Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Sorry Strivers, Talent Matters

My experience is quite the opposite... the individual who takes twice as long is praised as a hard worker, while the one who breezes through tasks with higher-quality results is constantly being pestered by management, because his far more efficient work performance leaves him with too much time to browse gifted forums on company time.

Or, loaded up with tasks and do 10 times as much work as anyone else while also providing the solutions for others who are "dead in the water."

Add in some managers afraid to work with you because you will get in their business. And its not good.

Or senior execs afraid to assign people or tasks to you because you will get things done with the same people they could not get anything done with before.

Or vendors who have to have their noses put on the problem to get them to actually fix their stuff.

Or people who love to work for you because you praise them, give them clear direction, check their work, let them take time off for their family, don't mind if they surf the web as long as they deliver, don't pester them with crap, and work just as hard as they do.

Another article from one of the co-authors. If the SAT is an intelligence test, and if college study requires a certain level of intelligence, then people with low SAT scores should not be in college, even if they are "strivers".

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...tter/the-sat-is-a-good-intelligence-test
A Good Intelligence Test (The SAT)
by David Z. Hambrick
DECEMBER 4, 2011
New York Times

...

The SAT captures more than a narrow range of skills, important only in the first year or two of college. Large-scale meta-analyses by researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that SAT performance is as good of a predictor of overall college grade point average as it is of freshman grade point average, and Vanderbilt researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow have documented that the SAT predicts life outcomes well beyond the college years, including income and occupational achievements.

Furthermore, the SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small � on average, no more than about 20 points per section.

This debate is ultimately about intelligence and its modifiability � and the question of whether it is fair to use people�s scores on what is essentially an intelligence test to make decisions that profoundly affect their lives. If that makes us all uncomfortable, that�s just too bad.

<end of article>

Here is a summary of a scientific paper by the same authors:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org...the-importance-of-general-abilities.html
Psychologists Defend The Importance Of General Abilities

�What makes a great violinist, physicist, or crossword puzzle solver? Are experts born or made? The question has intrigued psychologists since psychology was born�and the rest of us, too, who may secretly fantasize playing duets with Yo Yo Ma or winning a Nobel Prize in science. It�s no wonder Malcolm Gladwell stayed atop the bestseller lists by popularizing the �10,000-hour rule� of Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. Using Ericsson�s pioneering work�but omitting equally prominent, contradictory, research�Gladwell�s book Outliers argued that given a certain level of intelligence and a bit of luck, virtually anybody can get to Carnegie Hall�provided they practice, practice, practice.

In a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University and Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville disagree strongly. �We don�t deny the importance of the knowledge and skill that accrue through practice,� says Hambrick. � But, we think that for certain types of tasks, basic abilities and capacities�ones that are general, stable across time, and substantially heritable�play an important role in skilled performance. � Such basic capacities are a component of talent, Hambrick and Meinz believe.

The authors� work involves a particular basic measure of cognitive ability: working memory capacity, the ability to store and process information at the same time, which correlates with success in many cognitive tasks, from abstract reasoning to language learning. In one experiment Hambrick and Meinz tested 57 pianists with a wide range of deliberate practice under their belts, from 260 to more than 31,000 hours, to see how well they did on sight-reading�playing a piece from a score they�d never seen before. Those who had practiced more did better. In fact, practice�even specific sight-reading practice�predicted nearly half of the differences in performance across the subjects. But working memory capacity still had a statistically significant impact on performance. In other words, regardless of amount of deliberate practice, working memory capacity still mattered for success in the task. The psychologists surmised that the capacity influences how many notes a player can look ahead as she plays, an important factor in sight-reading.

Challenging another �experts-are-made� contention�that beyond a certain threshold, intelligence makes less and less of a difference in accomplishment�the authors cite a study by Vanderbilt University researchers that looked at the math SAT scores of people with PhDs in science, technology, engineering, or math. Those who scored in the 99.9th percentile at age 13 were 18 times more likely to go on to earn a PhD than those who scored better than only 99.1 percent of their teenage peers. �Even at the highest end, the higher the intellectual ability�and by extension, the higher the working memory capacity�the better,� says Hambrick.

�Some would consider this bad news. We�d all like to think that basic capacities and abilities are irrelevant�it�s the egalitarian view of expertise,� Hambrick says. �We�re not saying that limitations can�t be overcome.� Still, no matter how hard you work, it may be what you�re born with or develop very early in life that �distinguishes the best from the rest.�

I'm pretty sure that if I practiced enough, I would get a perfect (or near-perfect SAT score).

I base my personal theory on my experience with the GMAT and LSAT, which I prepared for, compared to the SAT, for which I did not.

Is the SAT still considered a valid measure of general intelligence? I know that Mensa stopped accepting it as such when the test was redesigned around 1994.

This is interesting research but

http://www.down-syndrome.org/research-highlights/2120/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~readingbrains/George_Psychonomic_5101.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3101523/

the research does indicate that anyone that takes music lessons, particularly piano or strings, has increases in working memory. I heard in the lecture that IQ was raised 6-7 points, across the whole group, compared to the control group after just one year of piano or string lessons.

Now, just taking lessons doesn't mean you become a YoYo Ma. But training does make a difference. I heard my DD7 commenting on a art sculpture, using comments about form and color I didn't know existed at 7. I did not develop my eye for art until I was 19 and I remember the moment sitting in the Modern when it happened. She gets it already because of exposure, not because she was born with it. Though being visual spatial does help.

That she was born with.

Ren

The SAT II replaced the SAT I at that time.

It seems reasonable that various activities and enrichment programs could cause gains on IQ or other tests. But are the gains lasting in the absence of continued practice? The answer seems to be no, except in a very limited set of circumstances (related to adoption in infancy). Here's one example. Here's a summary of some other information.


Hence, I don't really agree with the use of the term "raises IQ," because it implies permanence where none appears to exist outside of one well-defined area (adoptions).

Anecotal example of talent:

My DS9 could distinguish different dinosaurs that were in the same family when he was two, just by looking at their skulls (NOT scaled to size). He could even tell me why he knew they were different (e.g. "his snout is longer, so he's..."). No one taught him that; he just noticed it. He notices errors in stuffed animals ("He's a reef shark, not an xx shark; just look at his teeth."). And he does this kind of thing all the time, just because he notices the details.

This ability seems to be due to genetics, not practice. My husband and I are both very good at faces. I'm the kind of person who categorizes different facial types and can tell twins apart because of differences in the way they smile or their bone structure. Some of my cousins are the same way.

Likewise, a two-year-old who can teach himself to read is relying on talent. Practice obviously makes him better, but he needed to have a minimum amount of talent just to get started.

I'm of two minds about the SAT, etc. being IQ tests. Given that they test specific knowledge (e.g. geometry, vocabulary), they're achievement tests. It seems reasonable that if you're testing innate ability, you should ask questions that rely minimally on knowledge. Yet, given that you have to be able to remember a lot, they're IQ tests. Plus, those passages on the verbal section can be very difficult to understand and students don't have much time to digest them, so there is some IQ testing there. But...the SAT and GRE general tests don't go past around 2.5-ish standard deviations from the mean, so if they're IQ tests, they have a low ceiling and a high floor. I think of them as being primarily good discriminators of levels of averageness (LOA [LOL ]).

I am kind of puzzled, because working memory is usually considered a poor measure of g (although it probably correlates better with achievement). Why is the article using it as the marker for high IQ? It has also proved more trainable than other measures.

And I do not personally consider the ability to sight read to be what makes a great music performer. It helps, sure, but no real piano/violin/... player would step on a stage with an unknown piece. Unless (and that wouldn't surprise me) the article does a piss poor job of reporting the paper, I would consider the research behind it to be poorly designed.