So strong is the anti-testing feeling in many Western countries that advocating the use of even more standardised tests would be viewed as a brave move. If you then argued that these tests were needed not to judge teachers but to make them better at teaching, you would be seen as even braver.

Joni Lakin, then, is certainly courageous. The associate professor at Auburn University, Alabama, and co-author of a leading US cognitive abilities test - CogAT (Form 8) - is very clear that cognitive ability testing should be a much bigger part of classroom life, and that if this happened it would have a positive impact on pupil outcomes by improving teaching.

To be clear, she is not arguing for more GCSE-style tests of curriculum and accumulated cultural capital. Instead, she is advocating more use of cognitive ability tests that assess skills such as verbal, quantitative, non-verbal and spatial reasoning.

While it is now popular in England to use standardised cognitive abilities tests as an assessment device at Year 7, children in schools spend most of their time being tested on what they have learned. That’s true in other countries, too, says Lakin.

“The majority of time and money spent on testing is spent on achievement testing, when what’s missing is an understanding of potential,” she argues.

She points out that, although the best predictor of performance is past performance in an achievement test, the second best is performance in an ability test (Gustafsson and Balke, 1993).

And Lakin adds that an ability test has the extra benefit of showing you something that you may not already know.

“What the ability test tells you is that … some students are maximising their ability, they are performing as they should, and the instruction is really suiting them, so they’re performing well,” she explains. “But there’s another population of students who could be doing better than they are. They might perform as well as other students but have higher potential … they could perform better if the instruction was changed.

“I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that we can reach some high level of performance for all students if we just get the instruction right, but I do believe that most students could perform on standard or above standard with differentiated instruction.”

Lakin says that it is important to understand that it is impossible to create an ability test that measures purely the cognitive skills a child was born with.

All ability tests, she explains, to some extent measure the degree to which the child has been exposed to experiences and the culture in which the test is set.

Cognitive testing guru David Lohman, professor emeritus of the University of Iowa and co-author of the CogAT, describes ability and learned achievement as being on a “continuum” rather than being entirely separate (Lohman, 2006). All test questions lie somewhere on that continuum.

“You have to be in the world and develop and have experiences to do well in ability tests,” says Lakin. “The difference from achievement tests - it’s not necessarily something you learn in the classroom.”

ELL yes

One of the key advantages of ability testing is that it enables teachers to look at a student’s relative cognitive strengths and then adapt their approach, Lakin argues. For example, a student who is achieving poorly in their school subjects but has relatively higher scores in ability tests may be bored and unchallenged. As such, Lakin argues that decision making about whether to provide more autonomy or scaffolding for a student is made easier with knowledge of a child’s fundamental abilities.

The idea of differentiated instruction based on performance is well integrated into schools, but approaching this from a cognitive ability perspective is more controversial. However, Lakin argues that adapting teaching in a way informed by cognitive ability tests will result in better teaching.

She explains in a 2017 booklet outlining the benefits of cognitive ability testing that “students with weaker reasoning skills will benefit from explicit coaching of learning strategies and how to tackle abstract problem solving. For students with stronger reasoning skills, autonomy and the motivation to persist in the face of challenges are critical to develop” (Lakin and Driver, 2017).

She continues: “Students may prefer to engage in projects that allow them to demonstrate areas of strong performance. However, it is important not just to support areas of current strength, but to also use a student’s strengths to help them build up areas of weakness.”

For example, a student with a strength in figural reasoning and a weakness in verbal reasoning might enhance their learning in social studies by using timelines to show the course of historical events. Concept maps may also be valuable learning supports.

“This is not learning styles - they don’t exist,” Lakin says. “But cognitive strengths and weaknesses do. If you have a relative strength for verbal reasoning, maybe in math class we have you talk your way through an equation or explain how a function works.

“There are different ways to approach the learning if you know where their strengths lie. That’s true if you are at the lowest end or the highest end of the classroom overall.”

Where she feels this approach is most needed is in closing the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. “Especially in the US, educational underachievement is highly correlated to poverty,” she says. “So too often achievement scores are depressed by fewer high-quality educational opportunities. Ability tests, while not perfect at this, can help recognise students with potential for much greater achievement so they can receive acceleration or other services to help raise their achievement level.

“Students who live in very rural areas, migrant students, recent immigrants, students who are low-income - especially if they are surrounded by higher-income peers - all can be served better if teachers have ability information in addition to achievement levels.”

Lakin has researched the relative merits of various ability tests to identify the most academically gifted learners of English as an additional language - known as English language learners (ELLs) in the US (Lohman et al, 2008).

In one study, she concluded that the presumption that ELLs should not be subject to verbal reasoning tests - because they were still learning the language - was wrong. As long as the students were judged in relation to other ELLs rather than national norms, the inclusion of verbal reasoning made the results far more useful to teachers, almost doubling the predictive power of non-verbal measures of reasoning.

After all, verbal reasoning, such as finding connections and patterns in language and making sense of incomplete verbal information, is what ELL students are required to do all day to achieve success, Lakin explains.

She says that ability testing can also be used to find the most talented pupils who might benefit from elite university outreach schemes that begin recruiting at younger and younger ages.

“Generally, at the upper grade levels there’s a lot of this differentiation anyway … you can choose challenging high school courses if you are more able,” Lakin explains. “But if you come from a poor background, you might tend to assume that those aren’t for you when really they might be. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the ability tests: when you’re from not-great backgrounds, how do we pick you out and say, ‘Oh, well, if you had more challenge you could achieve and go to this college’?”

She says the tests’ capacity to highlight spatial reasoning - the ability to imagine something from a different physical perspective and see the spatial relationship between parts - is also important. Years of research have shown that strong spatial reasoning skills are linked to success in science and engineering. For example, a US longitudinal study of 400,000 people found that those with high spatial reasoning ability in adolescence were more likely to have success in Stem fields. The report says: “For decades, spatial ability assessed during adolescence has surfaced as a salient psychological attribute among those adolescents who subsequently go on to achieve advanced educational credentials and occupations in Stem” (Wai et al, 2009).

It concludes: “Individuals who are high in spatial ability but not as exceptional in mathematical or verbal abilities constitute an untapped pool of talent for Stem domains.”

In these arguments for targeted interventions for those identified as “more able”, Lakin echoes the work of behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin, who has also argued for more targeted educational work based on ability. And like the reaction to Plomin, Lakin’s ideas are likely to be met with fierce criticism from those who do not trust cognitive ability tests, and believe that environmental factors play a much larger role in ability. Plus, there is a further issue: would teachers have the skills to properly administer and interpret the tests?

“Teachers would not be able to administer the tests on their own,” Lakin admits. “However, many of these tests are available paper based, so if a school invested in a set of the tests, teachers could opt to use it.”

If teachers can convince their schools to invest in the tests, Lakin recommends administering them either in spring, with a view to using the information the following year, or at the start of the academic year to help plan instruction.

And it’s important that all children are tested.

“I think it’s really valuable for all students,” Lakin says. “No matter the student’s skill level, teachers benefit from comparing achievement and ability performance to plan instruction. When there’s a reason for concern - for example, they are ELL, a new student, they seem to be underperforming or they seem way ahead of their peers - then it’s especially helpful.”

But is there a danger that testing children in this way could leave them at a disadvantage - for example, being labelled as unintelligent and incapable of medium-to-high achievement? These concerns have often been highlighted in the past. Lakin says these things would only happen if the tests were misused.

“It’s really important that teachers have an understanding of testing as well,” she concludes, “that results can be wrong sometimes and that it is only one piece of information.”

Irena Barker is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 22 November 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Cognitive ability tests”