Even When Test Scores Go Up, Some Cognitive Abilities Don’t

From the APA press release:

To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school — what psychological scientists refer to as “crystallized intelligence.” These high-stakes tests have been shown to predict students’ future educational attainment and adult employment and income.

But new research shows that schools whose students have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in “fluid intelligence” — the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically.

The research, conducted by researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Brown University, is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Data from nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system showed that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems.

Read full story: Even When Test Scores Go Up, Some Cognitive Abilities Don’t