Who says who's smart?
How can you tell if a person is smart? Interesting answers are coming from students at Bronx Leadership Academy 2, a small public high school in New York City, who have launched a yearlong project to highlight their “insider knowledge” as urban youth. Their inquiry—known as “SAT Bronx”—will result in a book they will write and design themselves. As they create their own take on standardized tests, they will share new knowledge about who knows what, and why it matters.
These Bronx Leadership students join a long line of researchers. The notion that human intelligence could and should be measured first appeared in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century. The psychologists Binet and Simon developed two scales, the Alpha and the Beta, to assess military personnel in World War I.
By the 1930’s, the Binet scales had given way to the Wechsler IQ test, which soon spread to schools and other institutions across the country. The “Wechsler” assigned an “intelligence quotient” (IQ) to the test taker, adjusting it for age—while asserting that IQ stays constant over a person’s life span. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) got its start in 1941, under the College Board.
Still, there are plenty of researchers and others who question whether intelligence can be summed up in a numerical score. In 1994, 52 scientists signed a proclamation that argued for a new way of looking at intelligence. They defined “intelligence” as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.
Now, students at Bronx Leadership are adding their own answers to the question, “How can you tell if a person is smart?” At the first meeting of their “SAT Bronx” Club this September, junior Dinah offered one answer:
“Say we’re in an English class, I would expect the person to use proper grammar and to behave a certain way. When we’re outside, though, you have to act a different way. You have to fit in with the crowd, because if you don’t, then they won’t see you as street smart. They’re going to see you as only book smart. So you have to be smart in many different ways to be completely smart.”
