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Remaking the Concept of Aptitude: Extending the Legacy of Richard E. Snowreviewed by Norman Milgram - 2003 ![]() Author(s): Lyn Corno, Lee J. Cronbach, Haggai Kupermintz, David F. Lohman, Ellen B. Mandinach, Anne W. Porteus and Joan E. Talbert Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, NJ ISBN: 0805835326 , Pages: 312, Year: 2001 Search for book at Amazon.com A reviewer has two major tasks. The first is easy, to provide
information about the book so that review readers will know if the
book is of interest to them. The second task is more difficult,
namely to provide a critique of the book so that readers will have
the benefit of a professional opinion on the importance of its
goals and the extent to which these goals are achieved. The title
and subtitle of this book makes the first task easier than usual.
The book is the product of the collaboration of seven intimate
colleagues (including the widow) of Richard Snow, a prominent
educational psychologist at Stanford University. Following
Snow’s untimely and sudden death at age 61 in 1997, the seven
banded together to review his published and unpublished work and to
prepare a volume that would summarize where he had been and to
project ahead where he was going. Snow’s own research on the concept of aptitude as it
applies to academic settings extended over a 35-year period, and
the collaborative labor of love that produced this book extended
over several years. The outcome of their endeavors does honor to
the man and to the authors, as indicated below, but presents
considerable difficulty for the intended lay and professional
audience. Teachers and parents lack the background to comprehend
the concepts and the research findings cited. Many psychologists
and educational researchers will also find technical sections of
this book difficult to understand. The title of the opening chapter, “The Once and Future
Concept,” conveys the high aspirations of Snow and his
colleagues to make the concept of aptitude central to psychology in
general and to educational psychology in particular. Consider the
broad definition of aptitude in the preface written by Snow
himself, “the characteristics of behavior that make for
success or failure in life’s important pursuits.”
Although he worked exclusively in educational psychology, Snow
regarded the multi-faceted concept of aptitude as central to all
human endeavors. The operational definition of aptitude, “the
degree of readiness to learn and to perform well in a particular
situation or in a fixed domain,” emphasizes several key ideas
in Snow’s work. (1) Unity of inner and outer: An aptitude in isolation
may be regarded as a potential propensity within the individual,
but in practice, an aptitude is an application of an ability to a
specific situation; it yields a successful result only if it meets
the requirements/challenges of a given situation. As a consequence
a given aptitude may be advantageous in one situation and
deleterious in another. (2) Aptitudes differ in quality as well as quantity.
Aptitudes are typically associated with cognitive abilities and
refer to situation-specific applications of fluid-analytic
reasoning, crystallized-scholastic achievement, memory,
visual-spatial-mechanical abilities, etc. There are, however, in
Snow’s theory, conative and affective aptitudes as well.
Conative aptitudes refer to successive motivational processes
(e.g., wishes, wants, intentions, and sustained implementation) and
to various aspects of self-regulation (action orientation, action
controls, investment of mindful effort, and self-regulation).
Affective aptitudes include not only characteristic moods and
personal-social traits, but also beliefs and values. These aptitude
categories and a number of category exemplars are clearly defined,
and many of the measures to which they refer meet high psychometric
standards. Snow is not alone in asserting that variables associated
with intelligence and personality are relevant to success or
failure in a given pursuit. Few theorists, however, incorporate
cognitive, conative, and affective aptitudes in a single
overarching theory that assigns cognitive aptitudes to the
intelligence, affective to personality, and conative to
both. (3) Means and ends. Aptitudes are not only a proper
subject for individual assessment, but are also a proper target for
formal and informal educational intervention. Snow believed that
aptitude is the most important raw material of education, but also
its most important product; hence, his interest in research on the
aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI). The book provides examples of educational research on ATI and
discusses at length the many methodological and conceptual problems
that arise in comparing the effects on criterion learning measures
of different instructional methods in learners who differ in
relevant learning aptitudes. There are numerous difficulties in
conducting ATI research. They arise in any and all of the following
tasks: s election of aptitudes to be assessed, selection or
construction of reliable and valid measures of these aptitudes,
selection of appropriate criterion learning measures, training of
teachers in the instructional methods to be implemented, monitoring
the requisite cooperation of these teachers over the course of an
instructional program of substantial length, and finally
interpretation of findings. Given the prodigious effort required, the harvest is at best
modest because of the constraints against broad generalization of
the findings to the educational enterprise. What kind of
instruction reduces the achievement gap between students who differ
in baseline aptitude and what kind increases it? Does high aptitude
in one learning component compensate for low aptitude in another
component of the same criterion task, or is there a minimal
necessary level on the one that permits a higher level on the other
to exercise a beneficial and compensatory effect? Under what task
requirements (“affordances”) is the relationship
between performance and conative and affective aptitudes linear and
under what circumstances is it curvilinear? There are no simple
answers to these and other educationally important questions. As a
consequence of the enormous investment required and the modest
return forthcoming from ATI research, Snow himself did not pursue
this kind of research assiduously throughout his career.
Interesting experimental studies of ATI are strewn throughout
the book, some with thought-provoking findings that defy intuitive
interpretation. A study of film versus live demonstration of
principles in a basic physics course produced two fascinating
aptitude-instruction interactions. College students high in
assertiveness did better on short-term recall with the live
demonstration than with the film. Conversely students who were low
in personal responsibility did better with the film than with the
live demonstration. The two superior subgroups (high assertive on
live and low responsible on film) were at the same high level of
immediate recall. These kinds of findings are challenging or
frustrating, depending on one’s own cognitive, conative and
affective aptitudes and goals. There are many positive features to this book. It is an
excellent guide on how to conduct important, complex experimental
studies that attempt to answer practical questions in education. It
achieves this goal in a number of ways. It provides margin-marked
exhibits of experiments or illustrative examples of concepts, and
in the appendix it defines the major theoretical constructs and the
psychometric operations that assess these constructs. Its most
positive feature is the cogent and authoritative commentary by the
authors throughout the book on the psychometric assessment of
“the “cognitive-affective-conative triad,” the
various conceptualizations, and their inclusion in ATI research.
One of the many rewarding insights is a study on the prediction
of freshman year grade point average. The multiple correlation of
high school grades and SAT scores was .48. These scores were
subjected to three adjustments: the selective character of the
sample included in the correlation (e.g., those who attended
college, not the larger sample of those tested on the SAT), the
less than perfect correlation of first and second semester marks in
a course sequence in college, and the variability of grading
practices across courses. The corrected multiple correlation
increased to .76, impressive evidence of the “true”
predictive validity of these conventional, frequently maligned
measures. The volume is not for everyone. Some will be turned off by
statistical and methodological data and discussion. Others will not
be satisfied with the relatively brief reviews of theories of
cognitive aptitudes. Still others will be perplexed by the
compression in a single paragraph of a number of complex concepts
and their relationships. Nevertheless, we find here the state of
the art in ATI research and “a scaffold for future theory,
research, and practice organized around the concept of
aptitude” (quoted from the Foreword).
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