Paper, Pencil, Potential, and Performance.

This article presents research of the author on intelligence of school students. Much of the author's research starts by convincing teachers and principals in elementary schools to experiment with the hypothesis that all students have substantial potential for academic growth, even though they differ enormously in their experiences before they enter school. The author suggests a few reasons to distrust the generality of measured intelligence and propose a few alternatives for assessing intellectual potential in school settings. There are three reasons to distrust verbal aptitude and achievement (VAA) as typically assessed in elementary school settings. First, the validity of the VAA construct depends on the interrelatedness of similar tasks and assessment conditions, which all rely on formal language usage, performance in decontextualized situations, and capacity to solve strange problems in isolation, with no clear purpose and neither advice nor tutoring. Second, the VAA construct is affected by schooling. It is teachable. Third, expertise is not the same as VAA. The two have seldom been empirically correlated, but they certainly follow different cognitive principles.