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Supplemental Material for Introduction to terminological controversies in gifted education by Robert J Sternberg and Ophelie Desmet in Gifted Education International

The financial support of the GenoMembran-project funded by The Swedish Water and Wastewater Association (Swedish Water Development, SVU), Norrvatten, and VIVAB is gratefully acknowledged. Pentair X-Flow is acknowledged for the provision of various test modules and general membrane investigations.

The Psychology of Human Thought

The Psychology of Human Thought

The Psychology of Human Thought

When I was a young child in early elementary school, I performed poorly on IQ tests, so my teachers and I had low expectations for me. In particular, my teachers thought I was stupid, and so I thought I was stupid; my teachers were happy that I acted stupid, and I was happy that they were happy. So everyone was pretty happy. It was not until I was in fourth grade, when I had Mrs. Alexa as a teacher, that I realized that I could do better and became an “A” student. Things just chugged merrily along until I took introductory psychology as a freshman at Yale. I was determined to major in psychology because I wanted to understand why I had seemed so stupid as a child. But that was all in the past – or so I thought. The first test we took, I received a score of three out of ten. My professor, handing me my test paper, commented that there was a famous Sternberg (Saul) in psychology, and it looked like there wouldn't be another one. I ended up with a “C” in the course, which the professor referred to as a “gift.” Seven years later, that same professor was chair of the search committee that hired me back to Yale as an assistant professor of psychology. How times change! Experiences such as these led me to believe – or at least to hope – that there is something more to intelligence than IQ (my fourth-grade experience) and being able to memorize books (my freshman-year experience). By my last year as a graduate student in psychology at Stanford, I was convinced that the “something more” was an understanding of the mental processes (or, as I called them, components) underlying intelligence. So I started a research program looking at the mental processes used to solve IQ-test-like problems, such as analogies and series completions. The idea was that I would be able to detect, for example, if someone was solving a verbal analogy incorrectly because she did not reason well or, instead, simply did not know the meanings of the words constituting the analogy. Eventually, though, I realized that my “componential” theory of intelligence was incomplete. It specified processes, sure enough, but only those involved in solving IQ-test-like problems.

From the end of the Second World War to the close of the 1960s, the BBC’s approach to spoken-word science programming changed considerably. Whereas the BBC of the late 1940s saw itself as a platform from which scientists could deliver authoritative talks on science directly to the British public, the BBC of the late 1960s saw its role as the examination and interrogation of science through journalistic programmes presented by professional broadcasters or science journalists. Utilizing a wide range of archival and primary sources, this thesis details the tensions and deliberations which brought about this transition within BBC radio. In particular it focuses on the career of Archie Clow, a science producer at the BBC from 1945 to 1970 who was instrumental in both defining and implementing the BBC’s approach to science broadcasting during this period. His career serves as a lens through which the BBC’s changing conception of the value and purpose of science programming can be examined. In the early post-war period Clow fancied himself a ‘scientific impresario’ charged with the identification and recruitment of eminent scientists, yet by the end of the 1960s many of his colleagues considered themselves journalists rather than impresarios. Archival records show that this had much to do with a transition within the wider BBC toward a more journalistic, news-style approach to spoken-word programming. The thesis argues that by the end of this period the BBC saw itself as a communicator of science in its own right. It further argues that as the BBC moved to mediate science and scientists on behalf of the British public, scientists increasingly lost control over the framing and delivery of science programming, eventually finding themselves largely reliant upon and beholden to professional broadcasters. Open Access

Studying complex problem solving by means of computer-simulated scenarios has become one of the favorite themes of modern theorists in German-speaking countries who are concerned with the psychology of thinking. Following the pioneering work of Dietrich Doerner (University of Bamberg, FRG) in the mid-70s, many new scenarios have been developed and applied in correlational as well as in experimental studies (for a review see Funke, 1988). Instead of studying problem-solving behavior in restricted situations (like the "Tower of Hanoi" or "Cannibals and Missionaries"; cf. Greeno, 1974; Jeffries, Polson, & Razran, 1977), the new approach focuses on semantically rich domains that provide a touch of reality that has not inherent in the older research (see also Bhaskar & Simon, 1977). In the computer-administered scenario "LOHHAUSEN", for instance, subjects have to take over the regentship of a little town (Doerner, Kreuzig, Reither, & Staeudel, 1983). In other work, subjects take over the roles of a manager of a little shop (Putz-Osterloh, 1981), of an engineer in a developmental country (Reither, 1981), or of a pilot flying to the moon (Thalmaier, 1979). In general, the new approach deals with the exploration and control of complex and dynamic systems by human individuals. This chapter is divided into four main parts. First, I give a working definition of what I mean by "complex problem solving" and suggest how complex tasks can be profitably analyzed and compared to each other across domains. Second, I summarize recent research on complex problem solving, analyze the main streams of current research, and discuss the underlying principles and mechanisms uncovered so far. Also, I consider how people learn to solve complex problems and discuss expert-novice differences in complex problem solving. Third, I describe my own approach to studying complex problem solving in which it is conceptualized as a dynamic process of knowledge acquisition and of knowledge application. I briefly describe the so-called DYNAMIS project and the DYNAMIS shell for scenario, and report the results of some studies within this framework. Finally, I give perspectives for future research.