Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for educationHollingworth, Leta Stetter
Science
Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for education
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter
Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements; Exceptional children
Wider studies, including tests of _learning_ mechanical processes, will
give further light upon the extent to which ability to deal with
concrete mechanisms coheres with general intelligence, and to what
extent comprehension of mechanical principles is so correlated. It may
be that the correlation between performances in Stenquist’s tests and in
tests like those used to measure general intelligence is reduced through
factors like selective attention operating over a period of years. It
may be that the relatively unintelligent become relatively more
proficient in concrete acts, like assembling a bicycle bell or putting a
lock together, because they have not the degree of intelligence that
would enable them to prefer reading as an activity. Thus when 40
fifteen-year-old boys, 20 of whom have IQ’s (Stanford-Binet) from 150 to
170, and 20 of whom have IQ’s from 90 to 100, are faced with a series of
tasks similar to those mentioned above, those of lower IQ might
conceivably produce a record equal to or surpassing that of the first
group, because their ability had enabled them to practice only tasks at
a comparatively low level of _general_ capacity. With an equal amount of
attention to these matters, not previously of much interest to them, the
boys of 150 to 170 IQ might surpass their competitors greatly. In a test
of cake-baking, a hundred housewives, selected at random on a given
date, will surpass the hundred most eminent men of science; but not
after both groups have attended to the matter for an equal length of
time.
The tests of mechanical ability do not as yet eliminate the influence of
mechanical _interest_ upon the outcome of the test. Extremely high
intelligence may well be relatively little interested in concrete
materials and processes, preferring to manipulate ideas. Thus on a given
date lower intelligence, long acting on that level, may surpass. Yet the
higher IQ may really be capable under incentive, of surpassing in work
with things as well as in work with ideas. Tests of _learning_
mechanical processes would, therefore, be a most valuable supplement to
what has already been done in this field.
Great inventors of mechanical devices are probably, as a group, very far
above the average in general intelligence. This statement cannot be made
with positive certainty, as the general intelligence of a large number
of inventors has never been measured. It rests only on deduction from
the fact that invention evidently calls for a high degree of selective
thinking, and of interest in problem situations. Even “invention by
accident” which may occasionally occur, calls for a high degree of
ability to “notice” a new element in the familiar situation, in relation
to other elements.
V. ABILITY TO LEAD AND HANDLE PEOPLE
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