Topic
Aptitude
About: Aptitude is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3589 publications have been published within this topic receiving 95307 citations. The topic is also known as: capability & ability.
Papers published on a yearly basis
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Papers
TL;DR: The testing movement in the United States has been a success, if one judges success by the usual American criteria of size, influence, and profitability, but what assumptions is the success of the movement based?
Abstract: The testing movement in the United States has been a success, if one judges success by the usual American criteria of size, influence, and profitability. Intelligence and aptitude tests are used nearly everywhere by schools, colleges, and employers. It is a sign of backwardness not to have test scores in the school records of children. The Educational Testing Service alone employs about 2,000 people, annually administers Scholastic Aptitude Tests to thousands of aspirants to college, and makes enough money to support a large basic research operation. Its tests have tremendous power over the lives of young people by stamping some of them "qualified" and others "less qualified" for college work. Until recent "exceptions" were made (over the protest of some), the tests have served as a very efficient device for screening out black, Spanish-speaking, and other minority applicants to colleges. Admissions officers have protested that they take other qualities besides test achievements into account in granting admission, but careful studies by Wing and Wallach (1971) and others have shown that this is true only to a very limited degree. Why should intelligence or aptitude tests have all this power? What justifies the use of such tests in selecting applicants for college entrance or jobs? On what assumptions is the success of the movement based? They deserve careful examination before we go on rather blindly promoting the use of tests as instruments of power over the lives of many Americans.
4,594 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that ability can be conceived in two ways: high or low with reference to the individual's own past performance or knowledge, or competence relative to that of others, and that a gain in mastery alone does not indicate high ability.
Abstract: Achievement behavior is denned as behavior directed at developing or demonstrating high rather than low ability. It is shown that ability can be conceived in two ways. First, ability can be judged high or low with reference to the individual's own past performance or knowledge. In this context, gains in mastery indicate competence. Second, ability can be judged as capacity relative to that of others. In this context, a gain in mastery alone does not indicate high ability. To demonstrate high capacity, one must achieve more with equal effort or use less effort than do others for an equal performance. The conditions under which these different conceptions of ability function as individuals' goals and the nature of subjective experience in each case are specified. Different predictions of task choice and performance are derived and tested for each case. In this article, predictions of task choice, performance, and subjective experience in experimental achievement settings are derived, and relevant evidence is examined. An intentional view of behavior (Dennett, 1978) is adopted. In this, action is construed as a rational attempt to attain goals or incentives. In commonsense terms, individuals' actions serve to achieve purposes efficiently or economically. In the terms of games theory, action maximizes
4,228 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a framework in which goals are proposed to be central determinants of achievement patterns was tested and it was found that learning goals, in which individuals seek to increase their competence, were predicted to promote challenge-seeking and a mastery-oriented response to failure regardless of perceived ability.
Abstract: This study tested a framework in which goals are proposed to be central determinants of achievement patterns. Learning goals, in which individuals seek to increase their competence, were predicted to promote challenge-seeking and a mastery-oriented response to failure regardless of perceived ability. Performance goals, in which individuals seek to gain favorable judgments of their competence or avoid negative judgments, were predicted to produce challenge-avoidance and learned helplessness when perceived ability was low and to promote certain forms of risk-avoidance even when perceived ability was high. Manipulations of relative goal value (learning vs. performance) and perceived ability (high vs. low) resulted in the predicted differences on measures of task choice, performance during difficulty, and spontaneous verbalizations during difficulty. Particularly striking was the way in which the performance goal-low perceived ability condition produced the same pattern of strategy deterioration, failure attribution, and negative affect found in naturally occurring learned helplessness. Implications for theories of motivation and achievement are discussed.
2,973 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, two experiences mettent a l'epreuve un modele prenant en compte les differences dans les capacites cognitives, les processus auto-regulateurs de la motivation and les exigences de traitement de l'information.
Abstract: Trois experiences mettent a l'epreuve un modele prenant en compte les differences dans les capacites cognitives, les processus auto-regulateurs de la motivation et les exigences de traitement de l'information
2,061 citations
TL;DR: The authors introduced a regression-based logic for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates, which is analogous to the reading-level match design, but without some of the methodological problems of that design.
Abstract: In this study, we introduce a new analytic strategy for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates: a regression-based logic that is analogous to the reading-level match design, but one without some of the methodological problems of that design. It provides a unique method for examining whether the reading subskill profiles of poor readers with aptitude/achievement discrepancy differ from those without discrepancy. Children were compared on a varied set of phonological, orthographic, memory, and language processing tasks. The results indicated that cognitive differences between these 2 groups of poor readers all reside outside of the word recognition module
1,358 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2025 | 108 |
| 2024 | 130 |
| 2023 | 220 |
| 2022 | 278 |
| 2021 | 90 |
| 2020 | 80 |