... are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school — what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence.” However, schools whose students have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in “fluid intelligence” — the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically — according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University. In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems.

As policymakers push schools to focus more and more on standardized testing, they don't seem to be asking one of the big questions about that push—anyway, what you'dwould be one of the big questions. Does teaching kids to do well at standardized tests teach them to do well at other things? Does it make them smarter (whatever "smarter" means)? Well, add a mark in the "not so much" column. Standardized tests:Crystallized intelligence is great, as far as it goes. But is it all we want our schools trying to accomplish? Yet these tests are increasingly taking over the school year.