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New York Magazine recently published “The Stupid Issue,” and I have some thoughts.
The first article, titled “A Theory of Dumb,” is about how it isn’t smartphones or COVID that’s responsible for the recent downward trend found in IQ data—it’s how we have so much access to each other that we are getting ideas regurgitating without nuance. At least, that was my understanding. It’s a little less definitive than I thought it would be.
This in particular stood out to me: “There’s less reporting and more commentary about reporting, and sometimes just commentary about that commentary. What used to be a pyramid of original reporting topped by a layer of interpretation has flipped upside down into a wide base of takes wobbling on a shrinking nub of facts.”
(Here I am, doing some commentating! Oops.)
It’s worth reading the article’s summarization of how AI trained on AI (which is increasingly what the web is made up of now!) makes it stupider!
There’s a bit of a catch:
Dworak knows what her findings suggest, but as a scientist, she’s required to add a few caveats. First, scores weren’t down in every category. They rose in spatial reasoning, or the ability to mentally rotate 3-D objects, which is crucial for playing Fortnite. Second, her data came from voluntary unproctored online tests. “This wasn’t like an SAT. Somebody could have been taking it on a bus,” she says. “But I did have almost 400,000 data points.” Third and most important, “we can’t exactly say that people are getting dumber, just that scores in these categories are going down.” IQ has always been a rough proxy for intelligence, less a direct gauge than a reflection of certain mental habits that society rewards. Its scales are renormalized every decade or so and its meaning constantly debated among statisticians, some of whom still wonder if both the original Flynn effect and its reversal might owe more to inconsistent methodology than to real cognitive change.
Testing, hmmm?
The most important thing I’ve learned in my life may very well be how to analyze studies for biases. Almost all studies have issues, and I’m glad this one’s were explained in the article.
Thee question is, how much effort were the testers putting into their test?
NY Mag also published a story specifically about student achievements hitting a low: “The Big Fail.” This starts out about recent test scores, but pivots to Montclair, New Jersey (a favorite place of mine, actually) to give a case study on pandemic aid, test score availability, technology in the classroom, and racial disparities in the data.
Honestly, I’m not really sure what to make of this article, except I keep coming back to one thing: are standardized tests a good measurement to hang all this on?
For kids, they are over-tested, particularly the ones who are monitored the most. Three times a year benchmarks. Diagnostics for different teachers in different subjects. Everything the No Child Left Behind act stipulates (grades 3-8 testing). SATs and ACTs and the PSAT. Heck, New Jersey just piloted a new platform so we had that testing recently for three days, and it isn’t even the real one. When I first started teaching, part of why I lost my mind was watching even my honors students not care about benchmark testing that was supposed to give me the data to help them.
They don’t care.
We could argue that they don’t have the attention span, and that’s a fair question. I try to prepare my rather hyperactive students for the tests by making sure they’re not listening to music while reading or playing YouTube and games while also reading. They hate it. They are so used to this multitasking and constant audio and visual input that taking it away seems to bring pain. But they need that for the tests, right? And they need to not just read, but be read closely and critically—that requires their brain to make that extra noise, not something else. (Plus, the research I’ve explored suggests, as I suspected, the extra input gets in the way.) Even I tried listening to a podcast while working on this and was much less productive.
Plus, these testing environments? No bathroom breaks, no breaks at all, no water? How is that an environment where you can do your best?
There’s no way to tell what students can actual do versus what they are able to perform.
Not to mention that most of the essays on New Jersey’s new assessment will be graded by AI. You’re not even writing for a human audience!
Furthermore, as my own students constantly remind me, preparing for the test feels so separated from daily life and the life they imagine for themselves in the future. Especially, unfortunately, when it seems like computer programs can just seem to solve for x or write an essay in minutes.
I want to strive for curiosity, voice, and learning for the sake of it. I have to do that in the framework of daily reading and essays and test prep. It’s hard.
And I feel stupider than before, too. I’m challenging myself to write this newsletter because I want to make writing a part of my life again. But it isn’t just the phones or COVID or whatever. Maybe I haven’t actually gotten stupider. Maybe I just haven’t been trying.
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