Why MAP?
When Alfred Binet created the first IQ tests at the beginning of the twentieth century, he had a very particular problem in mind. The French government had started providing an education for every child, and it was becoming clear that not every child progressed at the same rate.
The challenge was to know why: one child may be demotivated, but did that cause the lack of progress or was it the result? Another child may be poor at answering a set of maths questions, but was that because they were inherently unable to tackle these kinds of problems or because they lacked certain prior knowledge?
Binet didn’t see intelligence as a single thing, but as a series of aptitudes; nor did he see those aptitudes as fixed but as things that could be developed alongside particular subject competences.
He tested for intelligence to better understand children so that teachers could give directed help.
That vision of IQ tests did not last long. Just over 10 years later a Stanford psychologist, Lewis Terman, adapted Binet's test for the US army, which had just started recruiting for World War I. Generals wanted a simple and effective way to sort their mass army into officers and men: a test, not to understand and support, but to sort. To facilitate this, Terman reduced intelligence to a single quality and gave it its now familiar number: a high one and you were an officer, a lower and you were a private.
This idea spread and the updated IQ test found its way back into schools. When I was in the last year of primary school, I took such a test, was given a number, and, along with my classmates, was sorted into one of 9 secondary school classes ranked from A1 to C3. Students in A1 embarked on a course for different exams and opportunities than those in C3. It was the educational equivalent of officers and privates.
A tool that had been created to understand and support students had become one to sort - giving or taking away opportunities. What a travesty.
Last week, many of you would have received the results of your children’s MAP tests (Grades 4 to 10) or CEM tests (Grade 12). Like Binet we want to go beyond subject performance, and think about why students do well or badly. We also agree with him that their capacity isn’t a single thing and it isn’t fixed.
For us, tests are one more way we can understand children as individuals so we can better support their progress. MAP sits alongside subject assessments and our experience of the children themselves in and out of the classroom. We also use aggregate information to reflect on the effectiveness of our programmes. Long term, we want students to engage more and more with their own MAP data to enrich their own reflections on how they are progressing.
What Binet and Terman did with the same idea shows that the significance of any tool is not itself but what people do with it. The values they have when using them. At ISA we never forget each child is at the centre of what we do.
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