Word: bial
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When Deborah Bial answered her phone in a rental car in Chicago, the unfamiliar voice on the other end asked the founder of a nonprofit for urban high school graduates if she were alone and sitting down. He then told her that she would be receiving a half-million dollar grant through the MacArthur Fellows Program...
...started crying,” said Bial, founder of the New York-based Posse Foundation...
...find the volume of a cylinder? Most of the skills and knowledge we use in our jobs are very different from those tested by traditional college-entrance exams, and those of us who score poorly on those tests will probably do just fine in the work world. So Deborah Bial, a doctoral student in education at Harvard, has developed a three-hour exam that uses group activities, personal interviews and even Lego blocks to identify kids with potential that might be missed by a test like the SAT. "Students who succeed in college can overcome obstacles," says Bial, whose research...
...Bial's exam, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, has been nicknamed the Lego Test for a 10-minute portion that asks small groups of students to reproduce a relatively complicated Lego robot. One at a time, students are allowed to go and look at the structure, which is placed in another room, but they can't take notes. In another tested activity, students lead a group discussion on a topic drawn from an envelope. In both cases, observers are watching to see who takes initiative, who collaborates well and who is persistent...
Nine colleges are participating in a trial of Bial's test, which was first given to 400 students in New York City in October 1999. James Sumner, dean of admissions at 1,400-pupil Grinnell College in Iowa, is hoping a test like Bial's will help identify strong minority candidates the college might miss in its traditional SAT-and-ACT-based selection process. This year Grinnell accepted two minority students who participated in the Bial-Dale test. The next step for the research is to track whether the participants stay in school and how much they contribute...