{"id":13754,"date":"2014-05-07T09:13:49","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T13:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13754"},"modified":"2014-05-07T09:13:49","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T13:13:49","slug":"intelligence-like-confidence-height","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13754","title":{"rendered":"intelligence is more like confidence than height"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(Washington, DC) According to experimental studies collected by Gregory M. Walton*:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You can explain to seventh-graders that people build their intelligence by working and learning, and their grades on math will be better for the whole school year.<\/li>\n<li>You can give 7th graders a writing exercise designed to affirm their personal values, and as a result, the Black students will be half as likely to receive a D or an F on the whole course (even though their teacher is blind to whether they did the exercise).<\/li>\n<li>You can give fifth graders a test and tell them they scored well because they are smart, they scored well because they worked hard, or just give them their scores. Then give them a very hard test on which they all score poorly. Then give them a third test. Those who were told that they scored high the first time because they were smart will do 30 percent worse on the final assessment&#8211;their confidence in their innate ability shaken.<\/li>\n<li>You can tell African American college students that items from the GRE are just a puzzle and they will perform as well as white students, but tell them the same items are an intelligence test, and they will score much worse.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As Walton argues, your height won&#8217;t change depending on the context, but your score on tests will. That implies that intelligence is&#8211;to a significant if not complete degree&#8211;<em>relational<\/em>. It is a measure of how you relate to the immediate environment and the other people in it. Much as I would be far more confident, motivated, secure, and competent in my own living room than on a sound stage, I will be more &#8220;intelligent&#8221; in some settings than others.<\/p>\n<p>These studies have profound implications for how we should test aptitude, whom we ought to promote and admit in school, college, and work, and how we should design educational institutions.<\/p>\n<p>*Gregory M. Walton, &#8220;The Myth of Intelligence: Smartness Isn&#8217;t Like Height,&#8221; in Danielle Allen and Rob Reich, eds., Education, Justice &amp; Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 155-172.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Washington, DC) According to experimental studies collected by Gregory M. Walton*: You can explain to seventh-graders that people build their intelligence by working and learning, and their grades on math will be better for the whole school year. You can give 7th graders a writing exercise designed to affirm their personal values, and as a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13754"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13770,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13754\/revisions\/13770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}