Noteworthy This Week
We learned this week that the College Board is streamlining the process for requesting test accommodations for the SAT.
“The College Board announced on Thursday that it would make it easier for students with disabilities to request test accommodations, and that it would provide, for the first time, testing supports to some English-language learners who take the SAT.
The College Board and its competitor, ACT Inc., have increasingly faced criticism—and questions from the U.S. Department of Justice—for testing practices that put students with disabilities at a disadvantage compared to students without disabilities.”
Read more at EdWeek.org.
While most colleges and businesses find standardized testing useful in comparing large groups of applicants, Oliver Staley cites research supporting the notion that a more holistic approach to education that embraces a broader set of academic and psychological factors is more effective in predicting and encouraging future life success.
“Personality, not raw intelligence, is a better judge of lifetime success, new research shows.
Colleges and employers interested in predicting the success of applicants would do better to look at a student’s grades, which measure personality traits, like grit and attention to detail, more effectively than IQ and SAT tests, according to a recent study from a team led by James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago. The research was released as a discussion paper by the IZA Institute of Labour Economics.”
Read more at Quartz.
Sometimes laughter is, as they say, the best medicine. To help with test anxiety, we can always turn to Mr. Bean...