Zachary Stein

Directions for Mind, Brain, and Education: Methods, Models, and Morality

In this article we frame a set of important issues in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education in terms of three broad headings: methods, models, and morality. Under the heading of methods we suggest that the need for synthesis across scientific and practical disciplines entails the pursuit of usable knowledge via a catalytic symbiosis between theory, research, and practice. Under the heading of models the goal of producing usable knowledge should shape the construction of theories that provide comprehensive accounts of human learning and development spanning multiple levels of analysis. Under the heading of morality usable knowledge must be put to good use: Its application and dissemination ought to be infused with moral considerations gleaned from dialogue among all those potentially affected. Generally, the field should be shaped not only by its constituent scientific disciplines but also by its applications to education and learning. Thus we argue for the adoption of a kind of pragmatism that would be best actualized by building research‐school collaborations between researchers and practitioners.

Redesigning Testing: Operationalizing the New Science of Learning

Complex standardized testing infrastructures have come to shape most educational systems. With so many people taking so many tests, we must seriously begin to ask, what are we measuring? and what is worth measuring? This chapter presents the work of a research group that has begun to use the latest in computer technology and learning science to build tests that are both standardized and formative, grounded in research about learning, and richly educative. Fischer’s Dynamic Skill Theory provides a framework for modeling the diverse learning sequences and developmental pathways that characterize how real individuals in real-world contexts learn and develop. Dawson’s Lectical™ Assessment System is a psychometrically validated domain-general developmental assessment system. These two sophisticated outgrowths of contemporary learning science are being employed in an effort to design a new kind of testing infrastructure, an effort known as the DiscoTest™ Initiative. In this chapter we describe these efforts and explore how these specific advances in research and design will change the practice of testing, beyond using standardized tests as mere sorting mechanism and toward the use of tests as educative aids.

Narrow Assessments Misrepresent Development and Misguide Policy: Comment on Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham, and Banich (2009).

Intellectual and psychosocial functioning develop along complex learning pathways. Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham, and Banich (see record 2009-18110-001) measured these two classes of abilities with narrow, biased assessments that captured only a segment of each pathway and created misleading age patterns based on ceiling and floor effects. It is a simple matter to shift the assessments to produce the opposite pattern, with cognitive abilities appearing to develop well into adulthood and psychosocial abilities appearing to stop developing at age 16. Their measures also lacked a realistic connection to the lived behaviors of adolescents, abstracting too far from messy realities and thus lacking ecological validity and the nuanced portrait that the authors called for. A drastically different approach to assessing development is required that (a) includes the full age-related range of relevant abilities instead of a truncated set and (b) examines the variability and contextual dependence of abilities relevant to the topics of murder and abortion.