> Closing Statement: Kathi Kearney
>
>
> I would like to thank all of those who participated in this conference and
> wrote such thoughtful, insightful posts. I would especially like to express
> my appreciation to Bobbie Gilman, my co-presenter; and to Sally Lyon, the
> indefatiguable coordinator of Our Gifted Online Conferences. Sally took on
> the herculean task of moderating every post, a cumbersome but necessary
> activity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter and the issue of
> test security. In addition, the technical comments by Drew Carson, Senior
> Project Director at Riverside Publishing, and Deborah Ruf were very much
> appreciated.
>
> Due to the technical nature of the subject matter of this conference,
> composing responses to your posts took a great deal more time than other
> online conferences where I have been the virtual "guest speaker." There were
> a number of posts I wanted to answer in depth, but time did not permit. I
> apologize if yours was among them! Please know that I read and considered
> every post in this conference, even if there wasn¹t the time to compose an
> answer to every single question.
>
> Bobbie¹s extensive closing statement sums up the high points of this
> conference and the varied concerns of the individuals attending ­ a diverse
> group that included psychologists, parents, teachers, school administrators,
> test authors, and a Senior Project Director at Riverside Publishing. The
> international nature of this conference is also a testament to the power of
> the Internet in making knowledge available instantaneously to a large
> worldwide audience, and the far-reaching influence of current American test
> instruments.
>
> As we close, I would like to offer just a few additional comments, at once a
> combination of personal, technical, philosophical, and futuristic musings.
>
> I am a passionate believer in the power of individual assessment, carefully
> and thoughtfully conducted by trained examiners, to provide critical
> information to parents, teachers, schools, and the individual. Over and over
> again, I have seen this information literally change the course of an
> individual¹s education, career, and life satisfaction.
>
> A major theme woven throughout the questions that were asked during this
> conference involved the end uses of assessment. Two major functions of
> assessment emerged again and again, in various ways, throughout the
> discussion ­ functions that, in today¹s society, sometimes are treated as
> mutually exclusive in practice. I would summarize these as assessment for
> gatekeeping purposes (such as admission to gifted programs or schools)
> versus assessment for understanding (assessments primarily used for the
> purpose of understanding the child and planning interventions for optimal
> development). To complicate matters further, often the same assessment
> instruments are used to accomplish these widely diverse purposes. In a way,
> these end functions of assessment mirror the larger debate in the field of
> gifted education today: Is giftedness primarily a function of external
> achievement, competition, and production in a cultural context, or is it
> primarily a developmental phenomenon?
>
> Politically, we live in an increasingly test-driven world, especially in the
> United States and especially within K-12 education in its current
> incarnation. Much of the mass testing conducted with school children today
> (other than assessment of children with disabilities in special education)
> is conducted primarily to satisfy politicians and bureaucrats, and not to
> benefit individual children. Too often, the results of these
> group-administered, timed tests are being used in grossly inappropriate
> ways. For instance, many professional organizations, including the
> prestigious American Psychological Association, state in their ethics
> standards that the results of one test, alone, should never be the sole
> determinant of the educational placement of a child. Yet whole states and
> cities, including Florida and New York City, are routinely using the results
> of just one test to be the major, and sometimes sole, determinant of grade
> promotion or retention. In some states, this misuse of assessment results is
> even codified in state law. Furthermore, there have been numerous blatant
> examples of massive scoring errors on these high-stakes tests (the latest,
> just this week, involved the Connecticut Mastery Test and the state
> assessment test in Minnesota). Such large-scale misuse of group assessment
> instruments has the potential to give all assessment, (including -- simply
> by association ­ individual assessment using well-standardized, reliable,
> and valid test instruments), a bad name ­ perhaps a very bad name.
>
> I had the unusual opportunity of observing the course of the development of
> the SB5. From my first phone call to the former SB5 project director seven
> years ago, when the new SB5 revision project was in its infancy, to my work
> as one of many examiners nationwide for the standardization and validation
> study phases of the project, I have had the rare opportunity to watch the
> ongoing development of a major children¹s intelligence test from the inside
> out, and from beginning to end. What has surprised and pleased me most has
> been the genuine concern of Gale Roid, the test author, for individual
> children (especially exceptional children, including the gifted), and the
> continuing responsiveness of a corporation as large as Riverside to try to
> understand and respond to concerns in the field.
>
> But what of the future of the assessment of gifted children? Not since the
> early heydey of the mental testing movement in the 1920s and 1930s have so
> many essentially new instruments been released at once. It will take time to
> conduct research and to sort out what the information gleaned on newer tests
> really means when applied to gifted children ­ just as it took time in the
> 1920s and 1930s to understand what those instruments could contribute to our
> understanding of the gifted. Although Lewis Terman had hoped to design a
> test that would allow him to find both developmentally delayed and gifted
> individuals, his original 1916 Stanford-Binet, after all, required some
> tweaking. In its original incarnation, it had only one adult level, and that
> turned out not to be a high enough ceiling; the 1937 revision added three
> Superior Adult levels (and much more difficult items). Terman¹s own
> longitudinal study of the gifted, begun in the 1920s and still continuing
> today, has linked the Stanford-Binets (in all their incarnations) with
> gifted assessment for the better part of a century. Likewise, in the 1930s,
> Leta Hollingworth also experimented with the burgeoning increase in new test
> instruments. She pioneered the use of out-of-level testing. When extremely
> gifted children hit the ceiling of the 1916 and 1937 Stanford-Binets, she
> experimented with the use of the Army Alpha test (a group IQ test originally
> developed by Terman and others to test adult U. S. Army recruits). When the
> Herring-Binet (a short-lived adaptation of the Stanford-Binet) was released,
> she tested a large group of gifted children with the test and deemed it
> inadequate for this population, publishing her findings in a leading
> psychology journal. And when the 1937 revision of the Stanford-Binet was
> published, she re-tested all the children enrolled in the Speyer School
> experimental project for both rapid and slow learners, in order to compare
> their scores on the new with the previous edition. (This research was never
> published, probably due to Hollingworth¹s untimely battle with cancer; I was
> personally given all the original data from this study).
>
> Needing time to figure out what new test instruments mean with gifted
> populations is nothing new, then. But what is new is, perhaps, the
> redefinitions of intelligence underlying many of the new tests. Some of
> these definitions are obvious ­ the SB5 and WJ-III are CHC-model tests; the
> new K-ABC actually allows the examiner to select from two theoretical models
> of intelligence the model that will be most helpful for interpretation for
> an individual child. It¹s quite possible that a century from now, different
> models and theories of intelligence will emerge, based partly on
> neuroscience and biology, but perhaps, just as likely, based on the new
> cultural and political milieu of the 22nd century.
>
> This is probably enough of my late-night musings, so I will sign off now.
> Thanks to everyone for an exciting, stimulating, and ­ yes ­ exhausting
> conference!
>
>
>