Aptitude Tests

Use of Aptitude Tests

No single definition of aptitude exists. It is commonly understood as a precursor to, propensity for, or predictor of achievement. Yet, commentators throughout history have held varied ideas about bases of aptitude, for example whether or not it can be learned. Psychometricians have differing ideas about whether general intelligence, specific skills, affective qualities, motivation, and environmental characteristics can be considered components of aptitude.

Despite conceptual uncertainty, aptitude testing has been widespread in many education systems. It [Page 128]originated with the work of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911), who had been asked by the French Ministry of Education to devise a way to distinguish between students who had genuine difficulty learning and those who might be difficult to instruct for other reasons. Once identified with Binet's test, students received constructive interventions that improved their functioning. Binet did not believe his test was a predictive tool or one that measured intelligence. He firmly asserted that intelligence was a multifaceted, malleable quality that could not be represented by a number or arrayed in rank order.

Even as Binet's form of testing was widely adopted, his views about what it represented and how scores should be used were largely set aside. Instead, for much of the 20th century, the majority of psychometricians argued that such tests assessed general intelligence or g, which they regarded as a unitary, innate, and unmodifiable capacity for problem solving. Thus, scores from such tests were seen as predictive. This conception of intelligence-as-aptitude entered broadly into schooling alongside intelligence testing, which public school administrators readily embraced.

Aptitude testing provided school administrators with a rational and efficient means to track students into different curricular and vocational streams and thus fit them for their future careers. Such decisions were initially supported by social Darwinism and later supported by thousands of well-designed studies that show scores from such tests are positively correlated with future educational attainments and income. On average, such scores predict about 25% of the variance in school achievement. The SAT, originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, on average predicts about 16% of the variance in the grade point averages of first-year college students.

Controversies Associated with Aptitude Tests

Many controversies attend the use of aptitude tests. Scores from the tests typically show sizeable differences across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Therefore, using these scores to fit students to curriculum, rather than to provide constructive interventions as Binet advocated, tends to reinforce existing social disparities. In Britain, such tests sorted students along class lines. In the United States, aptitude test scores have contributed to gifted programs and upper tracks that were largely White and overrepresentation of low-income and minority students in special education and vocational programs.

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