Lifespan Development

The development of adaptive competence: Why cultural psychology is necessary and not just nice Robert J. Sternberg Cornell University, Department of Human Development, B44 MVR, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA article info Article history:

Received 16 April 2014 Revised 21 May 2014 Available online 13 June 2014 Keywords:

Augmented theory of successful intelligence Intelligence Cultural psychology Adaptation Shaping Selection abstract I argue that developmental psychologists need to view cultural approaches to cognitive development as necessary and not just nice. Cultural psychology enables one to study problems one other- wise might not be able to study and also to identify solutions to problems that might be obscured or even distorted if one looked only at results within a single culture (usually, one’s own). I describe work my colleagues and I have done around the world addressing speciﬁc problems such as what does it mean to be adaptively intelligent in various cultures, how does illness affect intellectual functioning, and what do people even mean by ‘‘intel- ligence’’ in different cultures. The results show that cognitive development can be fully understood only if one looks beyond one’s own cultural boundaries and preconceptions. The article fur- ther argues that a theory of successful intelligence can be a useful way of studying phenomena of intellectual development within a cultural framework.

2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Cultural psychology is often viewed in psychology as a peripheral ﬁeld. Indeed, the American Psychological Association, with 54 divisions, does not have a division for cultural or cross-cultural psy- chology. The closest it comes is ‘‘international psychology,’’ which really is quite different. But there are many questions that cannot be answered fully, or even at all well, unless one takes a cultural approach. Put another way, studying certain phenomena only within one’s own culture, for example, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2014.05.004 0273-2297/ 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. E-mail addresses:[email protected],[email protected] Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 Contents lists available atScienceDirect Developmental Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dr the dominant version of the Anglo-Saxon culture in the United States, leaves on unable adequately to address important psychological questions and issues. One such issue is that of adaptive competence. In order to understand people, regardless of their age, one needs to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and to help them capitalize on strengths at the same time that one helps them correct or compensate for weaknesses. The argument of this article is that psychologists, and especially develop- mental psychologists, can do a better job of understanding and leveraging the strengths of people from diverse environmental contexts if those strengths are viewed in a cultural framework (Miller, 2005; Nisbett, 2004; Wang, 2009). To understand development, one needs to look beyond one’s own cultural boundaries and preconceptions (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982; Matsumoto & Juang, 2012; Serpell, 2002; Shweder, 2003). Cultural approaches are especially important in studies of everyday cognition (Greenﬁeld, 2014; Nuñes, 1994; Rogoff, 2003; Schliemann, Carraher, & Ceci, 1997).

McClelland (1973)suggested that adaptive competencies go well beyond traditional notions of intelligence (e.g.,Carroll, 1993). Others, such asGardner (2006)andSternberg (2003), have made a similar argument.Sternberg (2004), moreover, has suggested that in diverse cultural settings, adaptive competencies may differ but that teachers may not recognize them because they are within the teach- ers’ repertoires, either actively (in terms of knowledge or skills the teachers may themselves utilize) or passively (in terms of knowledge or skills the teachers may recognize in others). The result is that students might be able to succeed at higher levels but do not because the teachers falsely label the students as lacking the ingredients for success. As a result, the teachers construct self-fulﬁlling proph- ecies (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 2003).

This article summarizes studies purporting to show the importance of a cultural framework when studying intellectual development, in particular, and developmental psychology, in general. The stud- ies cover a range of intellectual functions as well as cultural settings. Theoretical backdrop: The augmented theory of successful intelligence The theoretical basis of the studies to be reported is the augmented theory of successful intelli- gence (Sternberg, 2003, 2005). According to this theory, successful intelligence is one’s ability to choose and successfully work toward the attainment of one’s goals in life, within one’s cultural con- text or contexts. People succeed in selecting and attaining goals by recognizing and capitalizing on strengths and by recognizing and then compensating for or correcting weaknesses. They do so in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments that ﬁt their skills, interests, and values.

The theory suggests that the tasks that might be relevant for measuring successful intelligence in one cultural context may be less relevant or even not at all relevant in another cultural context. As a result, assessments of intelligence need to take into account the cultural context of the people who are being assessed. Intelligence is viewed as not merely within the person, but as an interaction between the person, the tasks the person confronts, and the cultural context in which the tasks are confronted.

As an example, a kind of sorting behavior that may be viewed as ‘‘intelligent’’ in one cultural context (e.g., taxonomic sorting) may be viewed as not very intelligence in another cultural context, where another kind of sorting (e.g., functional sorting) may be viewed as superior (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971).

To be clear, the theory does not propose that intelligence is a different entity in each culture. The basic information-processing components are the same, regardless of culture (Sternberg, 1985). For example, in any culture, one needs to identify the existence of problems, deﬁne the nature of the prob- lems identiﬁed, mentally represent the problems as deﬁned, devise a strategy for solving the prob- lems, and so on. What differs is the nature of the problems encountered in various ecological contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). For example, one child may focus during the day on how to solve an algebra problem, another on how to get past drug dealers on the way to school, another on how to ice-ﬁsh so that his family has something to eat for dinner. The mental processes may be similar or identical—what differs is the kinds of knowledge and skills to which they give rise as a result of cul- tural contexts. What may be a relatively novel problem in one culture (e.g., a textbook algebra prob- lem or effective ice ﬁshing) may be a familiar one in another culture. In the theory of successful R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 209 intelligence, the basic underlying competencies are the same everywhere (so-called ‘‘componential subtheory’’), but a given task or situation requiring them may be differentially familiar (so-called ‘‘experiential subtheory’’) across cultural contexts, and practical applications can differ radically from one cultural context to another (so-called ‘‘contextual subtheory’’—Sternberg, 1985). The theory does not suggest that typical tests of intelligence, suitably adapted, are useless in cul- tures other than the one in which they were created. Rather, the theory argues that such assessments inevitably will be incomplete and that their interpretation must take into account the cultural context in which the tests are administered. Properly to assess intelligence, one would want to use supple- mental assessments that more accurately reﬂect the adaptive demands of the cultural context in which the individuals live. These supplemental assessments may tell the investigator more about the intelligence of the individual being tested than do the more typical assessments. Motivation for research enterprise The research to be described was motivated, in general, by the theory of successful intelligence. But speciﬁcally, it was intended to answer a question that has been asked many times in many forms:

Why do people from certain cultural settings perform worse, on average, on tests of intelligence than people from other cultural settings?Herrnstein and Murray (1994)and especiallyLynn (2008)have suggested that much or even all of the explanation may be genetic. Others have preferred an environ- mental explanation (Nisbett, 2010). The ﬁnal word is probably not in but the research program described here identiﬁes a number of environmental/contextual factors that may lead to differences in intelligence-test performance. In particular, what constitute adaptive competencies, the bases of human intelligence, differ across cultures and subcultures, as do implicit theories of intelligence. Thus, differential enculturation as well as socialization, in addition to different environmental stressors, can account for much of the difference. It is argued here that what constitutes an appropriate test of intel- ligence may vary across cultures, such that cultural groups that do well on typical intelligence tests might perform rather poorly if the tests were instead invented and geared toward the adaptive demands of other cultures. Recognizing adaptive competencies One issue that psychologists need to deal with is how we even can recognize what constitute adap- tive competencies. In the United States and even in much of the world, we rely heavily on tests that measure general intelligence, org, sometimes supplemented by tests of competencies hierarchically nested underg(Carroll, 1993). But what about skills that are not measured by conventional tests of general intelligence, or even not very conventional tests? Hidden adaptive competencies A study in rural Kenya The extent to which adaptive competencies can be hidden from us as psychologists is demon- strated in research my colleagues and I did among Luo children in rural Kenya (Sternberg et al., 2001).

Consider a child in a small rural Kenyan village. We ﬁrst learned something of these children in a discussion with a parasitologist, then at Oxford. The parasitologist, Kate Nokes, mentioned that chil- dren in rural villages in Kenya would know the names of 80, 90, or even 100 natural herbal medicines that could be used to combat parasitic illnesses. Such knowledge is extremely relevant for adaptation by these children because parasitic illnesses are endemic in the regions in which they live and inter- fere greatly with the children’s ability to function, to the point that children may have to stay home from school or work because they are too ill to be effective in school or on the job.

If knowledge of natural herbal medicines was just a proxy for general ability (g) or academic knowledge, then a teacher might predict the children’s knowledge from conventional tests, standard- ized or otherwise. But suppose that such knowledge was not predictable from conventional tests. Then knowing something of children’s’ ability to learn, as evidenced by their knowledge of natural herbal 210R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 medicines, might be useful information for a teacher to have in assessing which children could be more successful in learning tasks than perhaps they appeared to be on the basis of their school work. The child’s prospects in some of these rural Kenyan villages are rather limited. Schooling beyond the early years is considered largely a waste of time because there is little need for academic skills in the village. But there is a need for a knowledge of natural herbal medicines that can be used to treat that various parasitic illnesses prevalent in the region, such as malaria, schistosomiasis, hookworm, whipworm, and the like.

‘‘A small child in your family has homa. She has a sore throat, headache, and fever. She has been sick for 3 days. Which of the following ﬁve Yadh nyaluo (Luo herbal medicines) can treat homa?

i. Chamama. Take the leaf and ﬁto (sniff medicine up the nose to sneeze out illness). ⁄ ii. Kaladali. Take the leaves, drink, and ﬁto. ⁄ iii. Obuo. Take the leaves and ﬁto. ⁄ iv. Ogaka. Take the roots, pound, and drink.

v. Ahundo. Take the leaves and ﬁto.’’ There are multiple correct answers, which are asterisked. Once again, no one would expect a typical US college professor or student to be able to answer such questions at better than a chance level. Why should they? The knowledge probably has no real adaptive value for them (unless they are studying cultural psychology or anthropology). But for children growing up in an environment where a major threat to adaptive success is parasitic illness, such knowledge is extremely important.

We in the United States may tend to assume that the knowledge and skills we often value—such as are measured by standardized tests, are important anywhere. Perhaps they are. Our purpose is not to address the ongoing argument as to how important standardized tests are here or there. Rather, our purpose is to show that there may be additional knowledge and skills that are important elsewhere that would be hidden if one were to rely exclusively on conventional standardized tests. Teachers would do well to know of the practical knowledge and adaptive competencies students from diverse environments have acquired because, for them, such knowledge and skills may tell us more about their learning abilities than do scores on conventional tests, and because, as I will show below, such practical knowledge and skills may be leveraged to teach these children more effectively.

We also tested the children for their vocabulary levels in Dholuo, their home language, and in Eng- lish. Such measures assess so-called ‘‘crystallized intelligence.’’ We also used geometric matrix prob- lems to measure their so-called ‘‘ﬂuid intelligence.’’ Our expectation, based on work we had done on what we have called ‘‘practical intelligence’’ (Sternberg et al., 2000), was that the knowledge of the natural herbal medicines would show at most a weak positive correlation with scores on the standard- ized ability tests.

To our surprise, there were signiﬁcant correlations, but they were negative (seeTable 1). This left us, at ﬁrst, puzzled, and might leave other psychologists puzzled as well because tests of ﬂuid and crystallized abilities typically show a positive manifold, that is, a pattern of positive correlations Table 1 Correlations of scores on a test of practical knowledge with scores on tests of crystallized and ﬂuid abilities.

SCORE PK DV EV TV Practical Knowledge Score (PK) Dholuo Vocabulary (DV) .20 ^ English Vocabulary (EV) .29 ** .31** Total Vocabulary (TV) .31 ** .66*** .92*** Raven Matrices (RM) .16 ^ .22* .30** .33** Note:PK refers to the test of knowledge of natural herbal medicines. DV, EV, and TV are measures of crystallized abilities; RM is a test of ﬂuid abilities.

^p< .10.*p< .05.**p< .01.*** p< .001.R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224211 throughout that yields a general factor (g) when the tests are factor-analyzed. But we came to see a logic to the negative pattern of correlations. What the correlations showed is the extent to which pat- terns of relationships among assessments may be inﬂuenced not only by characteristics internal to individuals but also to the environmental contexts in which they live. In particular, in these villages, students who were viewed as adaptively competent by the adults in the villages would be selected by certain adults to do apprenticeships with them. Such apprentice- ships would take them out of formal schooling. Whereas many of us greatly value formal schooling, such schooling is less valued among the Luo because, in the village, it does not ultimately lead to gain- ful employment, except perhaps as a teacher. But because most children will leave formal schooling in elementary school, there is a not a great need for teachers in the Western sense. Rather, there is a need for mentors who will apprentice children to learn the skills that can lead the children to earn a living.

So, perhaps oddly by our way of thinking, the children viewed as adaptively competent are whisked out of school whereas the children not viewed as being quite so competent are left in school, where they continue to acquire the knowledge and skills measured by conventional standardized tests but not the knowledge and skills that will earn them a living. As a result, children who acquire more for- mal knowledge in turn acquire less of what might be called ‘‘practical knowledge,’’ and hence fewer adaptive competencies.

One might be inclined to think that the phenomenon we observed in Kenya is limited to cultures remote from ours, but that really is not the case. In our culture as well, gaining more education can lead to reduced societally valued outcomes, such as money. For example, students with a two-year MBA generally will earn substantially more money than students with a PhD earned over four, ﬁve, six, or more years. In Silicon Valley, the entrepreneurs who run start-up companies often are individ- uals who have nothing more than a bachelor’s degree, if that; they hire PhDs to work for them, at sal- aries considerably lower than their own. The grade level at which additional formal schooling leads to certain reduced societally valued outcomes is different but the principle is the same: At some point, additional schooling and acquisition of associated academic knowledge and skills may lead to a reduc- tion rather than an increase in certain societally valued outcomes. This is even more the case in most other countries of the world, where college and university professors are paid far less than they are in the United States. German universities, for example, generally pay less than American universities, and the national pay scale for professors recently was reduced.

Observations in Zanzibar While doing our work in Kenya and Tanzania, my colleagues and I wondered whether adults in other locales might believe that bright children should be out of school rather than in school, leading us to a study in Zanzibar. Our motivation was informal pilot data in Zanzibar suggesting that parents might keep children perceived to be brighter home from school because the children would be more useful for chores and other work around the home, because the parents believe the knowledge chil- dren acquire outside of school is more important than the knowledge they acquire in school, and because the adults view school as a placeholder for the children until the children can be placed into a position of acquiring knowledge and skills of greater value.

We found, in Zanzibar, that parents generally preferred to keep the ‘‘most helpful’’ children (i.e., the children perceived to be the brightest) at home. There were no signiﬁcant differences between in-school and out-of-school children on measures of ﬂuid and crystallized intelligence, whereas, in the US, we might expect the in-school children to do better on such tests because schools develop these skills (Ceci & Williams, 1997). (Perhaps if the out-of-school children had remained in school, they would have excelled above the in-school children on these tests.) Most importantly, however, the out-of-school children did better on tests of community-valued skills for the Zanzibarian environ- ment in which they lived than did the children in school. An article inThe Economist, a general news magazine, reported a similar phenomenon among the Masai of Kenya: Parents kept the brightest children at home (The Economist, 2002).

A study among Yup’ik children In my colleagues’ and my work with Alaskan Yup’ik schoolchildren (Grigorenko et al., 2004), for example, we discovered that the Native American children were able to navigate on a dog sled from 212R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 one distant village to another across what to us (and probably you) would have seemed to be a perceptually uniform ﬁeld of vision. If you or we or the children’s non-Native American schoolteachers attempted to go from one village to another on such a dog sled, we probably would get lost in the wilderness and die. Signals for navigation are there; we just would not see them. Similarly, the Puluwat can navigate across long distances in the sea under circumstances in which meaningful signals also would elude us (Gladwin, 1995). The importance of context is shown by the kinds of practical knowledge that children develop in order to adapt to their environments. Consider two examples.

Imagine living in a hunting–gathering society. Many Yup’ik Eskimos in Alaska live in such a society, where hunting and gathering are joined by ﬁshing as means of putting food on the table. The knowl- edge and skills you need to survive in such an environmental context are rather different from those of, say, an individual who has spent his life as a professor. The professor (or college student, for that matter) might do well on an SAT question or on a question about what or how to order in a restaurant.

He or she might not fare as well on a question we developed for assessing Yup’ik children.

‘‘When Eddie runs to collect the ptarmigan that he’s just shot, he notices that its front pouch (bal- loon) is full of ptarmigan food. This is a sign that:

there’s a storm on the way. ⁄ winter is almost over.

it’s hard to ﬁnd food this season.

it hasn’t snowed in a long time.’’ The correct answer is asterisked. Of course, there is no reason why the typical college student or professor would need to know the answer to the question about the ptarmigan. But similarly, it is unclear that the Alaskan Yup’ik student would need to do well on the SAT or restaurant question if he or she plans to remain in a coastal Yup’ik village with no restaurants and no need to read complicated texts or perform complex mathematical operations. The knowledge that is useful depends on the context.

We found that urban students (from Dillingham, a city in Alaska that, although small by the stan- dards of most states would count as fairly large in Alaska) outperformed rural students on conven- tional tests of ﬂuid and crystallized abilities, but that the Yup’ik Eskimo children outperformed the urban children on tests of knowledge of adaptive competencies relevant to the Yup’ik environment (seeFig. 1). Moreover, tests of practical knowledge predicted hunting skills whereas conventional standardized tests did not.

A further study among Yup’ik Eskimo children At this point, we wondered whether the practical knowledge and adaptive competencies that Yup’ik and other children have for knowledge not learned in school might be leveraged to help them perform better in school. In other words, might the children do better in the acquisition of academic knowledge and skills if teachers enabled the children to utilize their practical knowledge in the con- text of the classroom?

In a further study (Sternberg, Lipka, Newman, Wildfeuer, & Grigorenko, 2007), we taught Yup’ik children the plane-geometry concepts of perimeter and area using either textbook presentation or a novel presentation prominently featuring ﬁsh racks, which are an integral part of the environment of children in rural ﬁshing villages. We found that the Yup’ik children who were taught via the ﬁsh racks outperformed the children who were taught using conventional textbook presentation.

Perhaps the ﬁnding is not altogether surprising. Many of us who are parents ﬁnd that our children learn better when they are taught in ways that capitalize on interests or even passions they may have, whether for handheld phones, computers, art, music, or whatever. In this respect, the Yup’ik children are no different from our own: They learn better when they can relate in a meaningful way to what they are learning.

The Russia study One might think that ﬁndings such as the ones described here apply only with limited kinds of cri- teria (e.g., hunting or ﬁshing skills) or only with limited age range (e.g., children). However, they apply more broadly. In a study conducted in Russia (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 2001), Elena Grigorenko and I R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 213 were interested in whether we could create a test of practical knowledge that would predict health-related outcomes. We constructed such a test with items that would be relevant to adaptation in post-Soviet Russia. We found that both academic measures (assessing ﬂuid and crystallized abili- ties) and practical-knowledge measures correlated signiﬁcantly with various measures of physical and mental health. These data suggest that practical knowledge, like typical academic abilities, can predict health-related outcomes (seeTable 2). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Rural Boys Urban Boys 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40Cattell Mill-Hill YSPI Cattell Mill-Hill YSPI Academic Practical Academic Practical Rural Girls Urban Girls Fig. 1.Scores on a test of ﬂuid abilities (Cattell) and crystallized abilities (Mill Hill) as well as on a test of practical knowledge (YSPI) for rural and urban boys and girls.

Table 2 Correlations of physical health, anxiety, and depression with ﬂuid/crystallized (academic) ability measures and practical knowledge.

Measure Academic Practical Physical Health .01 .12 ** Anxiety .07 * .17*** Depression .09 * .23*** Higher scores indicate poorer health.*p< .05.**p< .01.*** p< .001. 214R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 Health is important not only with respect to its relationship to practical knowledge, but also for its relationship to school success. In particular, some children may fail to thrive, or perform below their optimal level, because they are ill, but in ways that elude the observation of their teachers and school.

We therefore have been interested in how health conditions, and especially parasitic illnesses, may compromise school performance in children around the world.

The bottom line of these various studies is that absent a cultural approach to knowledge, skills, and abilities, typical mono-cultural assessment will give psychologists (or anyone else) only a weak idea of what kinds of competencies an individual has. Individuals who are talented need to be recognized for their talents, even if those talents are not ones measured by traditional tests of general intelligence and its elements.

In this section, I have dealt with the issue of differences in the adaptive competencies across cultures that serve as the bases for differences in measured human intelligence. But there are other factors that affect differences in measured intelligence. One of those is health, and in particular, health-related obstacles to academic and life success. Health-related obstacles to academic and life success Good health is perhaps the most important thing one can have in life. But what do we mean by ‘‘good health’’? Among children in our mainstream US culture, the unfortunate ones suffer from ill- nesses such as asthma or Type 1 diabetes, and the very unfortunate ones suffer from cancer or cystic ﬁbrosis. Studies within our culture therefore will look at the effects of such illnesses on a child’s devel- opment. But in other cultures, totally different health challenges emerge. For example, it is estimated that in 2012 alone there were about 207 million cases of malaria. Malaria caused about 627,000 deaths, mostly among African children (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/, retrieved 4/7/14). If one combines all parasites, over two billion people are estimated to be infected.

Many of these infections—malaria, but also schistosomiasis, trichuriasis, cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiaysis, onchocerciasis, and lymphatic ﬁlariasis, are far more common outside the United States than within it. For children in many parts of the world, these are the diseases that most present a threat to their health and well-being, as well as their ability to succeed in school. In order to understand these challenges, we need to study them in cultures other than our own: They just are too rare in our own environment. The Jamaica parasitic-illnesses study In a study conducted in Jamaica, my colleagues and I investigated the extent to which parasitic ill- nesses might compromise school-related outcomes (Sternberg, Powell, McGrane, & McGregor, 1997).

In particular, we studied children with whipworm infections. Whipworms are small parasitic worms whose eggs are found in dirt. Children, usually inadvertently, eat the dirt with the result that the eggs gain ingress into their bodies. The worms then hatch in the bodies of the children. Symptoms of whip- worm infection include diarrhea, retardation in growth, lethargy and difﬁculties in attention span, and in extreme cases, rectal prolapse.

Fig. 2shows the results of the study. Children infected with whipworm did worse on all three cog- nitive tests we investigated: visual search, memory, and reasoning. Unexpectedly and for reasons we have never been able to ﬁgure out, infected children did better on a ﬁne motor task. It is possible that infected children spent more time at home and engaged in more ﬁne-motor tasks than did the unin- fected children, but we really do not know for sure. The bottom line, however, is that whipworm infec- tion decreased cognitive functioning.

The question that arises from a study like this is whether prophylaxis against or treatment of par- asitic illnesses will increase cognitive functioning and, potentially, school performance? Perhaps other kinds of health-related interventions also will improve cognitive test performance. We investigated these questions in a series of studies. R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 215 The Lucknow, India, study In an unpublished study my colleagues and I did in Lucknow, India, we speciﬁcally asked whether anti-parasitic prophylaxis with a drug (Albendazole) combined with vitamin A supplementation might increase cognitive performance. After collecting the data, we found no signiﬁcant differences in tradi- tional cognitive-test performance between treated and control (untreated) participants, but we did ﬁnd a signiﬁcant difference favoring children who took supplements between scores on practical daily skills indicators, as provided by parents and children alike. A study in Tanzania In a further study in Tanzania (Sternberg et al., 2002), we investigated whether a form of testing called ‘‘dynamic testing’’ (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002) might better capture the strengths of chil- dren in developing countries, especially those with parasitic or other illnesses.

When we think of testing, we typically think in terms of conventional ‘‘static’’ testing. Basically, someone administers a test; students or others respond to the questions on the test; then the exam- inees get scores indicating how well they performed. The test is ‘‘static’’ in that it is a snapshot at one period of time—it is essentially frozen in time. Dynamic testing is different in that it examines perfor- mance over a period of time. That is, it looks at how test performance evolves from one time period to another. There are two common kinds of dynamic testing, what we have referred to as ‘‘sandwich’’ and ‘‘layer cake’’ models of testing.

In sandwich testing, the examinee takes a pretest. Then he or she learns something. Then the exam- inee is tested again. One is thereby able to assess learning that occurred at time of test. In layer-cake test- ing, the child is given testing items, usually difﬁcult ones, that she typically cannot initially solve. Then she is given a series of prearranged clues that will help her solve the problem. The dependent variable of greatest interest is the number of cues she needs in order to solve each problem. Thus, there is not just one overall learning experience, but layers of learning experiences that culminate either in solution to the problem or failure to solve it, despite the cues. Both kinds of dynamic testing are based on the work ofVygotsky (1980), who proposed that individuals have a zone of proximal development in which they readily can learn new knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills outside this zone is learned only with great difﬁculty, if at all. Feuerstein (Feuerstein, 1979) capitalized on this concept to create a dynamic test of learning potential, the Learning Potential Assessment Device (LPAD).

The reason such testing can be important for children in the developing world is that the knowl- edge base with which they come into a test may be very different from the knowledge base with Visual Search Memory Reasoning Fine Motor -0.3 -0.2 -0.10 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Infected Control Fig. 2.Performance on cognitive and motor tasks by children either infected or not infected (control) with whipworm parasites.

216R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 which a child in the developed world, and especially those living in middle- or upper middle class socioeconomic contexts, enter the testing situation. The result can be that the children from the devel- oping world never seem to have, on average, quite the knowledge and academic skills of children from the developed world. The advantage of a dynamic test is that it can capture learning at time of test, so that the tester better (although not completely) controls for the background knowledge and skills with which the children approached the test. In the Tanzania study, children were given either a static or dynamic version of three different tasks: syllogisms, sorting, and twenty questions. In the static test, they simply received a pretest and a posttest that was essentially an alternate form of the pretest. In the treatment group, children received instruction sandwiched in between the pretest and posttest. We found that, on all three tasks, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Pre-Test Post-Test 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.81 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.82 2.2 Pre-Test Post-Test 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 Dynamic Control Dynamic Control Dynamic Control Pre-Test Post-Test Fig. 3.Performance of Tanzanian children on syllogisms, sorting, and twenty-question tasks. Results are shown for dynamic- testing and control groups, both on a pretest and a posttest. R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224217 children improved signiﬁcantly more on the pretest than on the posttest (seeFig. 3). In other words, the dynamic test did enable the children to learn from experience. More important, the correlation between pretest and posttest was about .8 in the control group but .3 in the experimental group. In other words, the instructional treatment changed the rank orders of the students on the posttest relative to the pretest. In the experimental group, posttest scores correlated signiﬁcantly more highly with other cognitive tests than did the pretest measures. In other words, the posttest—the test Sorting Task TIME 3 2 1 Estimated Marginal Means 1.2 1.1 1.0 .9 .8 .7 .6 .5 GROUP Treated Placebo Control Syllogisms TIME 3 2 1 Estimated Marginal Means 6.0 5.8 5.6 5.4 5.2 5.0 4.8 4.6 GROUP Treated Placebo Control Twenty Questions Task TIME 3 2 1 Estimated Marginal Means .11 .10 .09 .08 .07 .06 .05 GROUP Treated Placebo Control Fig. 4.Performance on sorting, syllogisms, and twenty-questions tasks. Results are shown for participants medically treated for parasitic illnesses, participants treated with a placebo, and control participants who did not suffer from parasitic illnesses.

218R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 administered after dynamic instruction—proved to be the better predictor of how well children would succeed in a variety of cognitive-testing situations. This may be because when these children go into a testing situation, they just do not have the prior familiarity with it that many children in the devel- oped world would have. The instruction enables them to have an orientation to the kind of test that they will take so that they are more prepared on the posttest to show what they really can do.

The Tanzania repeated-measures dynamic-testing study In the previous study, dynamic testing was done in a single session. The question might arise of what would happen if the children were tested over multiple sessions, giving them even more time to familiarize themselves with the kinds of questions on which they will be tested. Although this may sound like a kind of testing we would never use in the West, it actually is similar to the situation of students in the West who take a standardized test but previously have taken a course or used a book to help prepare them for the standardized test. They take a practice pretest, then get instruction, then take a practice test, then get instruction, then take a practice test, and onward until they believe they are ready for the actual test (Grigorenko et al., 2006).

As shown inFig. 4, children in a control group (uninfected) improved more over time in their cog- nitive skills than did infected (experimental-group) children in either a medically-treated or placebo- treated condition. But the medically treated children improved more than did the placebo-treated ones. In other words, anti-parasitic medicines, such as albendazole, not only improve children’s health—they also help improve their cognitive performance. The Zambia study of effects of treatment for parasitic illnesses on following directions Children in school and outside of it continually need to follow directions. Indeed, to do well on standardized tests, following directions is essential. But for children, following directions is important in all aspects of life, not just on standardized tests. An effect of many parasitic illnesses is malaise and wandering of attention. As a result, children sometimes do more poorly in school and in life outside the school because their wandering attention takes away from their ability to follow directions. Fig. 5.Performance of four groups on tests of following directions over time. Longer intervention is associated with higher scores. R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224219 In Zambia, my colleagues and I looked at the effects of treatment of parasitic illnesses over time with respect to improvement of children’s performance in following directions (Stemler et al., 2009). We found that the longer the children underwent treatment, the better their ability to follow directions, relative to an untreated control group, presumably because of the possibility of chronic infection or reinfection (seeFig. 5). Thus, medical intervention to ward off parasitic illnesses can improve school performance by enabling students to recover the attention spans that will put them in a position where they better can follow directions. The Gambia study In a study in Gambia (Jukes et al., 2006), my colleagues and I extended our observations to address the question of whether long-term treatment of one particular parasitic illness, malaria, would improve not only cognitive function, but also school performance and social functioning. We found that girls who were treated over time with anti-malarials were more likely to enter primary school than were girls who were administered placebos. Moreover, boys and girls who received long-term malaria prophylaxis stayed in school for just over one grade longer than did children who received placebo treatment. Students in the prophylaxis group also performed better than the controls on a test of memory, although not on a test of general intelligence. The medically treated children also showed more community-valued skills, such as being able to take visitors on a comprehensive tour of the vil- lage in which they lived.

In this section, I have argued that health-related challenges can impact performance on typical intelligence tests. People who have serious health challenges may not be in a position to score as well on typical tests as those who are generally healthy. But there is yet another factor that can account for differences in intelligence-test performance, and that is what people mean byintelligencein various cultures. Parents socialize their children to be intelligent, but only some of them may be aiming at the types of skills measured by typical intelligence tests. Other parents may socialize important skills that just happen not to be measured by the tests so many Westerners view as ‘‘intelligence tests.’’ Implicit theories of intelligence vary across cultures Range of implicit theories When we in the United States create tests of intelligence, we inadvertently rely on culturally bound implicit theories, or folk conceptions, of what intelligence is. We may think we know what intelligence is—for example, general ability or ﬂuid/crystallized abilities—but we nevertheless rely on implicit the- ories that are not widely shared across cultures around the world. To understand what people around the world mean by ‘‘smart,’’ we need to study implicit theories of intelligence across cultures, not just in our own culture. Implicit theories do not tell us what intelligence is, to the extent that question even is answerable; rather, they inform us about folk conceptions of what people believe intelligence is. Folk theories drive many psychological phenomena, including even what we know and remember about ourselves (Kulkofsky, Wang, & Hou, 2010; Ross & Wang, 2010).

One might ask why implicit theories are important. After all, why should we care what laypeople think intelligence is? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the opinions of experts? The main reason folk theories matter so much is that 99+% of the judgments that are made about people’s intelligence are based on people’s implicit theories, not on IQ tests or related tests. These judgments are made on dates, in job interviews, after listening to someone talk at a party, during a business negotiation, or when we read an article about someone in the newspaper. Implicit theories, not explicit theories of experts, are what makes the ‘‘world go ‘round.’’ Dweck (e.g. 2007)has also studied implicit theories of intelligence, but for one particular aspect of intelligence—whether people believe intelligence to be largely ﬁxed or largely malleable. The studies of implicit theories described here are somewhat broader in focus, looking at all aspects of people’s folk conceptions of intelligence. 220R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 My colleagues and I have studied implicit theories across cultures, as have others (Cole et al., 1971), and found that, indeed, our implicit theories are not all that widely shared. In a set of studies we did in the United States (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981), we found that people’s implicit the- ories were well characterized by three factors: practical problem solving, verbal ability, and social competence. Note that only one of these factors—verbal ability—really is seriously measured by con- ventional tests of intelligence.

In a study Shi Ying-Yang and I did in Taiwan (Yang & Sternberg, 1997), four factors emerged from people’s implicit theories of intelligence—traditional cognitive abilities, but also interpersonal compe- tence (understanding others), intrapersonal competence (understanding oneself), knowing when to show you are smart, and knowing when not to show you are smart (i.e., have a ‘‘poker face’’). Again, only one of these factors is measured by conventional tests of intelligence, namely, traditional cogni- tive abilities.

In studies in a very different part of the world—rural Kenya—we found that cultural conceptions of the nature of intelligence were quite different from those in either Taiwan or the United States. Four qualities seemed to underlie people’s implicit theories of intelligence—rieko (knowledge, abilities, skills), luoro (respect), paro (initiative), and winjo (comprehension of the complexities of a social prob- lem-solving situation (Grigorenko et al., 2001).

One view of all this would be that these implicit theories cannot all be right. According to this view, the results show the futility of relying on implicit theories, since they vary so widely. But an alterna- tive view is that the results show precisely the opposite—namely, the need to take implicit theories seriously. If implicit theories differ so widely, it is clear how attributes that are valued highly in one culture might not be so highly valued, or might even be devalued, in another culture. Note also that unless one does implicit-theory studies in a variety of cultures, one is likely to make the mistake of thinking that the implicit theories of one’s own culture typify other cultures as well. But even the small sampling of cultures described here reveals large differences in implicit theories across cultures. How implicit theories affect teacher behavior It was claimed above that implicit theories affect people’s behavior. An important example is that of teachers. Teachers, like everyone else, have implicit theories of intelligence. They use these implicit theories to evaluate their students. If the students look smart according to the teachers’ implicit the- ories, the teachers are likely to treat the children differently from, and perhaps better than, if the stu- dents do not look so smart.

In one set of studies Lynn Okagaki and I conducted in San Jose, California, we looked at how the match between teachers’ and parents’ implicit theories of intelligence would affect the teachers’ views of children from different ethnic groups (Okagaki & Sternberg, 1993). We queried parents of Anglo-American, Latino-American, and Asian–American children regarding their implicit theories of intelligence. We also queried the children’s teachers. We found that parents of Anglo-American and Asian–American children emphasized cognitive skills more than social skills in their conceptions of intelligence, whereas Latino-American parents placed more emphasis on social skills. The children’s teachers, however, like the Anglo-American and Asian–American parents, emphasized cognitive skills.

Perhaps partially as a result, the teachers viewed the Anglo-American and Asian–American students as generally more academically able. Conclusions Our cultural-psychological work has implications for a broad range of phenomena. Most important, none of these phenomena could be studied adequately without the study of a broad range of cultures.

To put it one way, the study of cultural psychology is necessary, not just nice.

Parents may value practical knowledge, skills, and working in the home and local environ- ment more than they value traditional education. R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 221 Our work in Kenya and in Zanzibar showed that parents may not value what is taught in school as highly as what children can learn from and contribute to the home and community. As we have seen, in Zanzibar, among other locales, parents actually keep at home their brightest children because they are seen as most useful to the family.

Children with less ‘‘traditional education’’ may actually gain more parentally and locally val- ued skills than children with more such education.

In the United States, most of us are glued to the notion that schooling unlocks the doors to success.

But in some other cultures, it not only does not unlock the doors, but after a certain point is seen as a repository for those who cannot ﬁnd a trade. Even in the United States, there are businesses that are reluctant to hire PhDs, whom they view as over-educated and not possessing the kind of commercial orientation needed for business success.

Students may have critical knowledge that is important for their adaptation that teachers do not have and vice versa.

In our studies in Alaska, we found that children could navigate long distances via dogsled, during the winter, in the frozen tundra. Their teachers would risk their lives to attempt the same feat. The children also have knowledge about hunting and gathering, ice ﬁshing, and other environmentally rel- evant tasks that their teachers would not have.

Teachers may nevertheless view these students as slow or even stupid.

Teachers may view the Yup’ik children as not very bright because they do not perform well on con- ventional standardized tests and do not do well in school when material is taught in an abstract way that does not make contact with the children’s backgrounds.

Yet the teachers would not be able adequately to adapt to the students’ environments.

Conventional standardized tests of abilities and achievements measure the kinds of achievements schools value. But they do not measure various adaptive skills needed for local community environ- ments. Teachers (and we who are readers of this essay) might fare poorly on the kinds of tests we used to measure children’s adaptive skills. For example, most of us would be familiar with none of the nat- ural herbal medicines used to combat parasitic illnesses in Kenya.

Tests are predicatively valid as an interaction among persons, tasks, and situations.

Our studies suggest that test scores are not meaningful in themselves without an understanding of the context in which the testing takes place. Who is the individual being tested and in what environ- ment has he or she been enculturated and socialized? It may be that the individual has skills that are good or even remarkable but that would not show up on a conventional standardized test.

Practical knowledge may be important for good health practices.

Our study in Russia suggests that assessments of practical knowledge and skills may be better pre- dictors of health and health practices than conventional tests of abilities. At the very least, one should take practical knowledge into account, independent of IQ or other measures correlated with levels of formal schooling.

We should not assume that conventional schooling is necessary in all locales for good health practices.

222R.J. Sternberg / Developmental Review 34 (2014) 208–224 Our studies suggest that people can learn what they need to know about good health practices outside of formal school environments.

Practical knowledge enters into diverseimplicittheories of intelligence.

When we examine implicit theories of intelligence across a range of cultures, we ﬁnd that, even in the United States, they go well beyond the kinds of skills measured by conventional tests of intelli- gence. In the US and other cultures we have studied, practical knowledge such as about how to get along with others, how to navigate and solve problems in everyday environments, and even self-understanding ﬁgure into people’s implicit theories of intelligence.

Indigenous tests can help to assess people according to their own standards and adaptive needs.

Tests of intelligence need to reﬂect the real demands of the environments in which people live, not the environments in which the testers or test creators live. Yet tests are often designed etically, impos- ing the standards of the culture in which the tests are created on people who live in other cultures.

People’s, including teachers’, judgments about others’ intelligence may correspond only mod- estly to what would be the judgments of ‘‘experts’’ in the ﬁeld.

Our study in San Jose, California, showed that parents and teachers alike adopt notions of intelli- gence that ﬁt their environmental milieu. Parents of different ethnicities may tend, on average, to have somewhat different conceptions of what it means for their children to be smart. It is worth remem- bering that even teachers differ in what they mean by smart. For example, a philosophy professor, a mathematics professor, an engineering professor, and a professor of Latin may have different ideas about what makes a student smart in the context of what he or she teaches.

Parents socialize their students to be intelligent according to their own implicit theories.

In the end, parents will socialize their children to be ‘‘smart’’ according to their own folk concep- tions of intelligence, not in terms of some fairly arbitrary standard imposed by a standardized test.

Teachers should recognize the importance of practical/social competencies/knowledge to par- ents’ implicit theories of their children’s intelligence.

If teachers recognize knowledge and skills that are not necessarily measured by standardized tests, they may be able to capitalize on these in order more effectively to teach their students. In our Alaska study, for example, we found that teachers who taught plane geometry using ﬁsh racks produced stu- dents with better outcomes than those who taught the same concepts abstractly.

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