# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Testing is terrible for learning, destroys student and teacher morale, and impedes opportunities for productive, meaningful teaching. This oft-repeated axiom has become accepted as true without proof. Opposition to testing and all its associated ills has led to an over-generalization of the word "test" and an unwarranted reputation as the embodiment of all that is wrong with American education.

One researcher believes we are throwing a very effective learning tool out with our educational bathwater, and asserts that we should be testing students more, not less.

Henry L. Roediger III, a cognitive psychologist at Washington University, studies how the brain stores, and later retrieves, memories. He compared the test results of students who used common study methods-such as re-reading material, highlighting, reviewing and writing notes, outlining material and attending study groups-with the results from students who were repeatedly tested on the same material. When he compared the results, Roediger found, "Taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying the material." Remarkably, this remains true "even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information."

Researchers have long known about the "testing effect," the phenomenon of improved performance through testing. William James, psychology professor at Harvard and author of The Principles of Psychology wrote in 1890,

A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.

In other words, students who want to memorize information should attempt to retrieve that information from their own memories, rather than review the material over and over from notes or a text.

This is, at their essence, what tests are intended to do. Tests ask students to look into their wells of knowledge, locate information, and express that knowledge on the page.

Not all tests, however, are created equal. Some tests are more effective in eliciting this positive effect than others. Many tests, including standardized tests, SATs and IQ tests, are designed to measure developed knowledge or abilities. They are "static," and "summative," in that they measure students' sum total knowledge or ability at a fixed point in time. Summative tests do not allow for instructor input during the test and are not intended to shape future teaching. Therefore, no learning takes place during or as a result of the test. Complaints that excessive testing detracts from learning tend to be aimed at summative testing. As summative tests do not teach, and classroom hours spent engaged in summative assessments detract from hours a teacher has to educate her students, those complaints are probably well-founded.

"Formative assessments," on the other hand, are designed to discover what students do and do not know in order to shape teaching during and after the test. Formative assessments are not meant to simply measure knowledge, but to expose gaps in knowledge at the time of the assessment so teachers may adjust future instruction accordingly. At the same time, students are alerted to these gaps, which allows them to shape their own efforts to learn the information they missed.

Roediger asserts that educators should be using formative assessments early and often in the classroom to strengthen learning during the unit rather than waiting until the end and giving a summative assessment. These repeated assessments curb the most ineffective type of learning, in which students wait until just before the test and then attempt to cram the material in over a short period of time. Research shows that cramming works in the short term, allowing students to regurgitate the information for an exam the next day, but it is a terrible strategy for ensuring long-term storage. Knowledge learned through cramming is less durable over time.

Another drawback to standardized testing is that it is rare, high-pressure, and high-stakes, for both teachers and students. Because standardized test scores results can dictate the fate of a school, a teacher's employment or a student's educational future, they are very stressful for all involved. Temptation to cheat can be high, particularly for teachers who know their jobs are at stake.

Formative testing at its best is low-stakes and high-frequency. When students are used to the practice of being tested (or "quizzed," if that term carries less baggage) it loses its emotional teeth and its utility as an educational tool begins to emerge. When teachers expose students to frequent low-stakes tests in order to reveal gaps and foster active, continuous engagement in the material, students are given more ownership and power over their education. In Roediger's words, "Continuous testing requires students to continuously engage themselves in a course; they cannot coast until near a midterm exam and a final exam and begin studying only then."

Continuous formative testing promotes the cognitive processes that have been shown to maximize long-term retention and retrieval. Frequent testing "not only measures knowledge, but changes it, often greatly improving retention of the tested knowledge," says Roediger. Information that is tested repeatedly is learned more fully, and remains encoded in memory for a longer period of time. Students with better memory retention will have more ready access to that information as they learn new information and mature as thinkers, making connections over time and across subjects. Students who cram for short-term regurgitation on a summative exam, however, will have long since forgotten their hard-earned knowledge, and lose out on the opportunity to draw analogies and connections across disciplines.

Roediger, in a presentation to the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching Symposium in 2012, presented ten benefits to testing and their applications to educational practice.

1. Testing aids later retention.

2. Testing identifies gaps in knowledge.

3. Testing causes students to learn more from the next learning episode.

4. Testing produces better organization of knowledge.

5. Testing improves transfer of knowledge to new concepts.

6. Testing can facilitate retrieval of information that was not tested.

7. Testing improves metacognitive monitoring.

8. Testing prevents interference from prior material when learning new material.

9. Testing provides feedback to instructors.

10. Frequent testing encourages students to study

It takes time for a teacher to repeatedly assess, adjust future teaching for knowledge gaps, and assess again. Roediger acknowledges this difficulty, but implores teachers to rise to the challenge. "Often the best instruction may require teachers to implement the difficult process of using tests to assess performance and then changing the style and content of their teaching on the basis of the outcome of the tests," he says.

In the end, tests may just hold the key to our educational success-as long as educators are willing to commit the time and effort required to design tests that foster learning rather than impede it. It's time to stop teaching to the test, because if done properly, teaching is the test.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Students Should Be Tested More, Not Less

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Testing is terrible for learning, destroys student and teacher morale, and impedes opportunities for productive, meaningful teaching. This oft-repeated axiom has become accepted as true without proof. Opposition to testing and all its associated ills has led to an over-generalization of the word "test" and an unwarranted reputation as the embodiment of all that is wrong with American education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Debra Malpass
Published 31 Jan 2013

We use tests and exams to measure students' ability, but can tests themselves improve learning?

Critics have denounced regular exams and classroom testing as encouraging 'teaching-to-the-test' and shallow, rote learning. But there is mounting evidence that taking tests can in fact improve recall, and help students apply existing knowledge to new contexts and situations.

The testing effect

A phenomenon known as the 'testing effect' shows that taking a test improves people's later recall of information they have studied. For example, in a study by Henry L. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students had to either re-read a passage (the 'study' group) or recall what they could remember from the passage (the 'test' group). Students then took the same test five minutes, two days or one week later.

After five minutes, the study group could recall slightly more than those in the test group. But two days later, this had reversed. Now students in the test group could remember more than those in the study group (see the graph below). The same was true when students re-took the test after a week.

Results from Roediger and Karpicke's study of the testing effect

The testing effect has been found when learning all kinds of information: words from another language, locations on a map, events from US history. But learning is more than just remembering facts. It also involves applying what you have learnt to new situations, often outside the classroom. This 'learning transfer' is one of the most important aspects of education. Research reveals that taking a test can help with this too.

Andrew Butler gave students a one thousand word passage about how bats use sound waves to navigate and hunt their prey. Students who repeatedly tested themselves had better recall on this topic than those who simply re-read the passage. Butler later gave students a test on a different but related topic that they hadn't studied submarine sonar and found that students in the repeat testing group answered more questions correctly than those in the re-study group. The students in the testing group were more able to correctly recall information they had learnt about sound waves and apply it to a related topic.

Testing and revision

The testing effect suggests that it would be helpful to encourage students to test themselves during revision sessions. Unfortunately, most students tend to spend time re-studying material rather than testing themselves. Re-reading tends to make students feel more familiar with a text and gives the illusion of improved learning and recall, when in fact they are losing out on the benefits that the testing effect seems to offer.

Students may be reluctant to self-test because immediately after studying one can often only recall a few things correctly, and 'failing' a self-imposed test may make students feel discouraged or that the approach isn't working. However, as Roediger and Karpicke's study illustrates, testing can lead to better recall in the longer-term.

While the testing effect has implications for approaches to learning, most studies have compared testing with either no study or with students re-studying material. We also don't know whether the effect holds true for high stakes tests like GCSEs, or is more relevant in classroom settings to encourage students' progress during the year. The existing research certainly doesn't seem to suggest that students would only benefit if testing took place solely in high stakes, exam settings.

Future research comparing testing with other learning strategies, such as making revision notes or completing practice problems, would be helpful in establishing the most effective way to learn. More studies with school-age pupils rather than undergraduate students would also be useful, and under realistic classroom conditions rather than controlled lab-based settings. Once we have more readily applicable research findings, we'll be able to see whether the testing effect survives in the real world.

Debra Malpass

References

1. Butler, A. C. (2010). Repeated testing produces superior transfer of learning relative to repeated studying. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 36, 1118-1133. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

2. Carpenter, S. K., & Pashler, H. (2007). Testing beyond words: Using tests to enhance visuospatial map learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 474 478. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

3. Carpenter, S. K., Pashler, H., & Cepeda, N. J. (2009). Using tests to enhance 8th grade students' retention of US history facts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 760-771. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

4. Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471-479. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

5. Koriat, A. & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 31, 187-194. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

6. Pashler, H., Rohrer, D., Cepeda, N. J., & Carpenter, S. K. (2007). Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 187 193. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

7. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249 255. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

Keywords

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Debra Malpass Published 31 Jan 2013 We use tests and exams to measure students' ability, but can tests themselves improve learning? Critics have denounced regular exams and classroom testing as encouraging 'teaching-to-the-test' and shallow, rote learning. But there is mounting evidence that taking tests can in fact improve recall, and help students apply existing knowledge to new contexts and situations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
References

To learn more about the role of standardized testing in education, see W. James Popham's seminal 2001 work, The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action (New York, ASCD).

To learn more about how standardized testing is impacting classrooms and teaching in the US and Canada, see Arlo Kempf's (2016), The Pedagogy of Standardized Testing: The Radical Impacts of Educational Standardization in the US and Canada (New York, Palgrave).

To learn more about how validity and reliability work when interpreting standardized tests results, see Thorndike & Thorndike-Christ's (2010), Measurement and Evaluation in Psychology and Education (8th ed.) (NJ, Pearson).
Recommended TED-Ed Videos
Should we get rid of standardized testing? - Arlo Kempf
The power of creative constraints - Brandon Rodriguez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most American students strive for a 4.0 GPA and the highest test scores, but research shows that this quest for perfection actually discourages creativity and reduces academic risk-taking. In this episode of "School Myths" by The Atlantic, Alice Roth investigates why grades aren't everything when it comes to education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Standardized testing is simply one of many approaches for measuring things. By itself, this form of measurement has no more political agenda than a measuring tape, a thermometer, or a fuel gauge in a car. Like all instruments, however, standardized tests exist in specific cultural, economic, geographic, and political contexts. Standardized testing has become an important and controversial 21st century topic largely because of its widespread use in elementary and secondary schooling.

In the US, where standardized tests are used more frequently than most other countries, questions have arisen regarding the usefulness of standardized testing as well as regarding the validity and reliability of the inferences that can be made based on the results of standardized testing. While many scholars agree that standardized tests can be useful for diagnostic purposes, the use of standardized testing to measure the success and failure of students, teachers, schools, and districts is insufficient for understanding teaching and learning, or for getting a clear picture of what is happening in schools.

In particular, creativity as well as other important 21st century competencies simply cannot be measured using traditional assessment and evaluation methods. In his 2014 piece, Can imagination be measured?, Mike Llewellyn argues that standardized tests offer no good predictions of post-secondary or career success. In his 2013 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson goes further, to suggest that the use of standardized testing can actually discourage creativity and disengage children from the processes of learning.

Often in schools, what gets tested is what gets taught. It follows that standardized testing too often accompanies broader standardization of teaching and learning.

To learn more about the role of standardized testing in education, see W. James Popham's seminal 2001 work, The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action (New York, ASCD).

To learn more about how standardized testing is impacting classrooms and teaching in the US and Canada, see Arlo Kempf's (2016), The Pedagogy of Standardized Testing: The Radical Impacts of Educational Standardization in the US and Canada
(New York, Palgrave).

To learn more about how validity and reliability work when interpreting standardized tests results, see
Thorndike & Thorndike-Christ's (2010), Measurement and Evaluation in Psychology and Education. (8th ed.) (NJ, Pearson).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Should we get rid of standardized testing? - Arlo Kempf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Although standardized testing is a particularly hot topic in education right now, this approach to measurement has been in use for two millennia. And while the results of standardized testing can help us understand some things, they can also be misleading if used incorrectly. So what do these tests actually measure?

# data[].attributes.body
Which side are you on?
Which arguments are the best (most relevant)?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Debate.org is a dynamic social community where you can voice your opinion on today's hottest issues.

# data[].attributes.body
Download and print out these two articles.
Read them and make notes about the MAIN points.
Add to the list of advantages and disadvantages you started in class.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This piece was originally published on the New Republic website

In high school, we used to moan about Mr. Koonz's chemistry class. Every Friday, Mr. Koonz required his students to turn in a worksheet and take a test. Every single Friday. We begged for a break from the constant assessments. But nothing swayed him.

It turns out Mr. Koonz was on to something really important. In progressive circles, testing now inspires a lot of skepticism, if not outright hostility. With so much riding on test scores for both teachers and students, the standardized exams required by No Child Left Behind seem to encourage more cheating than learning. At best, they foster memorization, but at the expense of originality and critical thinking. In the modern era, when information can be more easily-and accurately-Googled than mentally recalled, old-fashioned testing strikes its critics as obsolete. (That is what a bunch of students caught cheating at New York's elite Stuyvesant High School tried arguing.) But it turns out that the right kinds of assessments-frequent, short tests-can actually yield big educational benefits. It's called the "testing effect," and policymakers are missing an opportunity by not doing more to take advantage of it.

The problem with the standardized tests mandated by No Child Left Behind-as well as with the SAT, A.P., GMAT, MCAT, bar exam, medical boards, and the rest of the standardized tests undergirding the U.S. credentialing system-is that they're built on what researchers call the "dipstick" view of assessment. They assume that there's a fixed amount of knowledge and ability in a student's head, which the test merely measures. But that's not what science has shown. Done properly, testing is not inert. Rather, it can be much more like the physical phenomena underlying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the act of measuring students, you can actually affect how much knowledge they absorb and how well they retain it.

Though it doesn't get a lot of mainstream attention, the research documenting the testing effect goes back nearly 100 years. In one experiment, three groups of high school students were given reading passages to study. The first group did nothing other than go over the material once. The second group studied it two times. The third group was given an initial test on what they'd read. Two weeks later, the students in all three groups were brought back and given an identical quiz. While the group that studied the passages a second time scored better than the group that just studied them once, the students who were initially tested performed best. The results held up when the students sat for follow-ups five months later. The testing had enhanced learning and retention more than just studying.

A young neuroscientist named Andrew Butler has gone further, showing that testing can actually facilitate creative problem solving. In Butler's research, undergraduates were given six prose passages of about 1,000 words each filled with facts and concepts. (Fact: There are approximately 1,000 species of bats. Concept: how bats' echolocation works.) He had the students just study some of the passages; others, he repeatedly tested them on. Not only did his subjects demonstrate a better grasp of the tested material, but they also fared better when asked to take the concepts about which they'd been quizzed and apply them in completely new contexts-for example, by using what they'd learned about bat and bird wings to answer questions about airplane wings. When students had been tested on the passages, rather than just reading them, they got about 50 percent more of the answers correct. They were better at drawing inferences, thanks to the testing effect.

A key to triggering the testing effect is timing: The sooner students are tested after encountering new material, the more it sinks in, while waiting just seven days to test students can substantially reduce performances. On the other hand, the more testing a student gets on a given set of more information, the greater the benefits. With the first few tests, students show dramatic gains. With further testing, the positive effects on retention taper off. But surprisingly, there is no plateau. Even after 20 or 30 tests, students' performances progressively improve with each additional assessment.

As for why all of this happens: No one is entirely sure. The most plausible explanation is that connections between neural cells are the subject of a brutal natural-selection process. When you fail to engage them, they seem to wither away; brain power is a classic case of "use it or lose it." Because the recall process involved in test-taking requires real mental effort, it bulks up the brain's neural connections and may force the brain to create multiple, alternative retrieval routes for accessing the same piece of information. Frequent mental struggle strengthens intellectual wiring. This may be why, for all the SAT's drawbacks, SAT prep courses featuring lots of practice exams can boost vocabulary and math skills-by forcing students to retrieve the information on all those flash cards, they provide helpful mental workouts.

So why isn't there much more testing in U.S. schools? Teachers' schedules are one major obstacle. Developing good quiz questions-not to mention grading them-is labor intensive. For the classes I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, it takes me and my co-instructor, aided by our two teaching fellows, about an hour a week to develop just five multiple-choice questions to give our students. Mr. Koonz's tests were on yellowing sheets of paper that he reused year to year. That time-saving approach now has a significant drawback: In the Internet age, students would just post the questions on the Web, which would tip off other students to exactly what's being tested, eliminating the organic recall that is key to the testing effect. Today's teachers would need to develop new test questions each week for each class, but few teachers have that kind of free time.

This piece was originally published on the New Republic website

The general verdict at Westminster is that Theresa May is not much good at politics. But there is one arena in which this consensus is incorrect: reshuffles. MPs and journalists alike tend to deride May's cabinet appointments because they assume that the Prime Minister shares their diagnosis of the last election and the next: that she was to blame for a disastrous campaign that turned a Conservative majority into a hung parliament. Under that reading, May's main job is to refresh the party's top ranks in order to develop an adequate leadership replacement.

But the Prime Minister herself has a different objective: managing the top ranks to ensure her long-term survival. Someone who was deeply interested in the long-term future of the party would not have delegated control over the junior ministerial moves in January to Gavin Barwell, her chief of staff, and Julian Smith, the government Chief Whip. However, her own top-level reshuffle that month managed to keep the Remain/Leave factions balanced and successfully cleared the Department for Education of the two ministers - Justine Greening and Jo Johnson - who hoped to block her plans to cut tuition fees. (An independent review into higher education funding is expected to recommend a cut in the headline rate when it reports back in 2019.)

That follows an established pattern. After the disastrous general election result last year, May stripped her ally Damian Green of his work and pensions secretary post and shunted him into a manufactured role in the Cabinet Office. This created space for Michael Gove to return from the back benches.

These moves addressed several problems: May couldn't risk leaving a dangerous enemy such as Gove in the wilderness for too long, but she was also too weak to sack anyone. Giving Gove the environment brief kept him in the tent, but agitating harmlessly about wildlife and plastic straws, rather than interfering in a policy area where she and he are at odds. Her treatment of her old friend Green called to mind the then Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe's one-liner about Harold Macmillan's purging of his cabinet in 1962: "Greater love hath no man than this - that he lay down his friends for his life."

Similarly, May's emergency reshuffle on 30 April was an astute bit of firefighting. In Sajid Javid, her new Home Secretary, she has promoted a Conservative cabinet minister who plausibly can speak with personal understanding of the fear and anger felt by Commonwealth Britons affected by her "hostile environment" policy.

May also took the opportunity to bring back one of her favourites, James Brokenshire, who quit the cabinet to undergo surgery; he now fills Javid's shoes as Secretary of State for Communities. While Brokenshire did not distinguish himself as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, he is one of parliament's few genuine May loyalists, and his return makes her position a little more secure, for now.

The elevation of Javid brought positive headlines. However, it also demonstrated how badly the Prime Minister has managed in the interval between reshuffles. A year ago, May hoped to fire Javid - who ran for the leadership in 2016 on a joint ticket with the now disgraced Stephen Crabb: the axe would have fallen after her expected landslide victory over Jeremy Corbyn on 8 June.

May and Javid are politically opposed on most issues. She is a pro-state interventionist; he is a classical Thatcherite. She favours strong borders, but he made a point of ostentatiously abandoning her "hostile environment" vocabulary in his first appearance before the Commons. The division even extends to science fiction: Javid is a Star Trek fan, while May prefers Doctor Who.

Yet, thanks to May's decisions - a disastrous election campaign that sharply limited whom she could hire and fire; the 2016 Immigration Act, which led directly to the fall of Amber Rudd - Javid is now one of the heavyweight contenders for the leadership. (Activists have already mocked up posters of his face in the style of John Major: "What does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Rochdale? They made him Home Secretary.") If Javid chooses to run, he will face either Gove or a candidate with Gove as their de facto deputy and éminence grise. That could be Jeremy Hunt, whom May only kept in office after she became leader in 2016 because her preferred health secretary, Crabb, fell foul of a sex scandal.

None of Javid, Gove or Hunt would continue May's attempt to take Conservative economic policy in a more statist direction - a bid that never made it out of the pages of a few essays on "Mayism" and on to the statute books. Her flagship education policy - the return of grammar schools - is dead in this parliament but retains enough affection within the Tory party that it might yet outlive her. Her only significant legislative achievement - that 2016 Immigration Act - might not even make it to the end of her premiership. As for Brexit, if her preferred outcome ends up being delivered, it will be because of the weakness of pro-European Tories on the back benches. Her failure to win a majority at the 2017 election guarantees that her chances of doing anything truly radical in this parliament are slim.

Why does she keep going? May knows that there are no prizes in politics for mere survival. Her MPs fear Gavin Barwell has convinced May that if she can survive until 2022, she might get another opportunity to contest an election and to write a better epitaph for herself. Thanks to Rudd's demise, the influential Cameroon tendency have no obvious standard-bearer in the next leadership contest and therefore no vested interest in triggering one too soon. Although the Conservative Party has a historical reputation for ruthlessness, it can always find reasons for doing nothing.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman and the PSA's Journalist of the Year. His daily briefing, Morning Call, provides a quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We should be giving kids more exams, not fewer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This piece was originally published on the New Republic website In high school, we used to moan about Mr. Koonz's chemistry class. Every Friday, Mr. Koonz required his students to turn in a worksheet and take a test. Every single Friday. We begged for a break from the constant assessments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Simply stated, measuring intelligence through examination is, inevitably, as limited as the examination itself. Whilst it might prove a reasonable sieve - perhaps even the best we can provide - it will not identify many of those we instinctively know to be intelligent.

* 'Exam results don't determine success in life'
* Creativity 'squeezed out of schools' academics warn

There are simple reasons for this, apart from the failure of examinations to measure divergent thinking and creativity (due in part to the need to keep marking as objective and, therefore, as inflexible as possible to remove any room for subjective judgment).

The problem of measuring intelligence per se is that it is an inadequate guide to human capability, and that many of the ways we use to measure working intelligence are woefully inadequate. Surely those we should be seeking to identify and nurture are students with the capacity of effective or applied intelligence, those who can do something with what knowledge and skills they acquire?

Too many 'intelligent' children, often bored by conventional learning, slip through the net. Others just think differently to the straitjacket dictated by 'one size fits all' exams. For instance, the list of those luminaries with learning difficulties who found it difficult to express themselves in conventional examinations makes for sober reading.

This poses the question as to just how many are badly served by traditional examinations, despite all the assistance offered through extra time, reader-writers and the use of technology. We only have to reflect on some of our leading public figures who dropped out of school and have ended up in prominent positions in public life to know that the traditional system of assessment was not capable of measuring their particular abilities, their sense of purpose, work ethic and creativity.

There are also many 'intelligent' people, as measured by our schools, who have the historic indicators of intelligence, viz. a quickness of understanding and the ability to perform cognitively at a higher level but are painfully deficient in other aspects.

These people can lack initiative, the ability to ask difficult questions (and solve them), EQ, cooperative and communication skills and the organisational discipline crucial to make intelligence an active, rather than a passive, trait.

Because our perceived definition of intelligence is so closely linked in with an ability to be measured by exams, many intelligent people are disfranchised.

Creativity is ignored in favour of the ability to provide expected answers, says Tait

Our measure of who is intelligent depends more on giving expected and appropriate answers rather than showing any initiative or creative spark, this is probably the reason for the clutch of third class degrees accumulated by such luminaries as Michael Morpurgo, W. H. Auden and Carol Vorderman.

By measuring intelligence this way, we get some of the crop, but not all, and those that fall by the wayside can be the most important of all. Hence while neurosurgeons, judges and nanotechnologists emerge from the current system, one only has to look at the vast numbers of highly successful - and intelligent - people who failed to shine at school to see how random our measure is. As Winston Churchill aptly demonstrated, it is possible to win the Nobel Prize for Literature despite a mediocre school career and no tertiary qualifications.

Part of the problem may be how we value and reward intelligence, as identified through traditional testing. The word 'intelligent' has a cache that other words, like 'industrious' do not. For instance, we richly reward those whose appointments are based on their academic qualifications; judges, diplomats, bankers and brokers, financiers, consultants, senior bureaucrats and the like. However, those people who make create, who tinker and take intellectual risks, are scantily rewarded in comparison.

We might well ask, are our schools guilty of promoting a passive form of intelligence, asking 'what do you know' rather than 'what can you do' simply because of the limitations of assessment? We might also pause to recognise that many 'intelligent' people may lack the very qualities we need from our leaders, be it emotional intelligence, wisdom or even common sense. Ability, talent, intelligence on their own are lumps of coal - they need setting alight to have any value.

Of course we need our most able to fly; we need an intelligentsia to keep challenging us and leading us forward. And they will probably still come from the traditional route until we widen our criteria and improve our tools for identifying talent, although when I read that 7 per cent of Oxford's student population are receiving counselling along with 728 postgraduate students, I wonder how too much focus on academia can stunt emotional and social development. As a society, we benefit most from those with effective intelligence, who are able to channel their intelligence and use it, rather than merely parade it in the safety of institutions and selected professions.

We lose too many talented and intelligent people by defining intelligence through tests that are wholly inadequate and constricting. We need to look wider and encourage the entrepreneur, the inquisitive, the creative and the downright cussed in our schools to make the most of who we are and to bring out the richness and diversity of thought and ideas in our society.

Peter Tait, headmaster of Sherborne Preparatory School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Intelligence cannot be defined by exams'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Simply stated, measuring intelligence through examination is, inevitably, as limited as the examination itself. Whilst it might prove a reasonable sieve - perhaps even the best we can provide - it will not identify many of those we instinctively know to be intelligent.