The Self-Driven Child

by William Stixrud

  Use rewards if necessary, but as much as possible provide a rationale that respects your child’s autonomy. “I know that when you look at your math work sheet it’s incredibly hard for you to get yourself focused enough to work on it. This is because there’s not enough dopamine in the front part of your brain to make it interesting enough to focus on. I’ll offer you an incentive, because it will make it easier to get your brain going.” Some kids dislike homework so much that they’ll turn down the incentives. If that is the case you may be able to negotiate with the school about alternatives to homework, like watching educational videos or listening to recorded books.

  If your child is in middle school or high school, advocate for a resource period or an extra study period during the day so that your child can get most of his homework done at school.

  Give your kids opportunities to serve, such as helping younger children or working with animals. This is a wonderful way for children with challenges to develop a healthy sense of control.

  Teach your children how their brains work and tell them that learning how to do something means that more and more brain cells are firing together as one unit. This is why we practice things over and over, so that we get more players on the neuron teams that do reading, math, writing, sports, and many other things.

  Talk out loud to yourself about managing situations that are hard for your kid. For instance: “When I was trying to figure out how to get everything done last night, it probably would have been better if I had written down everything I needed to do, prioritized things, and started with the most important thing. I guess I’ll do that next time.”

  Because kids with ADHD and ASD are at such high risk for sleep problems, pay careful attention to their ability to fall asleep, the ease with which they wake up, and the extent to which they seem tired during the day. If your child appears to have sleep problems, consult with your pediatrician and, if necessary, with a sleep specialist. Also consult an excellent book by V. Mark Durand, a psychologist and father of a child with autism, called Sleep Better! A Guide to Improving Sleep for Kids with Special Needs.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The SAT, ACT, and Other Four-Letter Words

  STANDARDIZED TESTS LOOM large in the lives of adolescents and their parents. The date is circled on the calendar along with other teenage rites of passage like the driver’s test, prom, and graduation. Many see the SAT as the pivotal occurrence of high school, the hours that will determine their fate, the score that will determine Harvard or College U.

  While we would love it if parents and kids read this whole book together, we recognize that for the past eleven chapters, we’ve been addressing parents. This chapter is different. We encourage parents to read it, of course, but we really want high schoolers themselves to have a look. After all, at the end of the day, they’re the ones sitting in the exam room. For that reason, this chapter speaks to them directly.

  Testing Stinks . . . Usually

  There’s a lot to be said against standardized tests. Among the many criticisms is the valid point that they allow for only one right answer. Diversity of thought, creativity, divergent thinking: none of these are rewarded by standardized tests. Plus, there’s no process of appeal: you cannot question the questioners. In a world where critical-thinking skills are necessary for tackling difficult questions with no clear right answer, you’re assessed with tests that insist there are. No partial credit is given, no context considered. Ned’s students routinely ask him, “Who are the people who make these tests and who put them in charge?” The short answer is that really nobody put them in charge. Among the very first standardized tests was the Binet-Simon Scale, created by the French educator Alfred Binet. He designed his test not to assess intelligence but as a way to identify children who needed more help. The way the test was used to separate people into categories worried him.

  In his book The Mismeasure of Man, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that simply assigning a number to something doesn’t mean we’ve measured it. Or, to borrow the old adage, “Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.” Our obsession with metrics has led to the testing-industrial complex—a multibillion-dollar business that’s only getting bigger.1

  It isn’t the tests themselves but what’s done with them and how they’re viewed by kids and their parents that’s a problem. There is some value to standardized tests. The SAT and ACT often reveal reading problems that have gone undetected. When kids with straight As from academically rigorous schools have mediocre test scores, it can be a sign. Average grades and average scores? No biggie. Killer grades and weak scores? Worth exploring. Ned has directed maybe a hundred kids to get neuropsychological evaluations or to meet with a psychologist or psychiatrist because, based on the discrepancy between grades and scores, he has sniffed out anxiety, attention issues, or learning disabilities. While he doesn’t have the tools to diagnose the issue himself, the blunt results of standardized tests can help him see that there is a problem worth investigating.

  One of his recent students was very bright but frustrated by school and even more so by standardized tests. While Ned didn’t know what the issue was, he noted that the boy was a strong reader but uncommonly slow. A neuropsychological evaluation confirmed it: 98th percentile verbal reasoning ability. Reading speed? Fifth percentile. No wonder he was frustrated. Because he was sharp, not one of his teachers in twelve years of schooling had suspected the problem of a very slow processing speed.

  Another student at an elite private girls school had a B+ average and PSAT scores in the 400s, which was unusual. Ned asked her, “Do you underperform on tests in school and do less well than you think you should do? Do you ever run short on time?”

  The girl’s mom looked at Ned quizzically. “Surely if there were an issue,” she asked, “wouldn’t one of her teachers have said something by now?”

  The straight answer to that is no. Even very good schools will often fail to catch a learning disability if a child is particularly smart or diligent. These kids will develop compensating strategies that make it possible for them to get by. As it turned out, the girl had a massive attention-related problem, which professional evaluation determined was ADHD. But because she was not disruptive, her issues had not drawn the attention of any of her teachers. It’s really common for kids (especially girls) who are hardworking and eager to fly under the radar. They don’t perform so poorly that anyone is alarmed. Sometimes standardized tests provide the first sign of an issue.

  Where tests become problematic is when they are seen as Binet feared they would be—as a marker of intelligence. It’s true that you cannot do well on the SAT or ACT unless you know certain things (we’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of those things), but one can be smart and know plenty and still not do well. So folks who believe these tests confirm how smart they are and folks who believe the tests do not reflect just how smart they are are both right. The bottom line is that it helps to do well on those tests for the purpose of applying to college. But if you’re stressed by the notion that the test is judging your intelligence, there is abundant evidence that it is not qualified to do that.

  It’s worth remembering that the SAT and AP tests don’t impact your future nearly as much as you think. Although it isn’t easy, we try to talk kids and their parents out of the idea that “one score determines your whole life.” Do the numbers: 75 percent of people score below the 75th percentile. That’s a lot of people, many of whom have very successful lives.

  So standardized testing mostly stinks, but it is a necessary hurdle if you want to go to college. There are almost a thousand colleges that are test-score optional (see fairtest.org for more on this), but that leaves many more that require the SAT or ACT, so you might as well take the darn test. And as long as you’re taking it, you might as well learn a thing or two. We’re not as interested as you might think in your learning
algebraic equations (though that’s important, of course). We think the real promise of the test lies in the techniques you can learn to manage stress. As the political philosopher Edmund Burke observed, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Put another way, it doesn’t matter what you know if you lose your mind when it matters.

  N.U.T.S.

  We covered this earlier in the book, but if you’re just picking up this chapter, we’ll fill you in. One of our favorite neuroscientists, Sonia Lupien, uses an acronym to explain the things that make life stressful:

  Novelty

  Unpredictability

  Threat to the ego

  Sense of control (or lack thereof)

  All of these can apply to the SAT or ACT, but they don’t have to. So let’s look at the world of testing through the lens of N.U.T.S.

  Novelty

  Ned once prepped a former army officer for the GMAT who was twenty-six, a West Point grad, and a wounded warrior. It had been years since Mike had taken high school math, and looking at the test material stressed him out. Geometry, which he’d hardly thought of since ninth grade, made him freeze. Ned encouraged Mike by telling him he just needed to revisit the fundamentals of geometry, and by processing it over and over, he’d know just what to do when he came across a geometry question on the GMAT. “Oh,” Mike said, “it’s just like airborne school.” As this was a comparison Ned hadn’t heard before, he asked him to explain. “Well, in theory,” the soldier said, “you could be taught how to jump out of a plane in the morning and then actually do it that afternoon. But that’s not how it works in the U.S. armed services. You spend days perfecting how to use your gear, how to engage the chute, how to jump off platforms, how to land and roll. For two weeks, you just do the same thing over and over so it’s ingrained. Then near the end of the second week, you don your gear, go up in the plane, and walk right out of the plane like it’s nothing, because you know the process so well.”

  Like the parachuter, you want to take all the novelty out of test day. You want to know exactly where you’re going, how to get there, and what the seats feel like. You want to know what you’re likely to see on the test and how you’ll handle it. You want to practice the details until they’re rote, so that actually taking the test is no big deal.

  You may think standardized tests are lousy, but at least they are consistently lousy. Yes, the questions themselves change, but lots of people up at the College Board and ACT headquarters spend all day making sure the difficulty level remains the same. That doesn’t mean they feel the same. Students regularly tell Ned that the tests are getting much harder. But Ned has taken the SAT and the ACT himself dozens of times, and he can assure them that this isn’t the case. Take practice tests, he reminds them, and the novelty goes away. If something in the test feels novel, it’s because something has changed in your process, something you can completely control. For instance, you might be rushing through the reading and so the questions seem harder. Slow down, and you’ll see they’re not.

  Those sample tests that you hate taking are serving an important function. They improve your process and ingrain a focus on the process itself so that nothing on test day is new. As the aphorism goes, “Practice like you’ll play so you can play like you’ve practiced.”

  One of the first kids I ever tutored, Naomi, cratered on her test in a way I didn’t see coming. Her mom called me up distraught, wondering why after all the time and money spent on test prep her daughter’s scores had not gone up. I wanted to say, “Beats me. She was doing fine when she left my office. What happened between here and the test?” But wisely I didn’t, and waited until I met with Naomi herself.

  At first Naomi couldn’t really explain what had happened, she just said that the questions were harder than they had been in practice. I asked about disruptions at the test site, like whispering proctors or kids tapping toes. She volunteered that she and her mom had gotten into a fight right before the test. In fact, while driving to the test. Her mom had told her that she hadn’t worked hard enough and probably wouldn’t do well because of her lack of effort. “So I was in tears and really upset,” Naomi said, “but I think I calmed down enough by the time I got to the test room.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “It’s important to be calm for the test, so I’m glad you were.”

  “Well, yes and no,” said Naomi. “There was this other thing.” It turned out that Naomi and her boyfriend of seven months had just broken up the week before. And he was in her testing room.

  “Okaaaay,” I said. “That’s pretty stressful. Anything else?”

  “Well, there was one other thing. See, I went out with my friends after my boyfriend and I broke up, and I was upset, and there was this other guy I met . . . well, anyway, he was in the testing room, too.”

  In a nutshell, much about this day for Naomi was new and stressful. Tiger Woods allegedly brought his furniture from home on the road with him so that he could replicate his home, reducing his stress by controlling the details.2 Now Naomi couldn’t control much of her experience, but the likelihood of another day like this was remote. The next time, I suggested that she drive herself to the test (and practice doing so beforehand). Chances are her love life wouldn’t be quite so tumultuous at the same time.

  —Ned

  Unpredictability

  We’re often asked about the difference between novelty and unpredictability. The simple answer is something that’s novel will be unpredictable, but something can be unpredictable that’s not novel. For example, if you have a friend who is usually nice but gets mean when he is stressed or under pressure, after a while his snarky comments aren’t novel anymore. But they are unpredictable. As a result, you may feel like you have to walk on eggshells when you’re around him.

  You may feel that the test is unpredictable. After all, you can’t predict what questions will be on it. But that’s not completely true. Do enough test prep and you begin to see that while the specific questions change, the types of questions are remarkably similar. By focusing on process, you will minimize unpredictability.

  The other way to counter the stress of unpredictability is through Plan B thinking. When you’re planning a party or wedding, you don’t know what the weather will be like on the big day. So what do you do? The helpful wedding planner suggests that in the event of rain, there’s a $5,000 tent you can rent to ensure your guests won’t be soaked. This is called Plan B. (It’s also called extortion, because there’s no way a tent costs that much for any event other than your wedding.)

  Psychometricians (a geeky word for people who make tests like the ACT and SAT) rely on the fact that students will respond in predictable ways to certain content. They design questions based not only on what students have been taught but on how they have been taught. It helps the test makers get the right balance of right and wrong responses. Under stress, students will sometimes experience a perceptual narrowing. This means that they default to answering questions in the way they’ve been taught. It is what’s most deeply ingrained, but it is also, not coincidentally, often the hardest way. Ned’s colleague Aaron offers this advice: “Don’t ask yourself how should I do this problem, which is likely to run you straight into a wall that you cannot surmount. Instead, ask yourself: What can I do? It broadens your vision, opens your mind, and frees you to use any tool you have in your toolbox. Can you eyeball it? Can you plug in numbers? Can you guess and check? These are all methods your math teacher would hate. But since she’s not here, use whatever method is best for you right now.” If you’re doing calculus and you can use the first derivative, knock yourself out. But if counting on your fingers is easier, go for it. Sometimes a bread knife is better than a chainsaw. For any question, it’s great to have more than one method (Plans C, D, and E). Then choose the one that’s better for you. Simply believing there’s more than one way will reduce your stress and help you think more
clearly.

  In addition to Plan B thinking, we suggest that you do some disaster preparedness planning. It’s pretty much like mental contrasting. Ned learned this lesson in a trial by fire. He’s always been really good at standardized tests, so when he took the SAT as a professional tutor, he was surprised to see that he had five questions left when the proctor called time. That hadn’t happened to him before; he knew his pacing pretty well, and usually finished well ahead of time. He looked around the room at the other students taking the test, and they were all deer-in-the-headlights frozen. Ned froze, too, for a second. But then he addressed the proctor.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but are you sure the time’s elapsed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Ned said. “It’s just that I’ve taken the test before and this time seemed really quick. Would you mind checking again?”

  The proctor sighed and said, “Fine, the test started at 9:05 A.M. and it’s a twenty-five-minute section, and now it’s . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Students, you have ten more minutes to complete the test. Please continue testing.”

  Ned tells this story to all his students, so that they can practice how to be respectful, calm, and yet proactive if something feels off about the exam conditions. Just knowing that you’ll know what to do prevents that deer-in-the-headlights sensation and increases your sense of control.