NurtureShock

by Po Bronson; Ashley Merryman

  But this is only lip service, for both parties. Studies show that 96% of kids lie to their parents, yet lying has never been the #1 topic on the parenting boards or on the benches at the playgrounds.

  Having lying on my radar screen has changed the way things work around the Bronson household. No matter how small, lies no longer go unnoticed. The moments slow down, and I have a better sense of how to handle them.

  A few months ago my wife was on the phone making arrangements for a babysitter. She told the sitter that my son was six years old, so that the sitter knew what age-level games to bring. Luke started protesting, loudly, interrupting my wife. Whereas before I’d have been perplexed or annoyed at my son’s sudden outburst, now I understood. My son was, technically, still a week away from his sixth birthday, which he was treasuring in anticipation. So in his mind, his mom lied—about something really important to him. At his developmental stage, the benign motivation for the lie was irrelevant. The second Michele got off the phone, I explained to her why he was so upset; she apologized to him and promised to be more exact. He immediately calmed down.

  Despite his umbrage at others’ lies, Luke’s not beyond attempting his own cover-ups. Just the other day, he came home from school having learned a new phrase and a new attitude—quipping “I don’t care,” snidely, and shrugging his shoulders to everything. He was suddenly acting like a teenager, unwilling to finish his dinner or complete his homework. He repeated “I don’t care” so many times I finally got frustrated and demanded to know if someone at school had taught him this dismissive phrase.

  He froze. And I could suddenly intuit the debate running through his head: should he lie to his dad, or rat out his friend? I knew from Talwar’s research that I’d lose that one. Recognizing this, I stopped him and I told him that if he’d learned the phrase at school, he did not have to tell me who had taught him the phrase. Telling me the truth was not going to get his friends in trouble.

  “Okay,” he said, relieved. “I learned it at school.” Then he told me he did care, and gave me a hug. I haven’t heard that phrase again.

  Does how we deal with a child’s lies really matter, down the road in life? The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time. It’s to be expected, and yet it can’t be disregarded.

  Dr. Bella DePaulo has devoted much of her career to adult lying. In one study, she had both college students and community members enter a private room, equipped with an audiotape recorder. Promising them complete confidentiality, DePaulo’s team instructed the subjects to recall the worst lie they’d ever told—with all the scintillating details.

  “I was fully expecting serious lies,” DePaulo remarked. “Stories of affairs kept from spouses, stories of squandering money, or being a salesperson and screwing money out of car buyers.” And she did hear those kinds of whoppers, including theft and even one murder. But to her surprise, a lot of the stories told were about situations in which the subject was a mere child—and they were not, at first glance, lies of any great consequence. “One told of eating the icing off a cake, then telling her parents the cake came that way. Another told of stealing some coins from a sibling.” As these stories first started trickling in, DePaulo scoffed, thinking, “C’mon, that’s the worst lie you’ve ever told?” But the stories of childhood kept coming, and DePaulo had to create a category in her analysis just for them.

  “I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie,” she recalled. “For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child, and that they did the right thing.”

  Many subjects commented on how that momentous lie early in life established a pattern that affected them thereafter. “We had some who said, ‘I told this lie, I got caught, and I felt so badly, I vowed to never do it again.’ Others said, ‘Wow, I never realized I’d be so good at deceiving my father; I can do this all the time.’ The lies they tell early on are meaningful. The way parents react can really affect lying.”

  Talwar says parents often entrap their kids, putting them in positions to lie and testing their honesty unneccessarily. Last week, I put my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter in that exact situation. I noticed she had scribbled on the dining table with a washable marker. With disapproval in my voice I asked, “Did you draw on the table, Thia?” In the past, she would have just answered honestly, but my tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. Immediately, I wished I could retract the question and do it over. I should have just reminded her not to write on the table, slipped newspaper under her coloring book, and washed the ink away. Instead, I had done exactly what Talwar had warned against.

  “No, I didn’t,” my daughter said, lying to me for the first time.

  For that stain, I had only myself to blame.

  FIVE

  The Search for Intelligent Life in Kindergarten

  Millions of kids are competing for seats in gifted programs and private schools. Admissions officers say it’s an art: new science says they’re wrong, 73% of the time.

  Picture the little child, just turned five, being escorted into a stranger’s office. Her mother helps her get comfortable for a few minutes, then departs.

  Mommy might have told the girl that the stranger will help determine which school she goes to next year. Ideally, the word “test” will never be spoken; if the girl asks, “Am I going to take a test?” she will be told, “There will be puzzles and drawing and blocks and some questions to answer. Most kids think these activities are really fun.”

  The child is directed to a seat at a table. The test examiner sits across from her. If she grows restless after a while, they might move to the floor. (If there is a significant problem, some schools may allow a retest, but most won’t allow her to return for a year or two.)

  They begin each test with a series of sample questions, which the examiner demonstrates. Then they start the real test. The examiner begins with a question appropriate for the child’s age. A five-year-old child might start with question no. 4 of the testing book. Each question gets a tiny bit harder, and the child keeps receiving questions until she has made several errors in a row. At this point, the “discontinue rule” is triggered—the little girl has reached the top of her ability, and they move on to a new section.

  Vocabulary is tested two ways; at first, the child merely has to name what’s pictured. When it gets harder, the child will be told a word, like “confine,” and be asked what it means. Detailed definitions merit a 2; less detail scores a 1.

  The little girl will also have to discern a word from just a few clues. “Can you tell me what I’m thinking of?” the examiner will ask. “This is something you can sit or stand on, and it is something that can be cleaned or made of dirt.”

  She has five seconds to answer.

  On another section, the child will be shown pictures, then asked to spot what’s missing. “The bear’s leg!” she’ll answer—hopefully within 20 seconds.

  Later, the examiner will set some red and white plastic blocks out on the table. The child will be shown a card with a shape or pattern on it, and she’ll be asked to assemble four blocks to mirror the shape. Blocks arranged more than one-quarter inch apart are penalized. The harder questions use blocks with bicolored sides—red and white triangles. Older kids get nine blocks.

  She may also see some mazes; no lifting of the pencil is allowed, and points are taken off for going down blind alleys.

  Discerning patterns is a component of all tests. For instance, the child will need to recognize that a circle is to an oval as a square is to a rectangle, while a triangle is to a square as a square is to a pentagon. Or, snow is to a snowman as a bag of flour is to a loaf of bread.

  If a child is six years old, she might be read four numbers aloud (such as 9, 4, 7, 1) and asked to repeat them. If she gets them right, she’ll move up to five numbers. If she can do seven numbers, she’ll score in the 99th percentile. Then she’ll be asked to rep
eat a number sequence in reverse order; correctly repeating four numbers backward counts as gifted.

  Every winter, tens of thousands of children spend a morning or afternoon this way. Testing sessions like this one are the keys to admittance to elite private schools and to Gifted and Talented programs in public schools. Kids are scored against other children born in the same third of the year. Mostly based on these tests, over three million children—almost 7% of the American public school population—are in a gifted program. Another two million children won entry into private independent schools.

  The tests vary by what exactly they examine. Some are forms of a classic intelligence test—for instance, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, known by its acronym, WPPSI. Other schools opt for an exam that doesn’t strictly measure IQ; they might use a test of reasoning ability, such as the Cognitive Abilities Test, or a hybrid test of intelligence and learning aptitude, such as the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test.

  Regardless of what is being tested, or which test is used, they all have one thing in common.

  They’re all astonishingly ineffective predictors of a young child’s academic success.

  While it’s no surprise that not all gifted kindergartners end up at Harvard, the operating assumption has been that these screening tests do predict which kids will be the best at reading, writing, and math in the second and third grades. But they turn out to not even do that.

  To give you a hint of the scale of the problem—if you picked 100 kindergartners as the “gifted,” i.e. the smartest, by third grade only 27 of them would still deserve that categorization. You would have wrongly locked out 73 other deserving students.

  Most schools don’t realize how poorly the tests predict a child’s elementary school academics. The few with concerns have tried to come up with other ways to test for giftedness—everything from asking a kid to draw a picture to rating a child’s emotional empathy or behavior. However, scholars’ analyses have shown that each of these alternatives turns out to be even less effective than the intelligence tests.

  The issue isn’t which test is used, or what the test tests. The problem is that young kids’ brains just aren’t done yet.

  For decades, intelligence tests have been surrounded by controversy.

  Critics have long argued that the tests have cultural or class biases. What’s gone unnoticed is that, stinging from these allegations, all the testing companies have modified their tests to minimize these effects—to the point where they no longer really consider bias an issue. (While that would seem a hard pill to swallow, consider that versions of these tests are used around the world.) On top of those changes, schools with the strictest IQ requirements often make exceptions for children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds or speak something other than English as their first language.

  Meanwhile, shaping the debate along the bias fault line has led us to completely ignore the larger question: how often do the tests accurately identify any bright young kids—even the mainstream children?

  We asked admissions directors and school superintendents, and they all had the impression that the tests were accurate predictors. The tests come with manuals, and the first chapters of these manuals are dense with research conveying an aura of authentication. However, the statistics reported are generally not about how accurately the tests predict future performance. Instead, the statistics are about the accuracy of the tests at predicting current performance, and how well these tests stack up against competitors’ tests.

  Dr. Lawrence Weiss is the Vice President of Clinical Product Development at Pearson/Harcourt Assessment, which owns the WPPSI test. When I asked him how well his test predicts school performance just two or three years later, he explained that it’s not his company’s policy to assemble that data. “We don’t track them down the road. We don’t track predictive validity over time.”

  We were shocked by this, because decisions made on the basis of intelligence test results have enormous consequence. A score above 120 puts a child in the 90th percentile or higher, the conventional cutoff line for being called “gifted,” and may qualify her for special classes. A score above 130 puts a child in the 98th percentile, at which point she may be placed in a separate school for the advanced.

  Note, these kids aren’t prodigies—a prodigy is far rarer, more like a one in a half-million phenomenon. To be classified as gifted by a school district indicates a child is bright, but not necessarily extraordinary. Half of all college graduates have an IQ of 120 or above; 130 is the average of adults with a Ph.D.

  However, earning this classification when young is nothing less than a golden ticket, academically. The rarified learning environment, filled with quick peers, allows teachers to speed up the curriculum. This can make a huge difference in how much a child learns. In California, according to a state government study, children in Gifted and Talented programs make 36.7% more progress every year than the norm. And in many districts, such as New York City and Chicago, students are not retested and remain in the program until they graduate from their school. Those admitted at kindergarten to private schools will stay through eighth grade.

  While the publishers of the tests aren’t trying to determine how well early intelligence tests predict later achievement, the academic researchers are.

  In 2003, Dr. Hoi Suen, Professor of Educational Psychology at Pennsylvania State University, published a meta-analysis of 44 studies, each of which looked at how well tests given in pre-K or in kindergarten predicted achievement test scores two years later. Most of the underlying 44 studies had been published in the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, and most looked at a single school or school district. Analyzing them together, Suen found that intelligence test scores before children start school, on average, had only a 40% correlation with later achievement test results.

  This 40% correlation includes all children, at every ability level. When Suen narrowed his focus down to the studies of gifted or private schools, the correlations weren’t better.

  For example, one team of scholars at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte analyzed three years of scores of an upper-middle class private independent school in Charlotte. The school required all applicants take the WPPSI test prior to being admitted to kindergarten. They were identified as smart kids—the average IQ was 116. In third grade, the students took the Comprehensive Testing Battery III, a test developed to fit the advanced curricula of private schools. As a group, the students did well, averaging scores in the 90th percentile.

  But did the WPPSI results forecast which students did well? Not really. The correlation between WPPSI scores and the achievement scores was only 40%.

  For students at the very high end, the correlations appear to be even lower. Dr. William Tsushima looked at two exclusive private schools in Hawaii—at one school, the kids had an average IQ of 130, while at the other, just over 126. But their reading scores in second grade had only a 26% correlation with WPPSI results. Their math scores had an even poorer correlation.

  The relevant question, therefore, is just how many children are miscategorized by such early testing?

  As I mentioned before, using tests with that 40% correlation, if a school wanted the top tenth of students in its third-grade gifted program, 72.4% of them wouldn’t have been identified by their IQ test score before kindergarten. And it’s not as if these children would have just missed it by a hair. Many wouldn’t have even come close. Fully one-third of the brightest incoming third graders would have scored “below average” prior to kindergarten.

  The amount of false-positives and false-negatives is worrisome to experts such as Dr. Donald Rock, Senior Research Scientist with Educational Testing Service.

  “The identification of very bright kids in kindergarten or first grade is not on too thick of ice,” Rock said. “The IQ measures aren’t very accurate at all. Third grade, yeah, second grade, maybe. Testing younger than that, you’re getting kids with good backgrounds, essentially.”

  Rock
did add that most kids won’t fall too far. “The top one percent will certainly be in the top ten percent five years later. It is true that a kid who blows the top off that test is a bright kid, no question—but kids who do quite well might not be in that position by third grade.”

  According to Rock, third grade is when the public school curriculum gets much harder. Children are expected to reason through math, rather than just memorize sums, and the emphasis is shifted to reading for comprehension, rather than just reading sentences aloud using phonics. This step up in difficulty separates children.

  “You see growth leveling off in a lot of kids.” As a result, Rock believes third grade is when testing becomes meaningful. “Kids’ rank ordering in third grade is very meaningful. If we measure reading in third grade, it can predict performance much later, in a lot of areas.”

  The issue isn’t some innate flaw with intelligence tests. The problem is testing kids too young, with any kind of test.

  “I would be concerned if high-stakes judgments such as entry to separate selective schools were based on such test results,” said Dr. Steven Strand of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. “Such structural decisions tend to be inflexible, and so kids can be locked in on the basis of an early result, while others can be locked out. It’s all about having sufficient flexibility to alter provisions and decisions at a later date.”

  In contrast to testing children in preschool or early elementary school, Strand found that IQ tests given in middle schools are actually very good predictors of academic success in high school.

  In a recent study published in the journal Intelligence, Strand looked at scores for 70,000 British children. He compared their results on an intelligence test at age eleven with their scores on the GCSE exam at age sixteen. Those correlated very highly. If early childhood IQ tests could predict as well as those taken at age eleven, they’d identify the gifted students about twice as accurately.