Have you ever wondered why intelligence and academic achievement are so revered in our society? My oldest son is 16 years old and entering his junior year in high school. He is becoming increasingly aware that college is just around the corner, and is doing his best to prepare himself for it. We’ve noticed that the college admissions process is mainly about grades and SAT scores, and little about his ability to work hard and follow-through on accomplishing his goals.
Interestingly, research shows that setting a specific, long-term goal, and doing whatever it takes until that goal has been reached (“grit”),will be more predictive of his success than his grades or academic achievement. Most of us assume this must be a brand new revelation, but look what Jonah Lehrer points out in his recent article in the Boston Globe:
“In 1869, Francis Galton published ‘Hereditary Genius,’ his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement. Galton’s method was straightforward: he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with ‘very high reputations,’ including poets, politicians, and scientists. That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising: success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent. Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when ‘ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.’
Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion. He spent decades following a large sample of ‘gifted’ students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success. While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as ‘perseverance,’ were much more pertinent.
Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement: ‘Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance.’
Unfortunately, in the decades following Terman’s declaration, little progress was made on the subject. Because intelligence was so easy to measure – the IQ test could be given to schoolchildren, and often took less than an hour – it continued to dominate research on individual achievement.
The end result, says James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, is that ‘there was a generation of social scientists who focused almost exclusively on trying to raise IQ and academic test scores. The assumption was that intelligence is what mattered and what could be measured, and so everything else, all these non-cognitive traits like grit and self-control, shouldn’t be bothered with.’ “
I find all of this a bit humorous. It seems that much of our systems of higher learning are based on the premise that intelligence and academic achievement predict a person’s propensity for success. But, ironically, they don’t really predict success very well at all…they’re just easy to measure. Yikes! This makes me even more concerned about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my kids’ educations!
Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the transition that is evolving regarding the traits that are believed to actually precede success. A group of very insightful researchers are performing the hard work of measuring and tracking what truly leads down the path to success…
