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Record: 1

Title:

Finding Students Who Are Wise, Practical, and
Creative.

Authors:

Sternberg, Robert J.1

Source:

Chronicle of Higher Education; 7/6/2007, Vol. 53
Issue 44, pB11-B12, 2p, 1c

Document Type:

Article

Subject Terms:

*ACADEMIC achievement
*CHARACTER
tests
*CITIZENSHIP
*COLLEGE entrance achievement tests
*CREATIVE
ability
*EDUCATION -- Aims & objectives
*EDUCATIONAL tests &
measurements
*LEADERSHIP
*PERSONALITY tests
*STUDENTS -- Rating
of
TUFTS University (Boston, Mass.)

Geographic Terms:

MASSACHUSETTS

Abstract:

The article discusses the educational model
WICS, an acronym for "wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesizes, which
was designed for college admission offices to use to assess a student in a way
that is beyond just academics. It is suggested in the article that when a
college is selecting a student to attend their institution attributes like
good citizenship and positive leadership should be considered along side
grades and test scores. WICS was developed by the Center for the Psychology of
Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, which was originally located at Yale
University and is now at Tufts, as the PACE Center. An overview is presented
of the assessments and testing that is involved with the WICS
model.

Author Affiliations:

1Dean, School of Arts and Sciences,
professor of psychology, and adjunct professor of education, Tufts
University

Full Text Word Count:

2478

ISSN:

0009-5982

Accession Number:

25847215

Persistent link to this record:

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Students Who Are Wise, Practical, and Creative.</A>

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Finding Students Who Are Wise, Practical, and Creative

One purpose of a college education is to create active
and engaged citizens and future leaders. If we want students who have the
potential to become such people, when we evaluate applicants we need to keep in
mind the skills involved in good citizenship and positive leadership.

Many of the leaders who have gotten the world into its
current messes did well on admissions tests and attended prestigious colleges
and universities. Jeffrey Skilling, a former CEO of Enron, graduated from
Harvard University's business school, and Andrew Fastow, who was Enron's CFO,
graduated from Tufts University. John Rigas, the founder of Adelphia
Communications, who was convicted of fraud in the company's demise, received a
bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The problem is not that those leaders aren't smart; they
are. The problem is that they lack -- and their colleges and graduate schools
evidently did not teach them -- certain important skills, attitudes, and values
involved in being good citizens and successful leaders.

How might the assessments colleges use in admissions
decisions better reflect the kinds of qualities that matter not just during a
student's education, but throughout life? At the Center for the Psychology of
Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, originally located at Yale University
and now at Tufts, as the PACE Center, we have collaborated with teams across the
country to develop assessments that measure some of the relevant skills. The
model that underlies our assessments is called WICS, an acronym for "wisdom,
intelligence, and creativity, synthesized" -- although wisdom was not initially
part of my theory.

The basic idea of the model is that active and engaged
citizenship -- as well as leadership -- requires individuals to synthesize
creative skills, to produce a vision for how they intend to make the world a
better place for everyone; analytical intellectual skills, to assess their
vision and those of others; practical intellectual skills, to carry out their
vision and persuade people of its value; and wisdom, to ensure that their vision
is not a selfish one. Can we apply the model to assessments that can be used in
college and university admissions?

Typical admissions assessments are useful but narrow
measures of ability and achievement. For example, the SAT Reasoning and Subject
Tests primarily evaluate students' remembered knowledge, and the analytical
skills they can apply to that knowledge. Creativity, practical thinking, and
wisdom are assessed minimally, if at all, on conventional standardized
tests.

My collaborators and I hoped to broaden the scope of
high-stakes admissions assessments. In our Rainbow Project -- a study supported
financially by the College Board -- we designed questions to measure analytical,
creative, and practical thinking that could be used to supplement tests such as
the SAT Reasoning Test, which measures analytical skills in the verbal and
mathematical domains. We brought together a large, national team of
investigators with diverse points of view, including both supporters and critics
of conventional college-admissions assessments. We tested 1,013 high-school
students and college freshmen from 15 schools and colleges. We gave them
analytical questions much like those found on traditional standardized tests,
but we also had them answer creative and practical questions.

The creative tests got students to stretch their
imaginations. For example, they might be asked to write a creative story to go
with a title like "The Octopus's Sneakers" or "3821." Or they might be shown a
collage of pictures, perhaps of musicians or athletes, and be asked to tell an
oral story based on the collage. Or they might be asked to think up a caption
for an untitled cartoon.

The practical tests required students to solve everyday
problems, presented in written form or in videos. One video showed a student
approaching a professor to ask him to write a letter of recommendation, but
stopping as the professor's blank expression indicated he did not know who the
student was. The test was to decide what the student should do next. Another
video showed a group of friends trying to figure out how to move a large bed up
a winding staircase.

How can we evaluate answers to questions that seem so
subjective? Our approach is to use well-developed rubrics. We assess analytical
responses based on how sound, balanced, logical, and organized they are. We
evaluate creative responses' originality, quality, and appropriateness to the
task presented to the students. With practical responses, we look at their
feasibility with respect to time, place, and human and material resources. We
assess wisdom-based responses according to how much they promote a common good
by balancing the student's and others' interests -- as well as larger
institutional or global interests -- in both the long and short terms, through
the use of positive values.

The results of the Rainbow Project suggest that we can
assess skills beyond those involved in critical reasoning. We had predicted that
the tests would show how well students did at creative and practical thinking;
we were right.

The data also demonstrated that solving multiple-choice
problems is a stable skill. In other words, students who did better on one
multiple-choice question tended to do better on others as well, no matter what
the questions were supposed to measure. Thus, using a multiple-choice format
consistently seems to benefit some students.

We found that using broader tests for admissions made it
easier to measure students' probable academic success. Our tests' predictions of
students' grades as college freshmen were twice as good as predictions based on
the students' SAT scores alone, and 50 percent better than predictions relying
on high-school grade-point averages combined with SAT scores. In other words,
our tests were not quixotic ventures into esoteric realms.

In addition, we discovered that using our tests
significantly reduced ethnic-group differences in scores. Different groups
sometimes have different concepts of intelligence and socialize their children
to be intelligent in different ways. For instance, on our tests, American
Indians over all performed worse than members of most other groups on analytical
assessments, but had the highest average score on questions that involved oral
storytelling.

Using such tests could mean not only admitting more
members of minority groups to selective colleges, but also improving the
academic quality of the student body -- not compromising academic excellence.
Different groups excel, on average, in different ways, and giving students a
chance to show how they excel also gives them the opportunity to show that they
can succeed. Our results are consistent with those of Claude M. Steele of
Stanford University, who has shown that students may score less well on a
conventional test of ability or achievement if they feel the test presumes low
performance by groups to which they belong, and if their own stereotype about
their group is activated.

Furthermore, the tests do not benefit only members of
ethnic minorities. Many students who come from the majority group -- even from
well-off families -- learn in ways that are different from those assessed by
conventional standardized tests. Although those students may well have the
abilities they need to succeed in college and throughout life, that fact may not
be reflected in their scores on such tests. Our tests measure such students'
aptitudes more comprehensively.

In 2005 I moved from Yale University to Tufts
University, where I became dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Tufts has
strongly emphasized the role of active citizenship in education, so it seemed
like an ideal setting to put into practice some of the ideas from the Rainbow
Project. In collaboration with Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions, who
had primary responsibility for executing the project, and with the cooperation
of Linda Abriola, dean of engineering, I began Project Kaleidoscope. It puts
into use the earlier project's ideas and also assesses the construct of
wisdom.

On the 2006-7 application for the two undergraduate
schools at Tufts -- arts and sciences, and engineering -- we introduced optional
extended-response questions designed to measure creative, analytical, practical,
and wise thinking. The 15,381 applicants for the Class of 2011 were invited to
answer any one of the questions, thus allowing students to highlight one of
their strengths and avoiding the usual pressure inherent in high-stakes tests
that require students to answer many complex questions in very short amounts of
time.

One creative question asked students to write a story
with the title "Confessions of a Middle-School Bully"; in another example,
students were asked to design an advertisement for a new product. One practical
question asked students to describe how they had persuaded friends to share an
unpopular belief. A wisdom question asked students how they could use a passion
of theirs to benefit other people.

We also evaluated applicants in a new way. We not only
looked at each student's academic achievement, talent, and personal qualities,
but we also considered his or her wisdom, creativity, and practical intellectual
abilities.

The preliminary results under Project Kaleidoscope for
the Tufts Class of 2011 are very promising. The quality of applicants on the
whole rose substantially, as measured by the traditional indicators of grades,
class rank, standardized-test scores, and curricular rigor. Considered by any
standard that we have used, both the academic and the personal credentials of
the applicant pool were the best we have seen.

The mean SAT scores of accepted students are at an
all-time high for Tufts. The new assessments are not negatively correlated with
SAT scores; rather, they are not much correlated at all. Thus, adopting the new
measurements does not result in less-qualified applicants being admitted.
Indeed, the applicants admitted to Tufts during this pilot program are more
qualified, considered in broader terms. Perhaps most rewarding were the comments
from many applicants that our application, unlike typical forms, had given them
a chance to show their true strengths.

With regard to diversity, it appears that Project
Kaleidoscope helped us identify and admit substantially more qualified students
of color. For example, we admitted roughly 30 percent more African-American
students than the year before, and 15 percent more Hispanic students. Greatly
increased financial-aid resources, made possible as a result of the generosity
of our alumni donors, contributed to enabling those students to matriculate.

As was the case with the Rainbow Project, we showed that
it is possible to increase academic quality -- defined in multiple ways -- and
diversity simultaneously. Furthermore, we have now done so for an entire
undergraduate class at a major university, not just for samples of students at a
small number of colleges. We hope that next year's results will match this
year's.

Moreover, we have sent an important message to students,
parents, high-school guidance counselors, and others: We believe that there is
more to a person than just the narrow spectrum of skills assessed by traditional
standardized tests. Many colleges, including Tufts, have sought to admit
students on the basis of broader skills; Project Kaleidoscope allowed us to
highlight the additional skills and to assess them in a quantifiable way.

Once students are admitted through such a program, they
should be taught in ways that match their strengths. Otherwise, their diverse
learning skills may not serve them well in college. At Tufts, we have created a
new center that offers seminars for faculty members on teaching, aimed at the
same skills we highlighted in the admissions process. Those who participated in
the seminar's first year gave it, on average, an almost-perfect rating.

In a related research project in which I collaborated at
Yale -- with Steven Stemler, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Linda Jarvin, and
supported by the Educational Testing Service and the College Board -- we applied
the same principles to high-stakes achievement testing used for college
admissions and placement. We modified advanced-placement tests in psychology and
statistics additionally to assess analytical, creative, and practical
skills.

In psychology, for instance, we gave students four ways
to discuss sleep. After a brief introduction ("A variety of explanations have
been proposed to account for why people sleep."), we presented four tasks (the
type of task is indicated in parentheses): *

Describe the restorative theory of sleep (memory).

* An alternative theory is an evolutionary theory of
sleep, sometimes referred to as the "preservation and protection" theory.
Describe this theory and compare and contrast it with the restorative theory.
State what you see as two strong points and two weak points of this theory
compared to the restorative theory (analytical).

* How might you design an experiment to test the
restorative theory of sleep? Briefly describe the experiment, including the
participants, materials, procedures, and design (creative).

* A friend informs you that she is having trouble
sleeping. Based on your knowledge of sleep, what kinds of helpful -- and
health-promoting -- suggestions might you give her to help her fall asleep at
night (practical)?

We found that by asking such questions, as in the other
studies, we were able to both increase the range of skills we tested and
substantially reduce ethnic-group differences in test scores.

The ways in which we assess students' knowledge and
skills have not changed much over the past 100 years. Perhaps such assessments
met the cognitive demands placed on students a century ago, but they do not meet
the cognitive demands of the world today. Active and engaged citizens now must
be able to: be flexible, responding to rapid changes in the environment; think
critically about what they are told in the media, whether by newscasters,
politicians, advertisers, scientists, or others; carry out their ideas and
persuade others of their value; and, most of all, have the wisdom to avoid
becoming bad leaders.

It is time for assessments, as well as instruction, that
reflect the demands of the current era.

The assessments I have described do not measure all the
skills required for success in everyday life. For example, although I assess
teamwork in courses I teach, the assessments mentioned here do not measure that
skill -- at least, not directly. Moreover, making the assessments usable on a
statewide or nationwide basis would no doubt present new challenges. And,
naturally, expanded assessments would cost more time and money.

But when we consider the benefits of broadening the
horizons of students -- of both genders and all ethnic backgrounds -- who learn
and think in different ways, the costs no longer seem too large. Our society
does not only need people who can analyze and memorize well; even more important
are citizens and leaders who are also creative, practical, and wise. One way to
develop those talents is to consider in college admissions and instruction the
broad range of skills behind good citizenship and leadership.

PHOTO (COLOR)

~~~~~~~~

By Robert J. Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg is dean of the School of Arts and
Sciences, a professor of psychology, and an adjunct professor of education at
Tufts University. His books include Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity
Synthesized (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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