Word: atkinson
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...Today Atkinson and Caperton have launched another great social experiment with the SAT. This time, the idea is that the test's rigorous new curricular demands will lift all boats--that all schools will improve because they want their students to do well on the test. Schools have long tried to prepare kids for the SAT, but education experts scorned the practice of openly teaching to the test. Now it's the mission of the College Board that every school should teach to the SAT. "I would say that the most important aspect of this test is sending a real...
...becoming even less of one? Largely because Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California--the College Board's biggest client--wanted it to. Board president Caperton surely has his own ambitions, but it's unlikely he would have sought such radical changes if Atkinson hadn't spoken out against the SAT. In a February 2001 speech in Washington, Atkinson recommended that his university stop asking its 76,000 yearly applicants for SAT scores. It's hard to overstate the gravity of this moment for the College Board. If U.C. had followed through on the recommendation, the board could have...
...speech, Atkinson called for U.C. to "require only standardized tests that assess mastery of specific subject areas rather than undefined notions of 'aptitude.'" Why the switch? "Last year," he said, "I visited an upscale private school and observed a class of 12-year-old students studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. I learned that they spend hours each month--directly and indirectly--preparing for the SAT, studying long lists of analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendaciousness' as 'circumspect is to caution.' The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather...
Like so many disconcerted 11th-graders, Atkinson had been driven round the bend by analogies--which are, not coincidentally, banished from the New SAT. But some academics are now offering an elegy for the analogy: "Analogical thinking is at the very foundation of how we make use of old knowledge to understand new things," says Lohman. "It may take a long time to understand how our solar system is set up, but if someone could use that information to help you understand the structure of an atom, it speeds the process up...When we learn, we have to do this...
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