Testing in the schools: A help or a hindrance?

In an article in our regular feature ‘Viewpoints and Controversies’ entitled ‘Ability Tests? A Shot in the Dark’,¹ the Soviet Academician Arthur V. Petrovsky defined the limits of a certain conception of mental development which he, for his part, saw as being directly governed by children's social and cultural environment and the education they receive and not as a spontaneous process of revelation of intelligence. Based on unscientific presuppositions, tests, in his view, cannot measure the mysterious quantity labelled intelligence. Although thus expressing the strongest reservations concerning this scientifically unfounded method, he said at the end of his article that the argument, though it had gone on for a long time, was still unsettled. The American educator whose outspoken views we publish below returns to the charge from a different angle; far from invalidating Petrovsky's arguments, he too denounces the obstacles to the renewal of educational methods, democratization and the universalization of genuinely scientific thought which tests multiply and institutionalize. And so the debate on tests continues. Our readers are invited to join in.     

College majors and the knowledge content of jobs

College students select majors for a variety of reasons, including expected returns in the labor market. This paper demonstrates an empirical method linking a census of US degrees and fields of study with measures of the knowledge content of jobs. The study combines individual wage and employment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) with ratings on 27 knowledge content areas from the Occupational Information Network (O^*NET), thus providing measures of the economy-wide knowledge content of jobs. Fields of study and corresponding BA degree data from the Digest of Education Statistics for 1976–1977 through 2001–2002 are linked to these 27 content areas. We find that the choice of college major is responsive to changes in the knowledge composition of jobs and, more problematically, the wage returns to types of knowledge. Women's degree responsiveness to knowledge content appears to be stronger than men's, but their response to wage returns is weak.     

School and Neighborhood Friendship Patterns of Blacks and Whites in Early Adolescence

This research examined the school and neighborhood friendships of 292 black and white children who attended an integrated junior high school. Most students reported having a close other-race school friend, but only 28% of the sample saw such a friend frequently outside of school. Reports of an interracial school friendship that extended to nonschool settings were significantly more common among black students than whites and among children who lived in integrated neighborhoods rather than segregated ones. Race differences in reported friendship behavior were also found on other friendship variables. Compared to whites, blacks reported more extensive neighborhood friendship networks but indicated that they talked to fewer friends during the school day. In addition, the study replicated prior findings that white girls report more peer social support than white boys but failed to find a gender difference in peer support among blacks. The discussion emphasizes the importance of the school/nonschool ecology and the need for further comparative study of white and black children's friendship patterns.