.” Synthesis involves putting together elements and parts to make a whole. Synthesis involves producing a unique communication, a plan or proposed set of operations. Achieving a synthesis enables the learner to make quantitative and qualitative judgments in terms of internal and external criteria. This is called critical thinking or critical, creative evaluation.
These last two higher levels of cognition, synthesis and critical evaluation, cannot be measured by a “standardized” test since they are unique constructions created by each individual learner. They are not standardized.
It is absurd to think that pre-logical learners can meaningfully engage the higher levels of cognition required of these State standards. They will not internalize these concepts until they have reached the formal operational level of development with capabilities for reasoning, abstract critical thinking, and hypothetical deduction. This will not happen much before ten or twelve years of age, if then. Only about 12% of the twelve year olds will reach this level of capability.
It will not likely happen at all if restrictions in thinking are built up through developmentally inappropriate instruction starting at the early stages of intellectual development. Memorizing relatively meaningless information while at the stage of pre-operations leaves the learner with learning disabilities that may never be rectified.
Learning to read the significance of children’s drawings, and paying attention to their thought processes, would likely result in a much different judgment about what is or is not appropriate instruction for learners at various stages of their development. Adults who impose on children unattainable expectations that do not take into account the realities of human development, are making a serious, serious mistake.
Moving developmentally inappropriate instruction (even legitimate mathematical concepts) to lower and lower age groups is most likely based on ignorance of or disregard for human development. The potential for long term damage to individual learners from these errors should be of grave concern to all of us.
During each semester over a span of nearly thirty years, about twenty-five elementary teacher-education candidates and I fanned out to area schools to study the behavior of children as part of a “foundations of education” experience. Each candidate was asked to pick a child in grade levels from nursery school to the sixth grade and study the results obtained from a battery of simple tests. We studied about fifteen hundred learners (1500). We focused on collecting and cataloguing these children’s drawings, observing and recording their uses or non-uses of logical thinking. We used ideas that were drawn from the research of two major developmental theorists, Jean Piaget and Viktor Lowenfeld.
Viktor Lowenfeld’s ideas dealt with non-verbal, visual artistic expressions. These expressions begin with scribbles, first occurring when the infant/toddler can grasp a marking instrument and apply it to a surface. Every parent has observed this behavior. Parents may not be aware of this but there is a gradual, biologically-based invariant sequence in maturation that follows from the scribbling stages.
The next more sophisticated level to develop is called pre-schematic drawings, leading to schematic drawings and to drawings that show a dawning sense of realism and eventually realism, culminating in an ability to utilize prior capabilities abstractly to communicate a particular message.
Visual expressions are very important to learners in organizing and communicating personal meanings and should be important to those charged with assessment and evaluation of intellectual capabilities and intellectual achievements. But do standardized tests include children’s drawings? No.
Authentic drawings of familiar experiences reveal the levels of children’s intellectual operations as defined by Viktor Lowenfeld and Jean Piaget, and this evidence of developmental capabilities can be easily observed in each child’s drawings that reflects that individual’s developmental sequence.
Producing random scribbles on a surface is a most important achievement for any child. Its origins reflect physical/neurological growth that relates to an ability to grasp an object. We all remember the infant banging a rattle against the crib until it falls. Small and larger muscle growth and neurological pathways develop that eventually enable the infant to grasp the object and then voluntarily let it go.
Likewise as more sophisticated growth occurs in the muscles and in neurological/ intellectual pathways, the child is able to control scribbles as a deliberate skill. A son or daughter at this level might even practice this skill by using the marker to re-decorate the walls of their bedrooms, much to the consternation of mom and dad.
As each child is developing a growing and expanding awareness of his or her surroundings, the ability to represent what is perceived in life is revealed in a picture drawn by the child. This can be the first evidence in a child’s drawings that represents what is being experienced in the life of that child. For instance, a controlled set of lines drawn anywhere on the page becomes a representation of a house, even if an adult does not recognize its form. The child will insist, and rightly so, those lines indeed represent a house. This is an example of a late pre-schematic drawing featuring controlled scribbles that mark a beginning schematic drawing that represents the child’s thoughts and images.
Gradually, as more sophisticated neurological capabilities emerge they are reflected in drawings that are fully schematic, that is, they are deliberately drawn so as to reflect a schema (a mental image) of what is viewed or perceived at the time.
At this level of intellectual capacity, the child will draw a two-dimensional house (absent depth) invariably placed at the bottom of the page, on a baseline. Nothing will be drawn in front of the house. Proportionality will not reflect logic but rather what is intuitively important in the life of the child. For instance, if mother is in the picture she might be taller than the house. Three-dimensionality, the way adults view a house, is not intellectually available to a child at this developmental level.
The first signs of three-dimensionality (applied logic) are seen in drawings that show a dawning sense of realism. The learner is becoming aware that the house is not anchored to a baseline in the picture; it is set back away from the bottom of the page, on a base plane, beginning to show three dimensions, that is, height, width and depth. However at this stage, the learner will only draw the front portion of the house in three dimensions; the rear of the house will still be in two dimensions.
A familiar house drawn at the dawning-realism stage will not show vanishing points as the scene would appear to adults, but will have an abruptly-drawn straight line from the roof to the ground at the rear of the house. This learner is not applying logic that would suggest that the rear of the house would reflect that which is imagined to exist even if it cannot be seen directly. This picture is the beginning of logical analysis, but not having completely matured to this level, the child will remain partially at the prior level of two-dimensional perception. This in-between stage is also reflected in other behaviors of this individual – sometimes logical sometimes not.
When full capabilities for logic emerge, the learner will deliberately draw a house in three-dimensions, showing acceptable proportionality, overlapping and depth that adults would recognize and approve of.
In our research, Piaget’s schematic was used to further describe children’s intellectual behavior in ways consistent with Lowenfeld’s findings. Piaget described intellectual development as beginning with automatic motor/physical responses to sensory stimuli (experiences). He found this to be the forerunner of deliberate operational intelligence which he called pre-operations, or pre-logical intelligence.
A learner at the pre-operational level of intellectual capabilities will decide the truth of something on the basis of perception (how it appears to be) rather than conception (how it is proven to be). To study this, along with other of Piaget’s conservation experiments, we used two beakers of the same size and filled them to the same level with water. We asked the learners who were able to engage in our experiment to agree that there was the same amount of water in each beaker and we adjusted the levels to get this agreement. Then we poured the contents of one beaker into another taller, skinnier beaker. The level of the water appeared much higher.
We then asked the learner if there was possibly the same amount of water in each, now that they appeared to be different. The pre-operational learner insisted the taller one had more water, even though he or she had just agreed that the beakers contained the same amounts of water. This answer was based on how the subject at the moment appeared to or was perceived by that learner.
This level of pre-operational intelligence does not include an ability to hold in the mind or “conserve” a concept of the agreement while the appearance changes and then apply this to the solution of the problem posed as to whether there is more water since it appears to be more. To determine that the amount of water has not changed requires the application of logical intelligence that emerges at the concrete operations level of development, usually somewhere for most learners between ages seven and ten.
The concretely logical learner explained that if no water was lost, the amount will be the same even though it appears to be different. In this case the concept of “sameness” is presumed to be conserved in the mind and applied to the solution of the problem put before the learner. This represents a basic application of logic; if this is equal, and nothing has been lost, then the result is also equal. This intellectual capability is needed to understand (comprehend) principles in arithmetic like the associative and distributive principles.
The learners who were formal operational looked at the so-called empty beaker to see if there was a drop of water remaining and then insisted that the amounts had changed, but not because the water appeared to be taller in the skinnier beaker, but because some water, even just a droplet, remained in the original beaker.
This judgment requires a more sophisticated intellectual capability than is available to the concrete operational youngster. The concrete operational youngster is limited to concrete or direct experience with fewer experiences in life, those more subtle points are not available. The formal operational youngster is capable of hypothetical deduction and abstract thinking.
The full development of logical intelligence does not generally emerge until approximately the ten year age level. Rousseau believed this, centuries ago. Piaget and other developmental theorists have validated this claim. Subjecting pre-operational learners to requirements that demand intellectual capabilities beyond the learner’s operational level, such as “reasoning abstractly and quantitatively,” is devastating, and the negative results will likely manifest themselves in later life.
This also is true of pre-maturely parsing the language into its syllables and letters, and analyzing sentence structure and themes in written works. This is comparable to memorizing the arithmetic facts that are not conceptualized and have little if any real use to the young learner. Little wonder it has been reported that nearly seventy percent of our beginning engineering students in college flunk out because they cannot deal with calculus. This is believed to relate directly to misguided instruction imposed on early learners with developmentally inappropriate procedures and irrelevant information.
You see, calculus requires a maximized creative mind, free to manipulate concepts of quantity and spatial relationships. Success with calculus requires a developmental level of formal operations, when the learner is capable of relatively unencumbered hypothetical deduction and abstract thought. These capabilities are available for most of us if they are not distorted or destroyed by inappropriate instruction.
I had the fortunate opportunity to discuss this in some depth with Dr. Robert Davis when he was at Rutgers University during his declining years. Coming from a scholar of his stature, it lends considerable credibility to concerns about the likely results from pre-mature, developmentally inappropriate instruction in mathematics. (The same holds true unfortunately for many other areas of the common core school curriculum as well).
The late Robert Davis, former researcher and Director of the Madison (Post-Sputnik) Project in Mathematics of the 1950’s, conducted at Syracuse University, stated that he and his colleagues from the University of Illinois found that engineering students, whose educational experience had resulted in the development of rigidly-held algorithms likely developed from a practice of memorization and repetitions at an early age, will fail to function creatively at this more advanced level of mathematics. They found as many as 70% of otherwise capable students enrolled in calculus will likely flunk out of that course.
What is clear is that human intellectual development occurs in an invariant sequence, like creeping that comes before walking and walking that comes before running. Progression along this sequence is grounded in each person’s unique genetic makeup. Full development at any stage is dependent upon full development at the prior stages. Some individuals mature earlier than others. Some learners have access to growth-encouraging experiences; some are neglected or miss-instructed.
Those who experience a misguided plan that demands performance on developmentally inappropriate standards will most certainly be short changed. When we hear the statement, standardized tests ignore developmental differences in learners this is what is being referred to.
Any parent recognizes that a sequence of biological development for each individual is real, and knows that it cannot be significantly accelerated, but it can be diminished. If you don’t agree with this statement, insist that puberty begin at seven and then deal with individual guilt feelings resulting from that person not having performed up to your expectations. Or demand that baby teeth fall out on cue; don’t be patient for the teeth to naturally fall out for new ones to take their place. Although it is not often thought about this way, intellectual development is also biologically based.
Those responsible for the creation and approval of these new standards should have known the facts about human development, but I guess the lure of big money from the feds skewed their “critical thinking.”
Had they studied children, as my students and I did, they would have discovered that even within a group of ten year olds (fourth graders) there is a range of developmental differences. The majority of learners would be concretely logical, able to see the world in its realistic, multidimensional form, but largely that world which is directly, concretely experienced. They would be considered “average.” A few would be operating at the formal operational level, fully capable of logic, abstract reasoning and hypothetical deduction and that would surely enlist the exaggerated accolades of uninformed adults and professionals. A few would still be pre-operational (pre-logical) and probably mistakenly being provided remedial assistance.
The capabilities of each of these different individuals depend upon their biological development that is positively or negatively influenced by the quality and quantity of their experiences. If there are few serious physical or psychological or instructional impediments to learning, those who are pre-operational will eventually become logical and capable of higher level thought processes. That is, if their development is not driven off course by well-meaning but misinformed adults.
It has been consistently found that approximately 85% of 5 year olds are pre-operational and 15% are only at the onset of concrete operations. 60% of the 6 year olds are pre-operational, 35% are at the onset of concrete operations and only 5% are at a mature level of concrete operations, capable of logical operations. None of the six year olds are generally found to be at the formal operations level. Hypothetical situations are not within their purview at this level.
12% of the 10 year olds are still at the pre-operations level, 52% at the onset of concrete operations and 35% have reached the mature level of concrete operations, only 1% function at the onset of formal operations. Even 1% of 14 year olds have been found to exhibit pre-operational capabilities, 32% are at the onset of concrete-operations, 43% are at the mature concrete operational level, 15% are at the onset of formal operations and only 9% are at the mature level of formal operations.
Given the realities of individual development, does a one-size-fits-all achievement test make any sense? Does instruction in the common core, mandated curriculum for all students, as if they are all alike, make sense? Does pushing instruction farther and farther down into the primary levels with expectations that learners meet these higher standards make sense? For instance, being able to (1) reason abstractly and quantitatively, (2) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, (3) model with mathematics, (4) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning, and (5) analyze, compare, and sort two and three-dimensional shapes and objects, in different sizes, using informal language to describe their similarities? The answer is a resounding, NO.
These standards of the NYSED are way beyond the capabilities of Pre-K youngsters, and many older youngsters; they invite instructional practices that will be the cause of irreparable damage to individual learners. Is this what is meant by “raising” standards? Do you think the results of administering achievement tests that attempt to measure what has been learned at the lowest levels of cognition regardless of their developmental readiness should be used to judge individual learner-success or the success or failure of the school? I hope not, now that “you know the rest of the story.” But what do you plan to do about it?
