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Fast track learning comes of age, April 22, 2001
The most serious accusation against differential psychology has long been that its factorial dimensions are somehow `static', pessimistic and rebarbative to those who wish to improve the human lot. Understandably, this complaint provides the linchpin for an IQ-bashing chapter (by Abraham Tannenbaum) with which the present volume opens. Thus can editors Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski demonstrate their openness of mind. Is there, however, some practical and improving response that can be made swiftly and painlessly to the twentieth-century's hard-won facts about human individuality? Is there some uncontroversial way in which psychological testers can already help testees via their test results? The bulk of Benbow & Lubinski's chapters provide up-to-date, scholarly and encouraging answers to these questions.
B&L's reviews and studies of individualization in education are of the highest importance for applied differential psychology. There are four inter-linked reasons. (a) In the g factor, the London School has a variable which (as even Tannenbaum agrees) strongly predicts educational outcomes quite regardless of commonly occurring differences in children's social and educational exposures. (b) Though politicians and the media will not ask it, the proper question for the promoter of any educational scheme whatever has long been this: `Does the scheme deliver attainment levels higher than would have been expected from children's initial g levels alone?' (c) A plausible and time-honoured idea is that children respond especially well to educative efforts pitched at their own g levels. (d) Suspecting such tailoring to be necessary, six per cent of parents in today's Britain already pay double for private education rather than leave their children in the state sector. (Still more parents expressly buy or rent houses near `good' state schools.) Taking these four considerations together, the existence of crucial education x ability interactions looks likely. The prospect of psychometric psychology being able to galvanize education could hardly be brighter.
What then, are the results of the practice once called streaming, currently titled `tracking', and residually exemplified in state school systems today chiefly by the patchy and modest attempts of charitable organizations to give brighter children -- for an hour per day or a summer-school month per year -- education that treats them for a little while according to their mental, rather than chronological ages? The key claims contained in the present volume are as follows.
(1) Critics of tracking (Linda Darling-Hammond, Jeannie Oakes, Robert Slavin) have failed to produce evidence of the harm to non-fast-tracked children that it has been common for egalitarians to allege. Indeed, arch-critic Slavin himself has reported ninety-minute-per-day `re-grouping' exercises (in accordance with reading age) to be positively useful.
(2) Matching accelerated with non-accelerated pupils from Lewis Terman's classic data set, Lee Cronbach reports substantial gains from acceleration which continue throughout adulthood. Fast-tracked pupils are about twice as likely to be satisfied with their earnings, social contacts and levels of community service; and, though no more satisfied with their sex lives, they make their marriages last longer.
(3) From the scores of thousands of children involved in today's American follow-ups of `talented' youth, Ellis Page and Timothy Keith provide an equally clear result. Attending schools having relatively homogeneous ability groups was associated (r = +.13) with significantly greater eventual educational achievement for high-ability children; and there was no negative effect for low-g children (r = .00). Importantly, P&K's result did not occur because of brighter children being siphoned off to particular schools that were thus more homogeneous for mental abilities: school homogeneity and school level for IQ were uncorrelated.
(4) P&K's gains were particularly marked for precisely those children whose parents and teachers might not have been expecting them to be capable of excelling scholastically. Homogeneity of teaching correlated at +.24 with outcomes for Hispanic, and at +.32 for Black children; and gains in self-confidence were particularly marked in fast-tracked girls.
(5) P&K's large-scale research results were based only on the relatively crude and slight differences that occur between whole schools. Effects of tracked vs untracked classrooms would plainly be stronger.
(6) Lastly, P&K were able to use as dependent variables only the most elementary tests of reading and mathematical attainment taken by all children in mid-adolescence. Thus their study could hardly have begun to tap the differences that advanced coaching would usually make for high-ability children.
The above six points cover a good range of the important questions in the scholastic literature about tracking; they seem well substantiated and are comprehensibly summarized in Intellectual Talent; they emerge against the background of years of tireless reporting of similar results by C. C. and J. A. Kulik; and they are supported by the enthusiasm of many of the present authors for the on-going projects of mathematical tuition for gifted youth developed by Julian Stanley (recounted especially well here by Joyce Van Tassel-Baska).
Properly, B&L complement their practical chapters with some psychogenetics and evolutionary speculation from Tom Bouchard; and with some Eysenckianism from Art Jensen -- who seems to accept Hans Eysenck's latter-day claim that geniuses are inclined to madness (rather than just to neuroticism, `substance abuse' and a certain independence of mind). These more theoretical chapters provide something of a reply to Tannenbaum's fears of the `complacency' of London School theorists -- especially since Bouchard's chapter has plenty of personality correlations around zero between biological siblings reared together (presumably reflecting the differentiation of children's micro-environments under the pressures of sibling competition). However, the main achievement of the present volume is clear. Egalitarian educationalists have met their match in applied psychometrician-psychologists. At no cost to dull or mediocre children, brighter children can be helped by programmes of fast track learning. Large-scale experimentation should now commence. Treating children according to their abilities and attainments to date would almost certainly convey wide benefits; and merely allowing parents to choose their children's tracks would quickly end the sorry dumbing-down of state education and the betrayal of intelligent children in the English-speaking world.
Publication reference:
BRAND, C. R. (1998). `Fast track learning comes of age.' Personality & Individual Differences 24, 6, 899-900.
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