Education: Thinking Test

Professor Ralph Winfred Tyler, University of Chicago’s famed chief examiner and professor of education, believes that U. S. high schools and colleges do not teach students to think. Because pedagogues lack even the means of finding out whether students can think, Professor Tyler and colleagues spent three months thinking up a test of thinking. Last month, having excogitated 290 questions and created perhaps the most elaborate thinking test ever devised, they stunned a group of the nation’s smartest high-school graduates with it. The examinees were 1,407 high-standing students, trying for 34 University of Chicago scholarships.

The three-hour test roamed the fields of science, literature, economics, English, history, in unusual fashion. Examinees were asked not to display their knowledge but to draw deductions from sets of given facts. In a test of their literary judgment, for example, they were given a poem to interpret, Wallace Stevens’ Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock:

The houses are haunted

By white nightgowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are riot going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

Examinees were asked to say whether certain statements were consistent with, irrelevant to or inconsistent with the poem, e.g.: The houses are haunted by ghosts; drunkenness is a terrible vice; respectable people are happier than drunken sailors; “red weather” occurs only at sunset; there is only one drunken sailor; life is now too uniform and standardized (closest to the poem’s meaning).

In another test of reasoning from, economic facts, students were to tell the effect on supply, demand and the price of American wheat in the world market if a major European war broke out and agricultural wage rates in the U. S. rose.

Last week Professor Tyler announced results of his test, found that students thought about as fuzzily as he had expected. Only 42% could make sense of the literary passages and even fewer had any notion of what Poet Stevens was driving at; 75% believed that the poem was an argument for temperance. Similarly, the students as a group scored only 47% on literary information, 42% on scientific information. They did better (57%) on a section of the test in which their memory for facts counted. Examinees were found to have many superstitions: 70% believed that daughters resemble their fathers more than their mothers; 60% that if a dominant man marries a weak woman more than half of their children will be boys. But 97% replied correctly that “germs may be spread by kissing.”

Highest score was made by Chicago’s Donald Wallace Connor, who got 211 of the 290 questions. Said a less successful examinee: “Anyone who could pass that test doesn’t need to go to college.”