Information and communication technologies in schools: a ...

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ICT IN SCHOOLS
A HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS
It was quite natural to establish a system of checking and testing both interim
results and the quality of the end-products of this almost industrial-like manufacturing
process.
At the turn of the 20th century, the French psychologists Binet and Simon
were commissioned to research the possibility for measuring intelligence. From
the start, the goal was to measure the sub-skills necessary for classroom success.
Binet actually sat in a classroom, taking notes of students’ answers to teachers’
questions, and tried to construct rules for predicting who would fulfill the
demands of the teacher best.
Sampling school children’s abilities to utter correct answers in many schools
across France, Binet created the first intelligence test, later developed and corroborated
by other researchers. With these tests, it became possible to estimate
an individual’s intelligence by processing the data of one’s performance on a deliberately
heterogeneous set of items, ranging from sensory discrimination of
colours to vocabulary knowledge, and to calculate a so-called Intelligence
Quotient or IQ.
What a magnificent epitome of the era of mass-produced education: now
you could quantify how bright and stupid everyone is!
In pre-industrial epochs, people perceived each other as much more complex
entities. Someone could be clever enough with words while incompetent in
numbers; shrewd in business but poor in writing; incapable in abstract reasoning
but masterful in crafts or apt in sports. It was only after the development of intelligence
tests and what the statistician Spearman did with them that the construct
of intelligence nested so firmly in the consciousness of educators and heads of
Human Resource departments.
Spearman found that all IQ tests that appeared after Binet and Simon’s correlated
highly with each other. He reasoned that they must have been measuring
the same thing. Further, this cross-correlation could be explained by a construct
he called g, for general intelligence. Some eminent critics disagreed, maintaining
that human beings had multiple abilities, or factors of intelligence, but they were
forced to admit that even these multiple factors had a high cross-correlation.
Hence IQ tests became highly useful in the hands of busy school administrators
eager to predict student scores and channel students according to their abilities.
After all, that was how the administrators’ own abilities would be measured and
rewarded (or punished).