I'm curious as to whether parental (/sub-cultural and therefore norm based) attitudes to education may be a significant factor, which traditionally would correlate with SES but also act as a confounding variable in existing research. To be horribly, painfully and objectionable generalist, the tradie fixing your toilet may make more money than the uni lecturer - but the uni lecturer is more likely to promote academic pathways for their offspring. If academic application is not normaitvely idealised within an individual's circumstance, they will be less likely to value those pathways. As such, I'd posit, it is less about ability (or prior-attainment) as a ceiling, and more about the socio-cultural context students exist within - at least when discussing population based effects.
Hi Nick, Marks does unpack this in the paper. I got a lot out of reading it because he does discuss some of the things that you're talking about - like career is a proxy for how intelligent a person is, but intelligence and SES are not the exact same thing. You might be referring more to something called socio-educational advantage than actual SES. This is a separate thing and equally interesting. You probably already know but these concepts were new to me till recently.
I often don't understand what people mean when they talk about "ability", and I'm not sure what you intend by this term.
One concept of "ability" is that it is the capacity that a person has at a specific point in time to perform an action or demonstrate knowledge. Thus, if Taylor takes a class in Adobe Photoshop, then she has the "ability" to use Photoshop, but if Ted hasn't taken a class in Adobe Photoshop, then he lacks that "ability". On the other hand, if Ted does take the class and learns Photoshop, then he too will have that "ability". So a person's "abilities" are just the sum total of the knowledge and skills that that person has acquired, and it's always possible to acquire a new "ability" given adequate resources.
But there's another concept of "ability" that is about innate capacity and potential, and being innate it's fixed. In this concept of "ability" students can still learn new skills and knowledge, but there are individual limitations to this process and not everybody can learn everything. This isn't a matter of lack of access to resources (although those are necessary) instead, it's more about basic cognitive function. In this concept of "ability", some people really are smarter than others, and that means that they have better general reading comprehension, faster pace of learning, better pattern-matching facility, superior abstract reasoning, etc. This isn't simply a matter of access to instruction, but instead represents something fundamental about that person -- in other words, we want everybody to reach their "optimal potential", but we acknowledge that different students might have different "optimal potentials".
So perhaps Ted did try to learn Photoshop, but it was just too complicated and he couldn't understand it no matter how hard he tried. Or perhaps Ted did learn how to do some basic things in Photoshop, enough to make a meme to post on Instagram, but he couldn't master the more advanced concepts. And that's because Photoshop really is complicated! Digital image processing involves many abstract concepts, and there are hundreds of details to master. In practice not everybody can handle that level of complexity.
So this is what I find puzzling about discussions on "ability" -- does the word mean someone's current skills and knowledge, or does it mean something fundamentally fixed? What are your thoughts?
Hi Theodore, in the paper, Marks actually uses measures of intelligence. That term is equally fraught so I used the term that we use more in schools - ability meaning innate ability. Two things: intelligence can be improved - we can and do get smarter. So it's not fixed. But rank order in the population tends to be fixed. While we are getting smarter, so are our classmates. Freddie de Boer writes about this really well if you're interested. He comes at it from a Marxist perspective - as in what do we do with people who will (for the most part) rank at the bottom of the bell curve?
Agree that defining "ability" in some clear, everyday language would be a wonderful start for having more discussions... Dynamic Assessments come close to supporting some understanding of learning and whether students can learn from a small amount of instruction during an assessment process
Yes, moving the bell curve to the right is a noble goal. Schools do so much. Perhaps universities could have more of a role in workplace training where students can also benefit from the boost of some additional maturity. You ask hard questions! Keep them coming!
I'm curious as to whether parental (/sub-cultural and therefore norm based) attitudes to education may be a significant factor, which traditionally would correlate with SES but also act as a confounding variable in existing research. To be horribly, painfully and objectionable generalist, the tradie fixing your toilet may make more money than the uni lecturer - but the uni lecturer is more likely to promote academic pathways for their offspring. If academic application is not normaitvely idealised within an individual's circumstance, they will be less likely to value those pathways. As such, I'd posit, it is less about ability (or prior-attainment) as a ceiling, and more about the socio-cultural context students exist within - at least when discussing population based effects.
Hi Nick, Marks does unpack this in the paper. I got a lot out of reading it because he does discuss some of the things that you're talking about - like career is a proxy for how intelligent a person is, but intelligence and SES are not the exact same thing. You might be referring more to something called socio-educational advantage than actual SES. This is a separate thing and equally interesting. You probably already know but these concepts were new to me till recently.
I often don't understand what people mean when they talk about "ability", and I'm not sure what you intend by this term.
One concept of "ability" is that it is the capacity that a person has at a specific point in time to perform an action or demonstrate knowledge. Thus, if Taylor takes a class in Adobe Photoshop, then she has the "ability" to use Photoshop, but if Ted hasn't taken a class in Adobe Photoshop, then he lacks that "ability". On the other hand, if Ted does take the class and learns Photoshop, then he too will have that "ability". So a person's "abilities" are just the sum total of the knowledge and skills that that person has acquired, and it's always possible to acquire a new "ability" given adequate resources.
But there's another concept of "ability" that is about innate capacity and potential, and being innate it's fixed. In this concept of "ability" students can still learn new skills and knowledge, but there are individual limitations to this process and not everybody can learn everything. This isn't a matter of lack of access to resources (although those are necessary) instead, it's more about basic cognitive function. In this concept of "ability", some people really are smarter than others, and that means that they have better general reading comprehension, faster pace of learning, better pattern-matching facility, superior abstract reasoning, etc. This isn't simply a matter of access to instruction, but instead represents something fundamental about that person -- in other words, we want everybody to reach their "optimal potential", but we acknowledge that different students might have different "optimal potentials".
So perhaps Ted did try to learn Photoshop, but it was just too complicated and he couldn't understand it no matter how hard he tried. Or perhaps Ted did learn how to do some basic things in Photoshop, enough to make a meme to post on Instagram, but he couldn't master the more advanced concepts. And that's because Photoshop really is complicated! Digital image processing involves many abstract concepts, and there are hundreds of details to master. In practice not everybody can handle that level of complexity.
So this is what I find puzzling about discussions on "ability" -- does the word mean someone's current skills and knowledge, or does it mean something fundamentally fixed? What are your thoughts?
Hi Theodore, in the paper, Marks actually uses measures of intelligence. That term is equally fraught so I used the term that we use more in schools - ability meaning innate ability. Two things: intelligence can be improved - we can and do get smarter. So it's not fixed. But rank order in the population tends to be fixed. While we are getting smarter, so are our classmates. Freddie de Boer writes about this really well if you're interested. He comes at it from a Marxist perspective - as in what do we do with people who will (for the most part) rank at the bottom of the bell curve?
Agree that defining "ability" in some clear, everyday language would be a wonderful start for having more discussions... Dynamic Assessments come close to supporting some understanding of learning and whether students can learn from a small amount of instruction during an assessment process
Really enjoyed this read.
People find curves and spectrums confronting... but they’re a reality. We can improve the shape though, within reasonable limits.
But we live in an increasingly automated world. Employment favours academic and so-called “soft skills”. That’s a huge challenge for many...
How do we handle that discrepancy???
Yes, moving the bell curve to the right is a noble goal. Schools do so much. Perhaps universities could have more of a role in workplace training where students can also benefit from the boost of some additional maturity. You ask hard questions! Keep them coming!