Adam Granicz
General Psychology (H) - Dr. Babbitt
Application Assignment #5
04/06/97

        Read the article* by Sternberg, Wagner, Williams, and Horvath (1995). You may omit the section "Questions about the tacit knowledge contruct," p. 919-923. Include the "Conclusions" section.

        * Robert J. Sternberg, Richard K. Wagner, Wendy M. Williams, Joseph A. Horvath: Testing Common Sense, American Psychologist, Nov. 1995, pg. 912-926.

Questions:

1. (first section) To what extent do I.Q. scores predict performance on "real world" tasks?

2. (Practical intelligence) What are a few of the differences between academic and work tasks? Give a concrete example of an academic task and a work (or home) task from your life that illustrates this distinction.

3. (Tacit knowledge) Describe what tacit knowledge is and what the characteristics of tacit knowledge are.

4. To what extent do you think that the concept of tacit knowledge as described in the article accurately represents the everyday concept of "common sense"?

5. Evaluate yourself on tacit knowledge. Describe two areas where you are personally "expert" in terms of your knowledge of "how" to do something. Be sure to use examples that illustrate tacit knowledge. (see number 3)

6. At least two areas of tacit knowledge were described in the article (Business managers, Psychology professors). Give two new areas of tacit knowledge that you think should be investigated because they are important in everyday life or to you personally.

7. Based on the article, the textbook, and our class discussion, how would you respond to a critic who says, "Honors students may score well on I.Q. tests, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not they will be successful in the real world."

1. I.Q. scores predict performance on "real world" tasks to the extent of 25 % on the average, according to the most charitable estimates. In other words, performance on measures of practical intelligence is relatively unrelated to performance on intelligence tests and other common selection measures.

2. It was about 20 years ago, when the distinction between academic and practical intelligence was first pointed out. Niesser, a pioneer in this field, described academic intelligence tasks as

          (a) formulated by others
          (b) often of little or no intrinsic interest
          (c) having all needed information available from the beginning
          (d) disembedded from an individual's ordinary experience.

In addition, one could consider that these tasks

          (e) are usually well-defined
          (f) have but one correct answer
          (g) often have just one method of obtaining the correct solution.

It can be observed, that these characteristics do not apply as well to many of the problems people face in their daily lives, including many problems at work. In direct contrast, work problems often are

          (a) unformulated or in need of reformulation
          (b) of personal interest
          (c) lacking in information necessary for solution
          (d) related to everyday experience
          (e) poorly defined
          (f) characterized by multiple "correct" solutions, each with liabilities as well as assets
          (g) characterized by multiple methods of obtaining a solution.

Using these characteristics, we could give a concrete example of an academic task, for instance an academic task would be a math integral, where we possess quite a few formulas, and have seen many problems like that one solved before. There might be more ways to solve the problem, but in each of those the asnwer is the same. The problem is well-defined, and can be easily solved by using the learned formulas and tactics.

On the other hand, an example of work task would be alphabetizing a huge list of employee-records. One could start going through the whole thing getting slower and slower in the process as the number of processed items increases. But a person who had done this kind of job for a longer period must have come up with some other method to execute the same job in a lot shorter way. For instance, separating the items according to their first letter, sort those smaller groups, and put the groups together. Or maybe even more advanced methods. Who knows?

3. Tacit knowledge refers to action-oriented knowledge, acquired without direct help from others, that allows individuals to achieve goals they personally value. There are three characteristic features of tacit knowledge. These are:

          (a) procedural in nature - takes the form of 'knowing how' rather that 'knowing what'
          (b) relevant to the attainment of goals people value - the more highly valued a goal is, and the more directly the knowledge supports the attainment of the goal, the more useful is the knowledge

          (c) acquired with little help from others

Tacit knowledge often must be inferred from actions or statements. It is typically implied rather than stated explicitly.

4. I believe that the concept of tacit knowledge described in the article fairly accurately represents the everyday concept of "common sense." Since we are talking about common sense, it makes sense that procedural structure along with high usefulness should both categorize a natural category of knowlegde. Whereas declarative knowledge addresses facts ('knowing what'), procedural knowledge is more likely to be instrumentally relevant in pursuing personally valued goals. On the other hand, knowledge acquired with low environmental support often confers a comparative advantage and thus tends to be practically more useful in a competitive environment.

5. I am certainly an expert at 'how to do everything at the very last moment.' My knowledge in this area is unbelievably huge. I did not acquire this knowledge from others, this is kind of what I grew up with. It is procedural knowledge: there is a scheme (postponing everything until it is due), and this sceme is carried through many different situations. I apply this knowledge all the time to "navigate" between different things that need to be done, moreover in a fashion that allows me to do the most (-> my goal). By doing this, I am not only getting better at procastinating, but also finish all my work (most of the time) and have the most free-time besides it. Isn't it cool? Not really, unless you are like me, and you don't leave things until they are done no matter what happens, no matter what has to be done to finish everything on time.

    I also formed a tacit knowledge about how to prepare for tests. Naturally, when the questions or themes are given, I put emphasis on those. Unless I am lucky enough to have the questions, which almost never happens, I am left with my tacit knowledge on how to prepare myself for the test. First of all, I read the appropriate chapters in the textbook once. This usually takes forever. After this, the easy part comes: read the couple pages of review at the end of each chapter. This takes usually for about 20 minutes, but this is the most essential component in my preparation. Depending on the class, I might also prepare some notes for myself. This is usually something that nobody besides me can interpret. It is like putting the whole chapter down on a small piece of paper. Now, when it comes to the test, I look over the stuff just a couple minutes before begining. I noticed that I usually see the word written in front of me when I think about something, and this usually helps me when I have to learn something schematic, with graphs, or something that is well described. In cases like this, I can see the entire thing in front of me, and this really helps me. In math, I usually take about 10 minutes to look over the formulas and the strategies on how to use them, the rest usually comes at the moment when I see the problems on the test. This is like having a small number of instructions, and applying them on big problems, and getting the right solution. I think this is really a great tacit knowledge.

6. I think the tacit knowledge of parents should be definetely investigated. This would involve obtaining answers to different questions from parents who rated themselves successful in raising their children. To avoid being biased, other people's opinions about the individuals' methods of raising their children would be investigated, such as grandmothers', other relatives', perhaps even the children's. The results then would be published. Naturally there would be a lot of kinds of parental methods of raising children, each depending on the children themselves, and the situations that were present in the famililes. Even though, this huge amount of information, that would result from the investigation seems to be somewhat overwhelming, I think letting other parents who are looking for answers to their questions about raising their own kids sample them would be very helpful. Secondly, I would investigate people who turned out to be successful in the jobs, and lives, on how they reached their success. One way of determining the level of success would be to look at the amount of money they made, yes, I know, that does not show how happy they are, but it is certainly an indicator of how well they could utilize their tacit (and academic) knowledge to emerge from the everyday life as winners. Especially in a money-chasing society as ours, it is certainly a measure of success. The findings from this research could be used as tools for young people, teenagers, who are just preparing for life. The finding would also make a good college course on how to become successful. Naturally, we do not have to stick to money, we can always switch to a different measure.

7. Regarding our academic abilities and achievements, it is more likely that most of us would score higher on an I.Q. test than someone who is not a member of the Honors Program. Even though this is true, we can not conclude much about our performance on real life tasks, such as being successful in life. There are so many people who are very successful, that is have a lot of money, or are world-famous, but they did not at all excel in school. The statement demonstrates that practical intelligence, our endurance in real life is not measured in I.Q. tests, and it is different from academic intelligence. On the other hand, academic intelligence could be a key to acquiring more practical knowledge. Such knowledge when used to real life problems can more easily give us advantage over others. But we should not forget, that we can not just close ourselves into the academic world, we also must pursue more real life tasks, interact with other people, etc.