Raising Intelligent Children

School Kids, Mastery Learning, An Update, Reality Check, Another Measure

I.

School Kids

Growing up, my parents often labeled me as “so smart.” In my youth, I consistently aced standardized comprehension tests and acutely understood how to gain approval from my teachers. I studied what they wanted me to (often via rote memorization), did all my homework, never passed up an opportunity for extra credit, and was a frequent hand-raiser. In other words, I knew how the game worked, and I played it well.

My younger sister, on the other hand, grew up being labeled by our parents as “not so smart.” Alicia struggled with those same comprehension tests and was often distracted by intrusive noises during exams. Her game differed, and she too knew how it worked: her scores would inevitably be compared to mine, and she was destined to lose.

The way we measure intelligence in schoolchildren—via standardization and comparison—is deeply flawed. It’s not only a poor indicator of a child’s potential, but the ingrained beliefs in such a system are incredibly harmful to young minds. Standardized scoring leads some children to equate success with approval from authority figures (parents, teachers), while comparison leads other children to believe they are “not smart” or “less than.” In both cases, children develop self-limiting beliefs that can (and often do) hinder their potential well into adulthood.

II.

Mastery Learning

Aptitude is the amount of time required by the learner to attain mastery of a learning task. Implicit in this formulation is the assumption that, given enough time, all students can conceivably attain mastery of a learning task.

John Carroll, A Model for School Learning

In the above quote, we learn that aptitude is a function of time, not intelligence. Simply put, all learners can attain mastery when conditions are optimal for them (i.e., enough time, right environment).

This idea seems so obvious and intuitive, yet we still feel compelled to gauge children’s intelligence based on standardization and comparison. Even my friends with two-year-old toddlers say things like “Emma is in the 90th percentile for speech development” because their child formed a three-word phrase a whole month before most toddlers do. Eventually, all toddlers learn to say words and form sentences (provided they do not have disabilities hindering them from doing so); the timing of when they start talking is less important than the fact that they do.

Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom first proposed a pedagogical philosophy which he called “learning for mastery” in 1968. This philosophy advocates for self-paced learning environments where students must achieve a subject-specific level of mastery (e.g., scoring 90%) before moving on to new material. This approach means some students will inevitably progress faster in certain subjects than others, but it should be emphasized that the pace with which one learns is not indicative of potential or innate intelligence. In a mastery learning system, the primary focus should be on ameliorating each student’s individual learning journey rather than teaching everyone the same material at the same pace and moving forward regardless of whether all students fully understand the content.

Mastery learning aims to bridge the pervasive achievement gaps in school classrooms. In the 1960s, Benjamin Bloom and John Carroll observed that students’ aptitude (i.e., their learning pace) tends to follow a normal distribution. This means that while most students fall within the center of the bell curve and progress similarly, not all learn at the same rate. If all students receive uniform instruction in terms of quality and duration (as they do in public schools), the overall achievement levels should also be expected to follow a normal distribution.

Aspiring for a normal distribution of student achievement is utterly uninspiring. As Bloom says, “Since education is a purposeful activity in which we seek to have students learn what we teach, the achievement distribution should be very different from the normal curve if our instruction is effective. In fact, our educational efforts may be said to be unsuccessful to the extent that student achievement is normally distributed.”¹

When students are taught in an optimal way—receiving individualized instruction and sufficient time to fully grasp skills and concepts before advancing to new material—the expectation is that the vast majority of students will ultimately achieve mastery. At the end of the day, or the end of 12th grade, what really matters is that young people can confidently master important skills and concepts, not the pace at which they do so.

References in footnote²

III.  

An Update

There are countless reasons why some children learn faster than others. In my case, being the first of four children meant my parents had more time and energy to teach me basic skills like ABCs and 123s compared to my siblings. Additionally, having an October birthday meant I was always one of the oldest kids in class. I was also intrinsically motivated to do well in school because it earned me more attention at home—a scarce resource. The list goes on.

Regardless of where you fall on the achievement spectrum, as a child, you’re vulnerable to self-limiting beliefs. Personally, I bought into the belief that if I were to pursue a creative profession, I’d waste my intelligence. From a young age, my parents urged me to pursue a career in medicine simply because I did well in school. Consequently, I pursued an undergrad degree in biomed despite feeling called to study broadcast journalism. Fast forward, I declined acceptance into med school, haphazardly obtained two other unrelated degrees, climbed the corporate ladder, and still felt unfulfilled. It took about six months of being out of work in my late twenties to remember what I actually wanted to do in the first place. Then, it took me another six months to actually convince myself to do it.

My sister, however, subscribed to a different belief. She’d grow up to believe she wasn’t smart enough and would go on to take (and pass) more comprehensive examinations in adulthood than any other adult I know—SIE, Series 7, Series 9/10, CFP. While she enjoys the work that she does, she still often feels the need to prove her worth (and intelligence). Schoolchildren mostly understand “smartness” as being linked to academic achievement, such as getting As and Bs.³ This belief is further reinforced when parents compare siblings or focus on achievement over learning.

IV.  

Reality Check

Most of our core beliefs are formed in childhood and persist into adulthood. These early-adopted beliefs ultimately shape how we show up in the world. And sometimes, they hold us back from who we really are.

We often inherit harmful beliefs from our parents, who, in turn, adopted them from their parents. It’s an intergenerational transmission of beliefs, reinforced by societal expectations. While my sister and I could place blame on our parents for some of the self-limiting beliefs we internalized, our parents were doing the best they could with what they knew. (And they did a pretty good job, all things considered.)

The truth is, grades and exams provide only one measure of intelligence, and a shoddy one at that. We subject kids to a uniform pedagogy and expect them to land on the right side of the bell curve. When they don’t, we worry it reflects their overall potential and future success. But children are incredibly complex and unique beings. They learn at different rates and in different ways, have preferred learning styles and favorite teachers, and gravitate towards some disciplines while being repelled by others. We don’t assign an alphanumerical score to adults like they do in other countries; so why in the world are we doing this to impressionable kids?

If we shift the focus from uniformity to mastery, ensuring all kids ultimately achieve the same end goal, it becomes much harder to compare children’s intelligence apples-to-apples. Ideally, everyone should make it over to the right side at the right time for them.

V.  

Another Measure

We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is a whiz at some form of scholastic discipline (math, science, a huge vocabulary, a memory for superfluous facts, a fast reader) is “intelligent.” Yet mental hospitals are clogged with patients who have all the properly lettered credentials—as well as many who don’t. A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

Wayne W. Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones

Intelligence comes from the Latin intelligere, meaning “to understand, comprehend, come to know.” But the big question here is what? What exactly do we need to understand, comprehend, and know? Do we need to understand the Pythagorean theorem? Or comprehend Mendelian genetics? Should we know the capital cities of all 50 states in the USA? Would knowing these things ensure we’ll come out on top in this dog-eat-dog world?

Or is there something else we should understand, comprehend, and know?

Maybe we should understand what makes us happy, healthy, productive, and wise. Or perhaps we should at least comprehend what doesn’t. It’s possible that what we should really know is that when we’re dead and gone, no one will give two shits whether we were a straight-A student or a straight-D student; what they’ll care about is the impact we made on the lives of those around us when we had the opportunity to do so.

Perhaps intelligence isn’t all it’s made out to be. Perhaps it’s so much more.

1. Starting Points Maths Tasks and Blog

2. Mastery Learning in Public Schools, Mastery Learning Wikipedia page, The Science of Learning Blog

3. The development of children’s beliefs about intelligence, What does it mean to be smart? The development of children’s beliefs about intelligence in Germany and the United States