Being a baseball fan my whole life, the conversation about yesterday’s most recent Hall of Fame (HOF) induction interested me because I think that institution for whatever its other faults acted in accordance with its meritocratic nature. Critics of yesterday’s election results missing that point also mistake how arguments for admission to a meritocracy should proceed.. To say that […]
Author: testingapersonalhistory
Myths of Meritocracy Are Entangled in Myths about Testing
The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin, a foundational text of modern assessment design, the science behind the making of tests, lays out the components of a formal argument that leads to a claim. (And remember the whole reason to have a test is to be able to make some claim about what someone knows […]
MailBox Monday #3: Tests, Time, Teachers, and Inertia
It is a beautiful but cold Monday morning here in Princeton New Jersey. Well, just barely morning as I am writing this a shade before noon. But my ebullience arises in part from finally shedding my obsession (as noted in y’day’s post) with reading critiques of the SAT. Earlier today, I gleefully informed the Google […]
Dog’s Breakfast or What My Algorithm Hath Wrought
According to Merriam-Webster, a Dog’s Breakfast is defined as “chiefly British. : a confused mess or mixture.” I don’t know about the British part because we certainly heard the phrase in our exclusively Irish household where I knew that it meant something that was thrown together. (The first use of the term cited by OED is […]
Mind Reading with My Granddaughter
The photo above is of my granddaughter and I walking to her nursery school this past October. Ever since she was born in 2018, the connections to what I know about learning obviously bubble up when I see her playing or hear her first babbling and now talking. And we are talking really TALKING. Mirror […]
Cognitive Gadgets Are Not Lego Toys
Let’s review the bidding here as we enter the bell lap in. our January Jolts with more than 2/3 of of the thirty-one pledged posts now up. The posts so far have included: An avowal that everyone has a personal history of testing, which means we all have experienced tests. Some wondering why our takes […]
My Blue Genes
My Blue Genes is the name of a fictional company sponsoring the podcast in the play Genealogy written by Joe Queenan and myself and presented as taped here in less than perfect fashion when it premiered at Broom Street theater in Madison WI this past November. shows like Finding Your Roots inspired Joe and I […]
Do the SATs signal success?
Two questions Success at what exactly? Will my answer change the mind of anyone already biased for or against the test? As stated in yesterday’s entry in this marathon of blog posts on various aspects of testing and how they’ve intersected with my own personal history, I do NOT think the SAT matters as much […]
What Do the SATs Measure?
Twenty years ago today, I became something of a marked man. It was a Friday and I received a phone call anxiously awaited telling me that ETS was offering me its newly created position of Chief Learning Officer. I had gone over to the dark side of the people who made the SAT. Of course, […]
MailBox Monday # 2
Our mailbox is bustling this week and even better many of the comments come from dear friends whom I have known for over half a century. In fact, the photo above is from where Mark attended school — the Abigail Adams Schoolhouse — while growing up in Weymouth Massachusetts. We met at Manhattan College in […]