Comment Re:How wonderful (Score 4, Insightful) 133
I believe you intended to be funny or sarcastic here, but many of the replies down-stream also seem to miss the point.
Provided you can believe the article...
There are *patterns* of thinking that indicate a student is about to make a mistake, that they otherwise may well be capable of solving correctly.
It's not that they can't handle that difficulty, or don't know the subject matter; it's that their brain is going into patterns that indicate it will simply be unable to reproduce the known material, and the student will fail on that problem, even if they have the requisite knowledge and skill to successfully answer the question.
It would seem a monumental failure to test someone and not actually measure the skill they have accurately.
Now, the solution? There are a myriad of them, and some are obviously better than others.
The prime solution, it seems in my mind, is to then give the subject a view of their brain and thinking that produced this likelihood of failure. You'd teach them how to recognize the onset of the thinking/brain patterns, and how to re-direct their thinking to help alleviate this bad construct.
Teaching someone how to do that would be incredible. It wouldn't involve "going easy" on them, and wouldn't give them results they couldn't achieve on their own. Once they were able to move out of the "bad" patterns, they could go right back to doing the test and you would get a much more accurate measurement of what the test-taker actually knew.
Further, almost certainly some people are much worse at getting stuck in these brain patterns - and their results from testing are probably much worse than the rest of the population and they are measured very inaccurately.
In spite of all the "humor" and snowflake BS thrown at the concept, I see this as something that could greatly improve the quality and skill of the people who utilized it. It could allow us to tap the potential of people who otherwise would be lost as "not very good" who really only fail the measurement system. [Or more accurately, the measurement system fails them.]
Why throw away many who *do* have the requisite knowledge - simply because we don't know how to help them perform better?
Why not help people perform better and learn where their brain limitations cost them - and better yet, teach them how to modify their thinking and work output to give them better results?
-Greg