The
United States’ economy desperately needs all the scientific, engineering, and
IT geniuses it can find. One of the most important functions that the SAT can
serve is to identify young Americans with that kind of intellectual potential.
For many
years, the scholarly literature has indicated that we have been missing a lot
of that talent because one of its key components, spatial ability, is not
identified by the verbal component of the SAT and only partially identified by
the math component. The current best guess is that we’re failing to identify
about half of students within the top one percent of spatial ability. That
estimate comes from an important new study by scholars at Vanderbilt University
about to be published in Psychological Science and already summarized in the New York Times.
The good
news is that IQ tests have accurately measured spatial ability for decades and
the items to do so could easily be incorporated into the SAT. The bad news is
that it’s extremely unlikely that the College Board, which administers the SAT,
will have the nerve to do so. Why? Because the largest gender differences and
the largest ethnic differences are found in the subtests that measure spatial
skills….To Read More…
No comments:
Post a Comment