Test-taking

Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post talks about Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous but maybe his best points are about the attempts to make schools focus on test-taking skills:

the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.

Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.

But other than bad test-takers, their economies have a few important traits in common...

Bottom line, their economies work pretty well--and attempts to fix a 50-year-old "crisis" of bad test scores do run a serious risk of doing much more harm than good. We need more innovators, not more test-takers...STEM has to be a big part of that, and many people doing STEM understand that just fine. By all means, let us advocate "STEAM not STEM," but if somebody starts advocating standardized tests as a basis for evaluating creativity...ummm.... no. Just say no.