11

Discover

Here’s the second “D.” It is certainly one of the most delightful tasks we parents ever undertake: to look at our children and discover their potential. How do you discover the streams of your child’s Intelligence River?

The Bad News is the Good News

Here’s the bad news: We don’t have any formal, well-standardized, carefully developed tests to measure the different tributaries of the Intelligence River. Suppose we all magically agreed tomorrow on exactly what ways of being intelligent we wanted to measure. (A very unlikely event!) Suppose we threw all our efforts into developing a single test battery to measure those intelligences. It could easily take a decade or two to have a test ready to go!

Here’s the good news: We don’t have any formal, well-standardized, carefully developed tests to measure the different tributaries of the Intelligence River. That means you get to discover your child’s abilities yourself. Numbers might be comforting — It may feel reassuring to be able to say “She got a score of 136 on Personal Intelligence.” But is it so reassuring to reduce a child’s ability to deal with other people to a single number? I’d much rather have my personal deep understanding of how my child functions in relationships with others. Much of the point of this book is to get us away from thinking of intelligence as being a single, monolithic idea, instead of a multifaceted and complex concept. In place of one way to be intelligent, we can now see many ways. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we now assumed that each of our new intelligences was a single entity, without parts, aspects, facets, and complexities of its own?

I also worry that tests’ numbers, with their illusion of absolute certainty and precision, can rob us of our own sense of expertise. The chances are that you have a deeper understanding than anyone else of your child’s potential. In this one area at least, you’re the planet’s leading authority! I hope that thinking through the observation guides in this chapter will further your knowledge, mostly by helping you notice and organize what you already know.

The truth is, we do have formal ways to measure many of the currents that make up each child’s Intelligence River — not one single test to measure them all, but batteries that could be assembled from various sources. If there’s some very serious reason that you need numbers to describe your child’s functioning in these new terms, you should be able to find a psychologist who could do such testing. But the odds are your own expertise will be your best tool.

Measure for Measure

A little side trip here will be worth the detour. We’ve seen our understanding of what it means to be intelligent expand like a super nova. The new understanding leads to dramatic differences between how we’ll want to assess intelligence now, versus how it has been done in the past.

• In traditional IQ testing, you present a child with prescribed tasks in a fixed sequence, where every word you say is dictated by a testing manual. Our new model of assessment is based on observation. (Specifics in a minute.)
• In traditional IQ testing, where you test is carefully controlled: a quiet, often unfamiliar office, and usually a more or less unfamiliar person. Our new model of assessment always occurs in a natural setting — home or school — usually with familiar adults observing.
• In traditional IQ testing, you get to a point where you can pretend you have an answer about a child’s intelligence — a number or several numbers that purport to say how smart the child is. Once you have a number, you’re done. You expect the number to continue to be a pretty accurate measure of the child, although you may check again. (Almost all the formal testing done in schools today is done to determine qualification for special education. Under special-education law, schools have to recheck that number every three years that a child continues to receive services, but the expectation is that it will stay essentially stable.) Our new model of assessment is continuous throughout a child’s development — there’s no endpoint where we can say “That’s the final word.”

In traditional IQ testing, assessment is not interactive — in two quite different senses of “interactive”:

• I mentioned one way already: The interaction of child and tester is carefully controlled. Every word, every movement, in a traditional IQ test is specified by the test manual. To assure that results are valid, the tester must follow the procedures exactly. You can’t rephrase the question unless the manual says you can. You can’t credit a novel answer that isn’t in the manual. You can’t encourage the child to “think again" unless the manual allows it. To get good numbers, you have to be a bit of a robot. To be confident that all differences in results from one child to the next are about the two children, not anything else, you have to make sure that everything else was exactly the same. (I'm being harsh here: within all that rigor, really good assessment involves more than a touch of artistry.)
• The child’s development and experiences aren’t expected to interact very much with the test— the child will develop new skills synchronously with other kids, and relative IQ will stay steady. The number is basically not interactive with the child’s development. In fact, the goal of the test developers is to ask the kinds of questions that will yield a stable number, one that doesn’t change.

On the other hand, our new model of assessment is highly interactive:

• There are no standard procedures. You interact with a child in a way that makes sense naturally. You use common sense — playing with him or watching him play, providing different materials, now modeling or teaching, now sitting back to watch the results. Rich impressions substitute for numbers.
• We don’t expect or want our observations to be stable across time. You’re after change, and you want to see it as it happens, so you can continue to influence it optimally.

Our new assessment is highly interactive precisely because we assume we can have major effects on our child’s development. We’ll need to notice those effects, so we can change what we’re doing to keep pace with new skill levels and new developmental maturity.

But there are dangers. I make the traditional style sound cold and useless. But when you need numbers, if you need numbers you can trust, that’s how you get them. By and large, you’ll seldom or never need that rigor with your child. In place of precision, you’ll get richness. But this puts some burden on you — it’s hard to be objective about our own kids!

Have you noticed that the line between assessing and influencing — between Discover and Develop — has become very blurred? In our new model of assessment, the two are interwoven. Each one supports the other. Each is inextricably part of the other: When we model a new use of a toy, to see what our child does with our example, we are both assessing and influencing. Remember, intelligence is always both being and becoming, and each interaction changes it.