16.4 Task-Based Assessment in AGI Preschool 295 16.4 Task-Based Assessment in AGI Preschool Professional pedagogues such as [CIM07| discuss evaluation of early childhood learning as in- tended to assess both specific curriculum content knowledge as well as the child’s learning process. It should be as unobtrusive as possible, so that it just seems like another engaging ac- tivity, and the results used to tailor the teaching regimen to use different techniques to address weaknesses and reinforce strengths. For example, with group building of a model car, students are tested on a variety of skills: procedural understanding, visual acuity, motor acuity, creative problem solving, interpersonal communications, empathy, patience, manners, and so on. With this kind of complex, yet en- gaging, activity as a metric the teacher can see how each student approaches the process of understanding each subtask, and subsequently guide each student’s focus differently depending on strengths and weaknesses. In Tables 16.4 and 16.5 we describe some particular tasks that AGIs may be meaningfully assigned in the context of a general AGI Preschool design and curriculum as described above. Of course, this is a very partial list, and is intended as evocative rather than comprehensive. Any one of these tasks can be turned into a rigorous quantitative test, thus allowing the precise comparison of different AGI systems’ capabilities; but we have chosen not to emphasize this point here, partly for space reasons and partly for philosophical ones. In some contexts the quantitative comparison of different systems may be the right thing to do, but as discussed in Chapter 17 there are also risks associated with this approach, including the emergence of an overly metrics-focused “bakeoff mentality” among system developers, and overfitting of AI abilities to test taking. What is most important is the isolation of specific tasks on which different systems may be experientially trained and then qual