Some Thoughts on Social and Emotional Learning…upon reading about it in The New York Times

            On January 17, 2019 The New York Times, in the person of one of the newspaper’s premiere columnists, David Brooks, discovered social and emotional learning. In a column titled “Students Learn from People They Love,” Brooks summarizes some of the research that over the last few decades has gotten us to appreciate the role of emotion in learning and thus the importance of the quality of the relationship between teachers and their students. “We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion,” writes Brooks. “If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions.”

            Brooks goes on to describe various studies in neuroscience that demonstrate the beneficial interrelationship between learning and emotion. He then asks “How many recent ed reform trends have been about relationship building?... We focus on all the wrong things because we have an outmoded conception of how thinking really works.”

            I monitored my own emotions as I read Mr. Brooks’ column. I was pleased to see someone with a politically conservative bent celebrating the importance of the teacher-student relationship, for in the past, many conservative commentators have decried what they've seen as the abandonment of academic content in education in favor of “softer,” more social and developmental goals and outcomes. And it was good to see someone with a national platform challenging the commonplace reductive dichotomy between reason and emotion.

            But I also found myself thinking what I often think when reading about breakthrough educational research in neuroscience and other fields. In this case, do we need all these studies to demonstrate what any good teacher knows: that the nature and quality of the relationship between teachers and students matters? Thus do the wheels of education policy turn in our country.

            More broadly I worry that as we pay needed attention to the full scope of a child’s being, we will inadvertently reinforce the false dichotomy between thought and emotion that Mr. Brooks decries. Mr. Brooks concludes his column with “[t]he good news” that “the social and emotional learning movement has been steadily gaining strength.” He’s right. We have books, conferences, consultants, and a proliferation of Internet platforms dedicated to social and emotional learning, some of which, unfortunately, trade in simplified notions of the way the mind works.

            As if to illustrate how easily we slip into reductive binaries about mental activity—this is a cultural danger in the West—Mr. Brooks concludes his column with praise for a practice mentioned in a new report from the Aspen Institute: “Some schools… do no academic instruction the first week. To start, everybody just gets to know one another.” Why, I wonder, would we need to suspend instruction to get to know one another—unless anything academic is seen as antithetical to human relation and instruction is conceived in a narrow way? How did we arrive at the place where writing or doing science or talking about a painting or a song is viewed as incompatible with “getting to know one another?”

            A few years back, I posted a blog exploring the shriveled notion of cognition that has resulted from the last two decades of education policy. I repost it here—with apologies for my tendency to repost. It’s just that some issues seem to appear and reappear with the regularity of the seasons. The piece below, “Giving Cognition a Bad Name” (originally posted February 19, 2013) was written during a period of national enthusiasm for character education. As you read it, you can substitute the construct “social and emotional learning” for “character education” and get a sense of what concerns me today about some of the discussions of social and emotional learning. Please understand, I am not at all disputing the importance of the social and emotional dimensions of teaching and learning; much of what I’ve written over the years has been an attempt to articulate and give texture to these aspects of classroom life. Rather, I’m trying to underscore the intricate interweave of thought and feeling when we teach and when we learn.

***

Giving Cognition a Bad Name

            Cognition traditionally refers to a wide and rich range of mental processes, from memory and attention, to comprehending and using language, to solving a difficult problem in physics or choreography or living with someone. But over the last few decades cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, cognition in education policy has increasingly come to mean the skills measured by standardized tests of reading and mathematics. And as economists have gotten more involved in education, they’ve needed quantative measures of cognitive ability and academic achievement for their analytical models, so they’ve used I.Q. or other standardized test scores (like the Armed Forces Qualification Test or AFQT) as a proxy for intelligence or achievement. From the Latin cognoscere, to come to know, or cogito erqo sum, I think therefore I am, we’ve devolved to a few digits on the AFQT.

           

            As if that were not enough, there is now emerging on a number of fronts – nicely summarized in Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed – a belief that our nation’s educational focus on cognition has been misguided. Rather than focusing our energies on the academic curriculum – or on academic intervention programs for the poor – we need to turn our attention to the development of qualities of character or personality like perseverance, self-monitoring, and flexibility. As much or more than the cognitive, the argument goes, it is these qualities that account for success in school and life.

            It is healthy to be reminded about the fuller scope of education in our test- and grade-obsessed culture, and I must admit a guilty pleasure in watching someone as smart as Nobel Laureate in economics, James Heckman (one of the advocates for character education) go after our current Department of Education’s reductive academic policies.

            The importance of qualities like perseverance and flexibility are indisputable, but what concerns me is that the advocates for character accept without question the reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies, and by accepting it further affirm it. The problem is exacerbated by the aforementioned way economists carve up and define mental activity. If cognition is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not captured in those scores – like the desired qualities of character – is, de facto, non-cognitive. We’re now left with a pinched notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot.

This downplaying of the cognitive and the construction of the cognitive/non-cognitive binary will have some troubling implications for education, especially the education of the children of the poor.

To begin with, the labeling of character qualities as “non-cognitive” misrepresents them – particularly if you use the truer, richer notion of cognition. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state – a profoundly cognitive activity. Flexibility demands a weighing of options and decision-making. This is not just a problem of terminology, for if you don’t have an accurate description of something, how can you help people develop it, especially if you want to scale up your efforts?

Furthermore, these desired qualities are developed over time in settings and relationships that are meaningful to the participants, which most likely means that the settings and relationships will have significant cognitive content. Two of the classic pre-school programs that have provided a research base for the character advocates – the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian Projects – were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language use, and activities that required thought and cooperation. A very different example comes from a study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they were doing and help others do it. You could be by inclination the most dogged or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with a garment or an engine, you’re tendencies won’t be realized in a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.

 Also, we have to consider the consequences of this cognitive/ non-cognitive binary in light of the history of American educational practice. We have a powerful tendency toward either/or policies – think of old math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given this tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away from the academic and toward character education. And over the past fifty years attempts at character education as a distinct pursuit have not been particularly successful.

Finally, the focus of the current character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive domain. There’s a stirring moment in Paul Tough’s book where a remarkable chess teacher decides she’s going to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an admissions test for New York’s selective high schools. What she found was that this stunningly bright boy had learned pitifully little academic knowledge during his eight years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a strong academic education for children like him.

By all means, let us take a hard look at our national obsession with tests and scores and grades, and let us think more generously about what kinds of people we want our schools to develop. Part of such reconsideration would include a reclaiming of the full meaning of cognition, a meaning that is robust and vitally intellectual, intimately connected to character and social development, and directed toward the creation of a better world.

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Portraits of Thinking: Two Primary-Grade Teachers

Here is another story about cognition in action, an account of two primary-grade teachers. In this portrait (and one to follow in a few weeks), I want to call attention to the thought involved in good teaching. In our current policy environment, “qualified teachers” are rightly championed, but there is little discussion of teaching itself. The teacher becomes the mediating mechanism between student and test score—important, but faceless. In the following vignette I try to highlight some of the teacherly knowledge and skill at play in a primary classroom: The complex blend of planning, coordinating of tasks, on-the-spot decision making, knowledge of cognitive development, and pedagogical sensibility.

For those of you who missed the previous entries where I discuss the purpose of these portraits of thinking, I’ll repeat two introductory paragraphs now. If you did read the earlier entries, you can skip right to the story of Anne Brown and Abby Cowan, which is drawn from Possible Lives.

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

I hope that the portraits I offer over the next few months illustrate the majesty and surprise of intelligence, its varied manifestations, its subtlety and nuance. The play of mind around us. I hope that collectively the portraits help us think in a richer way about teaching, learning, achievement, and the purpose of education—a richer way than that found in our current national policy and political discourse about school.

***

It was the hundredth day of school in Brown Cow’s classroom, which was actually two classrooms and three primary grades combined—the door between them permanently open—kindergarten, first, and second grades brought together and team-taught by Anne Brown and Abby Cowan, who, in the three years of this partnership, had become Brown Cow. The children, together for their three primary years, said that they were in Brown Cow class, that they, themselves, were Brown Cows.

One Hundred Days. A milestone in primary school, so there would be all kinds of activities involving the number 100. The mother of one of the children brought in a piece of fabric printed with a hundred brown cows, fairly realistic cows, but for the red-and-white life jackets each wore. Mrs. Brown had all sixty-one children around her, leading them as they counted off: fif-teen, six-teen, seven-teen. Ms. Cowan was quickly laying out the materials for the next lesson, hustling through the two rooms.

Along the south wall were rows of mimeographed sheets done in anticipation of this hundredth day of school, blanks in sentences which the children filled in. “I can eat 100 grapes,” Yuki’s claimed. “I can hold 100 coins. I can play games 100 times.” Joey’s made different claims. He could blink 100 times, but could not eat 100 beans. Matthew could flush the toilet (he’d whispered this to Mrs. Brown before writing it) 100 times, but certainly not eat 100 Brussels sprouts. Who could? And Chris, he couldn’t no way, hold 100 worms.

Eighty-five…eighty-six…eighty-seven. Mrs. Brown was approaching the last row, touching each cow in turn, but remaining silent, the chorus of high voices rising even higher in anticipation. Crescendo. The century mark. “Wow,” said one boy in front, “it really is a hundred.” “Not all the children can count to a hundred on their own,” Abby said to me, whizzing by, “but those who can’t are guided along by those who can.”

The idea of “mixed age” or “undergraded” primary classrooms gained some national popularity in the late 1950s and sixties, then faded; it is once again being discussed as part of school reform. The pleasant, productive chaos of Rooms 13 and 14 at Franklin Elementary belied the boldness of Anne and Abby’s experiment, for what they were doing challenged one of the most widespread practices in elementary education: setting cognitive and linguistic benchmarks for children’s development.

“Children just don’t learn to read or write or count or compute at the same time,” Abby said in exasperation. “There’s all kinds of normal variation. Some kids don’t really start reading until the second grade, and they go on to become fluent readers.” Yet the anxiety that can be generated when a child doesn’t hit one of these arbitrary benchmarks—especially among some affluent parents who attach great significance to such measures—is considerable and can lead to a range of remedial interventions, some more harmful than helpful. The Brown Cow classroom was attempting a revision of that way of thinking about children’s growth.

By the time the children had finished their cow inventory and had their say about it, Abby had finished setting up the room for the next math lesson. The students would break into two groups. Those who were more advanced mathematically went with Mrs. Brown, and the rest went with Ms. Cowan. This was to be a lesson in counting and grouping by tens. The children had white mats (and the mats Ms. Cowan used had grids on them, clearly marking ten spaces for an added visual clue) and sacks of small objects they had brought in the day before, from pennies to dog biscuits. The children were to count out ten piles of ten.

They got at it, counting, sorting, piling—lots of chatter, to themselves and to others. I sat down and watched Abby. She was all over the floor, on her haunches, kneeling, turning quickly on her knees, stretching backward, extending her line of sight. “Count those out, Joey.” “Good, Melissa.” “Watch, Sebastian, what happens when I do this.” “Mantas, show Brittany what you just did.”

It is remarkable, this ability that good primary teachers have: to take in a room in a glance, to assess in a heartbeat, to, with a word or two, provide feedback, make a connection, pull a child into a task. While the majority of Brown Cow’s children were native speakers of English, there were also Eddie and Mantas, making the transition from their native Lithuanian, Yuki (and her sister Yuko), whose English was limited when they entered the class, and a fair number of students whose first language was Farsi or Spanish. So Abby and Anne made a conscious effort to get native-born children to help Mantas and others—and to get Mantas and company to use their new language to explain things to whomever was close by.

In Anne’s half of the shared classroom, children were making their piles of tens with little trouble, but there would be more for them to do. One of the benefits of the ungraded primary is that students who were excelling in a subject could be encouraged to go beyond kindergarten or first-grade guidelines. Mrs. Brown had written eight problems on the board, to be solved with the help of the students’ “manipulatives,” their pennies and stamps and leaves.

1) 20             2) 60               3) How many 5s in 200?

  +30               +90 

And so on. “How can we do two hundred when we only have one hundred?” Jeremy asked. “Good question,” said Mrs. Brown. “What do you think?”

All the Brown Cow children took districtwide achievement tests, so standard measures of learning—and accountability—were in place. But Anne and Abby have also been trying to develop a different kind of report card, one that reflects the way their class worked. “What does it really mean to say that a kid is doing math at first- or second-grade level?” Anne asked rhetorically. “That’s awfully vague…and not very helpful. What we want to do is provide a description of each child’s strengths and weaknesses. And since we get to know the kids so well over three years, we should be able to do that with precision.”

When the bell finally rang for physical education—a twenty-five minute break when the children would be out in the yard—Anne and Abby started setting up for yet another lesson involving the number 100, this one to combine arithmetic and language arts.

The teachers distributed old newspapers on the tables in two rooms, then scissors, glue, and large pieces of art paper: yellow, blue, green, magenta. As they did this, they reviewed the morning. How did the lessons work out? Who was doing well? Who needed help? How might Anne better integrate the math problems with the use of the manipulatives? How can Abby do more with her children? They also talked about a boy who might be ready to move into the more proficient math group, such movement being central to this mixed-age grouping.

The bell rang, and soon there was the flap and chatter of the children’s return. Ms. Cowan and Mrs. Brown gathered them around and began explaining the lesson with the newspapers. The children would work in assigned groups of eight—the Yellow Group, Green Group, Magenta Group. These were mixed age and ability groups so that the younger children would learn from the older. (Earlier, I had seen Abby pair a second-grader with a kindergartener to read a book; there were lots of possibilities for such peer tutorials in this room.) The students were to find a hundred words that at least one person in their group could read. “One hundred words you know, and cut them out, and paste them.” Then the teachers would put the final products on display.

Mrs. Brown explained the assignment one more time, and off they went, the girl in the flowered pants, the boy in the Raiders jacket, the girl with the oversized sweatshirt. Anne and Abby moved from table to table, organizing, demonstrating, cajoling. “Ms. Cowan,” Lisa said, touching Abby’s arm, “I can’t read yet.” “You know what, sweetheart?” Abby replied, kneeling down. “You’re starting to; you can read some. Look.” And she pointed to some words on the page of advertisements, and Lisa read them: and, the, to, Muppet. Then Lisa wiggled her fingers awkwardly into a pair of scissors and started cutting, Muppet first, then and, then to.

A focused pandemonium spread over the room; kids wrangling for pages with big print, singing the words out as they cut them, pounding them onto art paper, reading loudly, and more loudly, the words they knew, discovering them amid a growing jumble of newsprint. You, book,tax, four, down, Clinton, dream, deal, warranty, house, Von’s, blowout, celebration, doctor,banker, slashing, champagne. (“Hey, I found the word champagne”), Cocoa Puffs, matinee,guarantee.

Cut and crumpled paper piled up on the floor, the children kicking through it as they moved around the tables for yet more words: silk, tennis, Vietnam (Abby: “Do you know why that word is important?” The little girl in flowered pants: “There was a war there”), sale, love,dress, book, need. A girl came up to Anne with the word squash stuck to the top of her finger. A boy thumped his new word onto green paper. Abby helped a child read need. Neeeed. And all around the room, words not known, words cut away, fluttered to the floor.

Portraits of Thinking: A Novice Cabinetmaker

Here is a second story about cognition in action, a glimpse at a young man developing skills as a cabinetmaker. For those of you who missed the previous entry where I discuss the purpose of these portraits of thinking, I’ll repeat two introductory paragraphs now. If you did read the earlier entry, you can skip right to the story of Felipe, which is drawn from The Mind at Work.

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

I hope that the portraits I offer over the next few months illustrate the majesty and surprise of intelligence, its varied manifestations, its subtlety and nuance. The play of mind around us. I hope that collectively the portraits help us think in a richer way about teaching, learning, achievement, and the purpose of education—a richer way than that found in our current national policy and political discourse about school.

***

Felipe, a student in a high school wood construction class, is the head of a team assigned to build a cabinet for his school’s main office. At this point in his education Felipe has built one small, structurally simple cabinet, and this current, second, cabinet has a number of features the earlier project didn’t. His storehouse of knowledge about cabinets, his “cabinet sense”, is just developing, and the limits of his knowledge reveal themselves at various points throughout assembly. Like this one.

Felipe is trying to record final figures for all the components of the cabinet—he and his co-workers are eager to begin assembly. He is working with Gloria and Jesus, and he is sketching with them one more three-dimensional representation of the cabinet, using several lists and a sketch he and the others had produced during planning.

When I approach the team, Felipe is looking back and forth from lists to the sketch and talking to his peers. He seems puzzled. He asks Gloria to get the first sketch they made of the cabinet. She retrieves it from her backpack and unfolds it. They study it for a moment. He says something to Jesus, then takes a tape and measures—as if to confirm—the length of the cabinet. Sixty-eight inches.

Felipe continues this way, double-checking, trying to verify, looking up occasionally to snag the teacher, Mr. Devries, who, however, is helping a group across the room. The source of this vexation is a discrepancy that emerged as Felipe, Jesus, and Gloria were listing final numbers: The length of the sheet of plywood for the bottom of the cabinet—this is found on the list of materials—is sixty-eight inches. But the length of the top panel—listed on another sheet—is sixty-seven inches. This makes no sense. As Felipe explains it, exhibiting a nice shift from numbers to their structural meaning, the top can’t be shorter than the bottom, or the cabinet will look like this: and here he makes an abbreviated triangle in the air with his hands. What’s going on?

Finally, Mr. Devries is free, Felipe goes to get him, and they confer. The sketch Felipe has is inadequate, is not detailed enough to reveal that the top panel rests inside notches cut into the top of the side panels. These are called rabbet cuts. Felipe’s discomfort resolves quickly into understanding. The bottom panel extends to the very ends of the side panels, but the top will be shorter by a half inch on each side, the dimensions of the rabbet cuts. Thus the mystery of the sixty-eight inch bottom and the sixty-seven-inch top.

The depictions of the cabinet in Felipe’s plans do not provide enough information—through graphics or numbers—to enable him to figure out the discrepancy in measurement between top and bottom. Yet he must rely on these lists and sketches, for he does not yet know enough about cabinets to enable him to solve the problem readily…or not to assume that the discrepancy is a problem in the first place.

Fast forward now to the next cabinet Felipe builds, a few months after the completion of the one we just witnessed. This time there is no confusion about the length of the top and the bottom panels; that earlier episode taught Felipe a lot. And there is evidence of his emerging “cabinet sense.” This new cabinet requires a plastic laminate over its surface. Felipe is laying the cabinet’s face frame over a long sheet of plastic and tracing the outline of the frame onto it. This will give him the covering for the frame but leave two fairly large door-sized squares of the plastic. Felipe stops, takes a step back, looks the cabinet over, and then reaches for his list of measurements and a tape measure. I ask him what he’s doing.

We’re short on laminate, he explains, and here you’ll have these two excess pieces of it cut away from the frame. We’ll need to use them. But, he realizes, they won’t cover the doors themselves, because the doors will be larger than the opening; they’ll attach onto and over the face frame. So, he’s trying to think ahead and picture where the as yet uncut surplus might go. What other, smaller pieces of the cabinet could be covered. That’s what he’s about to check. When I describe this event to the teacher, Mr. Devries, he smiles and says, “That’s how a cabinet-maker thinks.”

* * *

Several times during the construction of the wall cabinet with the puzzling sixty-seven inch top, Felipe would comment on the mathematics involved in cabinet assembly. And I asked him about it myself. His comments were a bit contradictory, and the contradiction resonated with something that was intriguing me as well. At times he would note that the math is “simple,” “just numbers,” “only fractions.” At other times, though, even within the same few sentences, his face registering perplexity, he would observe that “a lot of math is involved” and that “it’s difficult.”

Felipe has taken algebra and is currently enrolled in college math; he knows what more advanced mathematics looks like. On the face of it, the math involved in cabinet assembly is pretty simple: reading a ruler; adding and subtracting (and, less frequently, multiplying and dividing) whole numbers, mixed numbers, and fractions; working with the basic properties of squares and rectangles. Yet, he says, "there’s so many pieces you need to take into consideration, otherwise, you’ll mess up somewhere.”

Felipe’s puzzlement, I think, is located in the intersection of traditional mathematics, learned most often in school, and the mathematics developed in the carpenter’s shop.

Traditional mathematics is in evidence throughout Mr. Devries’ workshop: from the calculations students do to determine cost per board foot to measurements scribbled on scraps of paper spread across the room. Considered from the perspective of school math—that is, if lifted from context and presented as problems in a textbook—the operations here would be, as Felipe observes, fairly rudimentary, grade-school arithmetic.

But as these measures and calculations play out in assembly—particularly an assembly that is unfamiliar—things get more complex, and thus Felipe and his crew move slowly and with some uncertainty. With an incomplete sense of a cabinet’s structure, Felipe must keep a number of variables in mind, arrayed in three-dimensional space, with each variable having consequences for the other. The top of the cabinet will be shorter in length by the sum of the two rabbet cuts in the side panels—but what about the width of the top? Will it rest in a cut in the back panel, and if so, what are the implications for the measurements of the back panel? Will the top extend into or onto the face frame? What does that mean for the face frame? And so on. In neurologist Frank Wilson's phrasing, this young carpenter is developing the ability to "spatialize" mathematics—and as Felipe notes, that means taking "so many pieces…into consideration." Mr. Devries tells me that he has students taking calculus who have a hard time with such tasks.

There is a small but growing research literature on mathematics in the workplace—from the tailor’s shop to the design studio—and a few of these studies focus on carpentry. Listening to Felipe puzzle over the nature of the mathematics of assembly led me to look more closely at the math in Mr. Devries’ shop, and what I saw matched earlier studies, some of which were conducted in other cultures, such as in South Africa, suggesting some cognitive commonality to the way carpenters do the work they do.

One of the findings of this research is that a wide range of mathematical concepts and operations are embodied in carpentry’s artifacts and routines, and in ways suited to the properties of materials and the demands of production. The carpenter’s math is tangible and efficient.

Take, for example, measurement. The ruler and framing square provide measurements, but so do objects created in the shop: one piece of wood, precisely cut, can function as the measure for another. Tools are also used as measuring devices. A sixteen-inch claw hammer laid sideways on a wall provides a quick measure for the location of studs in a wall frame. And carpenters use their hands and fingers to measure and compare. (“I use my forefinger and thumb for calipers,” reports master woodworker Sam Maloof.) They develop an eye for length and dimension and for relations and correspondences.

Working in the shop, the young carpenter learns a range of other mathematical concepts: symmetry, proportion, congruence, the properties of angles. Planing straight the edge of a board, cutting angles on the miter box, laying out the pieces of a cabinet’s face frame to check for an even fit—through these activities, Mr. Devries’ students see mathematical ideas manifested, and feel them, too, gaining a sense of trueness and error. Fractions were never more real to Felipe than during the episode with that cabinet top.

Portraits of Thinking: A Test Taker

I want to continue the discussion of cognition, and to do so through a series of portraits drawn from the writing I’ve done over the years.

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

I hope that the portraits I offer over the next few months illustrate the majesty and surprise of intelligence, its varied manifestations, its subtlety and nuance. The play of mind around us. And, though not all the portraits will be of young people in school, I hope, as well, that collectively the portraits help us think in a richer way about teaching, learning, achievement, and the purpose of education—a richer way than that found in our current national policy and political discourse about school.

This first portrait comes from an adult literacy and developmental education program that I describe in Lives on the Boundary. The focus is on standardized testing, a close look at one test-taker. And though this woman is in her forties, I think there’s a lot here worth considering for all ages, especially in our current test-intensive culture.

***

When they entered the program, Ruby and Alice and Sally and all the rest were given several tests, one of which was a traditional reading inventory. The test had a section on comprehension—relatively brief passages followed by multiple-choice questions—and a series of sections that tested particular reading skills: vocabulary, syllabication, phonics, prefixes and roots. The level of the instrument was pretty sophisticated, and the skills it tested are the kind you develop in school: answering multiple-choice questions, working out syllable breaks, knowing Greek and Latin roots, all that.

What was interesting about this group of test takers was that—though a few were barely literate—many could read and write well enough to get along, and, in some cases, to help those in their communities who were less skilled. They could read, with fair comprehension, simple news articles, could pay bills, follow up on sales and coupons, deal with school forms for their kids, and help illiterate neighbors in their interactions with the government. Their skills were pretty low-level and limited profoundly the kinds of things they could read or write, but they lived and functioned amid print.

The sad thing is that we have few tests of such naturally occurring competence. The typical test focuses on components of reading ability tested in isolation (phonetic discrimination, for example) or on those skills that are school-oriented, like reading a passage on an unfamiliar topic unrelated to immediate needs: the mating habits of the dolphin, the Mayan pyramids. Students then answer questions on these sorts of passages by choosing one of four or five possible answers, some of which may be purposely misleading.

To nobody’s surprise, Ruby and her classmates performed miserably. The tasks of the classroom were as unfamiliar as could be. There is a good deal of criticism of these sorts of reading tests, but one thing that is clear is that they reveal how well people can perform certain kinds of school activities. The activities themselves may be of questionable value, but they are interwoven with instruction and assessment, and entrance to many jobs is determined by them. Because of their centrality, then, I wanted to get some sense of how the students went about taking the tests. What happened as they tried to meet the test’s demands? How was it that they failed?

My method was simple. I chose four students had each of them take sections of the test again, asking them questions as they did so, encouraging them to talk as they tried to figure out an item.

The first thing that emerged was the complete foreignness of the task. A sample item in the prefixes and roots section (called Word Parts) presented the word “unhappy,” and asked the test-taker to select one of four other words “which gives the meaning of the underlined part of the first word.” The choices were very, glad, sad, not. Though the teacher giving the test had read through the instructions with the class, many still could not understand, and if they chose an answer at all, most likely chose sad, a synonym for the whole word unhappy.

Nowhere in their daily reading are these students required to focus on parts of words in this way. The multiple-choice format is also unfamiliar—it is not part of the day-to-day literacy—so the task as well as the format is new, odd.

I explained the directions again—read them slowly, emphasized the same item—but still, three of the four students continued to fall into the test maker’s trap of choosing synonyms for the target word rather than zeroing in on the part of the word in question. Such behavior is common among those who fail in our schools, and it has led some commentators to posit the students like these are cognitively and linguistically deficient in some fundamental way: they process language differently, or reason differently from those who succeed in school, or the dialect they speak in some basic way interferes with their processing of Standard Written English.

Certainly in such a group—because of malnourishment, trauma, poor health care, environmental toxins—you’ll find people with neurolinguistic problems or with medical difficulties that can affect perception and concentration. And this group—ranging in age from nineteen to the mid-fifties—has a wide array of medical complications: diabetes, head injury, hypertension, asthma, retinal deterioration, and the unusual sleep disorder called narcolepsy. It would be naïve to deny the effect of all this on reading and writing.

But as you sit alongside these students and listen to them work through a task, it is not damage that most strikes you. Even when they’re misunderstanding the test and selecting wrong answers, their reasoning is not distorted and pathological. Here is Millie, whose test scores placed her close to the class average—and average here would be very low just about anywhere else.

Millie is given the word ““kilometer” and the following list of possible answers:

a. thousand
b. hundred
c. distance
d. speed

She responds to the whole word—kilometer—partially because she still does not understand how the test works, but also, I think, because the word is familiar to her. She offers speed as the correct answer because: “I see it on the signs when I be drivin’.” She starts to say something else, but stops abruptly. “Whoa, it don’t have to be ‘speed’—it could be ‘distance.’”

“It could be ‘distance,’ couldn’t it?” I say.

“Yes, it could be one or the other.”

“Okay.”

“And then again,” she says reflectively, “it could be a number.”

Millie tapped her knowledge of the world—she had seen kilometer on road signs—to offer a quick response: speed. But she saw just as quickly that her knowledge could logically support another answer (distance), and, a few moments later, saw that what she knew could also support a third answer, one related to number. What she lacked was specific knowledge of the Greek prefix kilo, but she wasn’t short on reasoning ability. In fact, reading tests like the one Millie took are constructed in such a way as to trick you into relying on commonsense reasoning and world knowledge—and thereby choosing a wrong answer. Take, for example, this item:

Cardiogram
a. heart
b. abnormal
c. distance
d. record

Millie, and many others in the class, chose heart. To sidestep that answer, you need to know something about the use of gram in other words (versus its use as a metric weight), but you need to know, as well, how these tests work.

After Millie completed five or six items, I have her go back over them, talking through her answers with her. One item that had originally given her trouble was “extraordinary”: a) “beyond”; b) “acute”; c) “regular”; d) “imagined.” She had been a little rattled when answering this one. While reading the four possible answers, she stumbled on “imagined”: “I…im…”; then, tentatively, “imaged”; a pause again, then “imagine,” and, quickly, “I don’t know that word.”

I pronounce it.

She looks up at me, a little disgusted, “I said it, didn’t I?”

“You did say it.”

“I was scared of it.”

Her first time through, Millie had chosen regular, the wrong answer—apparently locking onto ordinary rather than the underlined prefix extra—doing just the opposite of what she was supposed to do. It was telling, I thought, that Millie and two or three others talked about words scaring them.

When we come back to “extraordinary” during our review, I decide on a strategy. “Let’s try something,” I say. “These tests are set up to trick you, so let’s try a trick ourselves.” I take a pencil and do something the publishers of the test tell you not to do: I mark up the test booklet. I slowly began to circle the prefix extra, saying, “This is the part of the word we’re concerned with, right?” As soon as I finish she smiles and says “beyond,” the right answer.

“Did you see what happened there?  As soon as I circled the part of the word, you saw what it meant.”

“I see it,” she says. “I don’t be thinking about what I’m doing.”

I tell her to try what I did, to circle the part of the word in question, to remember that trick, for with tests like this, we need a set of tricks of our own.

“You saw it yourself,” I say.

“Sure I did. It was right there in front of me—‘cause the rest of them don’t even go with ‘extra.’”

I am conducting this interview with Millie in between her classes, and our time is running out. I explain that we’ll pick this up again, and I turn away, checking the wall clock, reaching to turn off the tape recorder. Millie is still looking at the test booklet.

“What is this word right here?” she asks. She had gone ahead to the other, more difficult, page of the booklet and was pointing to “egocentric.”

“Let’s circle it,” I say. “What’s the word? Say it.”

“Ego.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Ego. Oh my.” She scans the four options—self, head, mind, kind—and says “self.”

“Excellent!”

“You know, when I said ‘ego,’ I tried to put it in a sentence: ‘My ego,’ I say. That’s me.”

I ask her if she wants to look at one more. She goes back to “cardiogram,” which she gets right this time. Then to “thermometer,” which she also gets right. And “bifocal,” which she gets right without using her pencil to mark the prefix. 

Once Millie saw and understood what the test required of her, she could rely on her world knowledge to help her reason out some answers. Cognitive psychologists talk about task representation, the way a particular problem is depicted or reproduced in the mind. Something shifted in Mille’s concept of her task, and it had a powerful effect on her performance.