Changing Mind, Changing World: Practical Intelligence and Tacit Knowledge in Adult Learning

Changing Mind, Changing World: Practical Intelligence and Tacit Knowledge in Adult Learning\

Now well into their 40s, Bill and John came from similar backgrounds. They did equally well in school and on college admission tests, went to the same university where they performed comparably, and embarked on careers in business. However, whereas Bill has been very successful, consistently gaining promotions in a top company, John has been unable to climb the corporate ladder. Given that Bill and John began in so similar a manner, what accounts for their differential success in business? There could be many reasons, among them the possibility that there are skills that are important in business—and perhaps as well in adult life in general—that do not show up in academic exercises such as schoolwork and tests.
This proposition is supported by research on the extent to which intelligence test scores predict real-world performance. On average, the validity coefficient between cognitive ability tests and measures of job performance is about .2 (Wigdor & Garner, 1982). This means that only 4% of the variance in job performance is accounted for by scores on ability tests. Even after validity coefficients are corrected for unreliability in test scores and criterion measures, and restriction of range caused by the fact that only high scorers were hired, the average validity coefficient rises only to .5 (J. Hunter & R. Hunter, 1984; Schmidt & J. Hunter, 1981). Thus, even with the corrections, only 25% of the variance in job performance is accounted for by ability test scores. Put the other way, even the corrected estimates leave unexplained a full three-fourths of the variance in job performance. Sternberg, Wagner, W. Williams, and Horvath (1995) concluded that “even the most charitable view of the relations between intelligence test scores and real-world performance leads to the conclusion that the majority of the variance in real-world performance is not accounted for by intelligence test scores” (p. 913). Clearly, there is more operating in adult success than the academic skills captured on ability tests.
These findings—and the story of Bill and John—raise the issue of how our society conceptualizes, teaches, and evaluates the skills needed for a productive adult life. What sorts of skills are needed for adult success? What have psychologists found about the development of those skills? It turns out that recent theory and research have veered away from previously held views about human abilities. In this chapter we suggest that the traditional view looks somewhat narrowly at human abilities and the cultural contexts in which they operate, and thus underestimates the importance of developmental changes in both the person and the context. An alternative position holds that because certain abilities develop over the life span, and because the cultural contexts of abilities keep changing, attaining a specific body of knowledge is less important than the ability to learn. In a nutshell, the alternative model encourages people not to “get an education” but to “stay in education.”
OLD AND NEW VIEWS OF HUMAN ABILITIES