This much-discussed study, published in the current edition of Education Next, finds that “oversubscribed charter schools” in Boston produce strong test-score gains but “do not improve students’ fluid cognitive skills.” Put another way, the study shows high-performing charters are getting great results improving “crystallized knowledge”—but fluid skills, not so much. Crystallized knowledge is prior knowledge—vocabulary, math facts, and bits of mental furniture. Fluid intelligence, in contrast, is your ability to think, reason, and solve problems. The two combine into overall cognitive ability. West and his colleagues report that “effective schools help their students achieve at higher levels than expected based on their fluid cognitive skills.” Bravo, charters. But wait. What does it mean if these putatively high-performing schools aren’t moving the needle on fluid skills? Jay P. Greene describes the finding as “potentially unsettling” and notes that, “if fluid skills really matter, ed reform is in a serious pickle” because reform efforts “appear to be increasingly emphasizing (and measuring) crystallized knowledge to the exclusion of fluid skills.” Enter University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham, who says the results are “fascinating, but they are also easy to misinterpret.” Researchers have long had a hard time finding evidence that fluid intelligence is malleable. It may simply be hard to improve, he notes. “So it’s inaccurate to interpret these results as showing that charters are making kids good at scoring well on math tests, but they haven’t really taught them math because they haven’t improved their cognitive skill,” Willingham writes. West and his co-authors conclude in their Ed Next piece, “This is a perfect time for cognitive psychologists, educators, and perhaps even game- and software developers to join forces in rapid-cycle experimentation to explore whether and how schools can broadly and permanently raise students’ fluid cognitive skills.” Maybe. Maybe not. Remember cognitive performance is a product of both fluid and crystallized intelligence. The difference is that we know crystallized intelligence is improvable, while fluid intelligence might not be. If these important findings end up translated by schools as, “raise fluid intelligence,” the result could be like Aesop’s fable about the dog with a bone who sees a dog with a bigger bone reflected in the water: if we drop one for the other, we may lose both.
SOURCE: Martin R. West, et al., “What Effective Schools Do,” Education Next Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 2014).
