The jangle fallacy: Aptitude ≈ achievement

After my last post about the jingle fallacy, it is impossible to resist talking about the jangle fallacy. In short, the jangle fallacy occurs when a person treats two concepts as being different because there are different words for them. The jangle fallacy occurs because “. . . psychologists can name more things than they

The jingle fallacy: Why schools should not teach critical thinking or creativity?

Should schools teach lessons on developing general creativity or general critical thinking? Maybe not. I came to this conclusion after reading a superbly written literature review on the effectiveness of cognitive training regimens (Sala & Gobet, 2019). These training programs take a variety of forms, including working memory training, music lessons, chess instruction, and brain

Ethics of DNA research on indigenous people: Not thorny at all

Undark published an article on September 30, 2019, about the “thorny ethics” of collecting genetic data from the world’s indigenous populations. This is an important issue because genomic databases consist overwhelmingly of people of European ancestry. Results from these databases will not generalize well to non-European populations. In fact, the more distantly related a group

Zenderland’s biography of Henry Goddard

I just finished reading Leila Zenderland’s (1998) biography of Henry H. Goddard, a pioneering psychologist in intelligence testing. It is the best biography of any of the early psychologists involved with the development of intelligence testing. Henry Herbert Goddard was a psychologist who, in the early 20th century, was America’s foremost expert on the identification

Combining tests for identifying gifted children: Just use IQ?

A few years ago, my colleagues Matthew T. McBee, Scott J. Peters, and Craig Waterman published what I think is one of the most important articles in the past 10 years in gifted education. In it, they examined the effect of using different rules to combine multiple scores into one dichotomous decision to admit or

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