What Does ‘Smart’ Mean in the 21st Century
For those of us who work with students to achieve their best grades and highest test scores, conversations about intelligence come up as often as discussions of athleticism in a major league broadcasting booth. Certain attributes very clearly connect to success in a specific task without actually being either necessary or sufficient, and intelligence definitely falls into that category. Part of the problem comes with mistaking intelligence with smarts. The term ‘smart’ seems to be a catch-all for a diverse mix of skills, strategies, and cognitive attributes the elude consensus. I like the spin Seth Godin–a genius in his own right–has on what smart really means these days: Smart is no longer memorization. It’s not worth much. Smart is no longer access to information. Everyone has that. Smart is: • Situational awareness • Filtering information • Troubleshooting • Clarity of goals • Good taste • Empathy and compassion for others…
Different Ways to Be Intelligent
Every student and parent in the U.S. knows that there’s a lot of pressure on kids to be “smart.” In fact, intelligence is very cool right now—Gen Z, or everyone born in the mid-90s or later, is the most educated generation in American history. The hashtag #BookTok on TikTok, where readers share book-related content and bond over their love of reading, has over fifty billion views. Quintessentially geeky games like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering are more popular now than they’ve ever been. If it’s brains versus brawn, brains are enjoying a winning streak these days. But society tends towards a pretty limited view of what intelligence really means. In our public school system, it’s easy to feel like you’re not smart if you can’t hack homework or ace tests. The SAT and ACT especially are mistaken for intelligence tests, even though they’re definitely not. Being book-smart is…
What is an Intelligence Test?
For as long as standardized exams like the SAT and ACT have been part of the college admissions process–a long time, indeed–they’ve been mistaken for conventional intelligence tests. This misconception makes sense. After all, the SAT and ACT are standardized tests, and intelligence appears to play a major role in success on these exams. That does not mean, however, that they are the same. Traditional intelligence testing dates back to the turn of the 20th century, debuting in France and then making a splash in the United States. The various intelligence tests evaluate markers of general intelligence, often referred to as intelligence quotient or simply IQ. Of course, defining intelligence itself poses pernicious challenges, especially to those who ascribe to the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. However, general intelligence, also known as g, encompasses both crystallized and fluid intelligence, basically knowledge and problem solving ability respectively. Below these broad categories lie specific…
Is the SAT an Intelligence Test?
The recent negative publicity that the SAT has received once again exposed College Board’s inability to provide students and colleges with both a perfect test environment and a reliable measurement tool. This is nothing new. It just received a lot of publicity this time. After the story broke, my wife asked me why the colleges don’t offer their own entrance exams. My response was that despite having more than fifty years to come up with an alternative, they have done nothing. Sadly–and I say this as a parent–I don’t think it will ever change. Colleges simply do not have the resources to give your child’s application the review time that it deserves. As a result, they are dependent on two numbers: GPA and test scores. One would hope that GPA is a reasonable measure of a student’s academic accomplishments, although high schools are unfortunately not immune to the grade inflation…
Learning New Languages Improves Test Scores
It was once thought that growing up in a bilingual home was a detriment to a baby’s cognitive development. Scientists believed that the child would become confused or develop schizophrenia or a split personality. Today we know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Speaking another language goes far beyond just learning a second set of words, phrases, and metaphors. Learning a second language can actually increase the size of the hippocampus–the area of the brain responsible for creating, storing, and retrieving memories and information–while also increasing the amount of neural pathways connecting other parts of the brain. Here are a few more cognitive benefits to learning another language: Multilingual people tend to score better on standardized tests. They are better at remembering lists and sequences. They are more perceptive to their surroundings. They are better able to focus on important information while sifting out unimportant or misleading information.…
Mental Models for the SAT and ACT
Education, or at least learning, must be more than the memorization of facts and routines. Learning is a process of developing ways of looking at the world, frameworks of reasoning, representation, and calculation that we can apply to different situations. Basically, learning is about developing mental models. A mental model describes a way to think about something. As a result, we should never try to apply a single model to every situation. Why do we need more than one? The investor Charlie Munger, who has mastered many complex systems to massive profit in his day, has said much about mental models: “… the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. “You’ve got to have models in…