Lego Testing - Just Another Education Fantasy :: Teaching Education Essays

Lego Testing - Just An separate Education Fantasy After eld of hearing how standardized testing cheats minorities and the disadvantaged out of the higher pedagogics, educationists live with come up with a new bag of tricks - Lego building. Johnny shagt read and Mary potbellyt compute? non a problem. If they crowd out build a robot out of Legos in 10 minutes, theyre college material under a pilot course being tested by Colorado College and eight different schools Beloit, Carleton, Grinnell and Macalester colleges and the University of Michigan, University of Delaw be, Rutgers and Penn State. The goerness is this Some children who do poorly on standardized tests have other qualities that counselors believe would make them good candidates for success in college. The Lego test and other exercises public speaking, conflict resolution and personal interviews are designed to stair those qualities. The Lego exercise works like this A group o f eight to 10 students is given a box of the colored blocks and shown an assembled Lego robot in other room. Each student views the robot individually. Then the group is given 10 minutes to try to reproduce the robot. Evaluators rate students performances, awarding a lay down between one and four. The robot isnt the end point, apparently. The process is supposed(a) to reveal which of the students emerges as a leader, one of the markers for projected college success. Other markers are perseverance, drive, motivation, adaptability and the ability to work well within a group. Too galore(postnominal) exceedingly bright students have emerged from dismal backgrounds to succeed in college to pecuniary backing the thesis that standardized tests are unfair to the socially disadvantaged. Likewise, too umpteen exceedingly advantaged children perform poorly on standardized tests to convince me that financial security predicts academic success. You either can rea d or you cant you either can do math or you cant. Thats about as simple as it gets. What more liable(predicate) is true is that minority children who also come from economically depressed neighborhoods tend to receive inferior educations owing to a plethora of problems, not the to the lowest degree of which is the high turnover rate among teachers exhausted by an incompetent education system.