Has anyone undergone testing for a job interview in the last, guessing 20 years? It is common place to undergo numerous types of testing. Like everything, education progresses with tools and measures to best identify abilities - above and below, both of which need to be considered. I am certainly no expert on this subject. However, I can see great benefit in teachers understanding each student's skills and abilities and targeting those abilities (under or over). I can only see it producing better and more individual learning outcomes for students.
“Critical thinking is the act of carefully considering a problem, claim, question, or situation in order to determine the best solution. Reasoning skills, which go hand-in-hand with critical thinking, ask you to base your decisions on facts, evidence, and/or logical conclusions”. This is very important and can be taught (to some degree) - the earlier, the better I think.
Psychometric tests - used to assess a candidate's cognitive ability and their personality.
Aptitude testing
“Measure a narrower range of abilities than intelligence tests do
Used by schools and workplaces
Don't take the ages of test-takers into consideration”
I think it's good that education now goes beyond the basic 3 R’s of the old golden days. Critical thinking for research, relevance, reliability. Surely critical thinking is a more important skill than being able to spell some obscure word? If we don’t teach children to think critically, history will surely continue to repeat itself. Intelligence comes in different forms.