Snow1992 PDF
Snow1992 PDF
Snow1992 PDF
Educational Psychologist
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To cite this article: Richard E. Snow (1992) Aptitude Theory: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Educational Psychologist, 27:1,
5-32, DOI: 10.1207/s15326985ep2701_3
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EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 27(1), 5-32
Copyright o 1992, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Aptitude Theory:
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Richard E . Snow
Stanford University
Aptitude is an old term for an old concept still widely used, but also widely
misused and misunderstood in much scientific, professional, and public
parlance today. I believe it to be a central concept for educational
psychology (s~odid B. L. Thorndike, although he seems not to have used the
term), and for many other psychologies as well. In educational, industrial,
engineering, clinical, counseling, and school psychology, researclhers and
practitioners alike face problems of aptitude every day, whether or not these
are recognized or labeled as such. Although I concentrate here om educa-
tional issues, it is helpful to keep the larger sphere in mind, because thinking
of aptitude only in education can lead us into local traps.
This article addresses three interrelated questions: What is aptitude?
What form might theories of aptitude take? How can we describe and
understand aptitude in research on learning, teaching, and instruction?
These broad questions go back to the ancient Chinese and the Israelites and
can also be traced through the ages in many European philosophies (Snow,
---
Requests for reprints should be sent to Richard E. Snow, School of Education, Stanford
University, Stanford, CA 94305.
1982). However, they have been badly distorted, in my view, by English-
language psychology in this century (Snow, 1991b). Thus I first review and
contrast old and new thinking on these questions. I then propose a common
form for conceptualizations of aptitude across this broad front, and define
a domain called aptitude theory within the framework of a person-situation
interactional paradigm. The result is to suggest that a radical departure
from yesterday's styles of theory and research has long been needed and has
been taking shape in recent years; this leads to some projections about the
nature of aptitude theories for tomorrow.
'Potentials can be negative; that is, there are aptitudes for doing evil (see Scheffler, 1985).
These must be ignored in the present article, although they are also an important topic for
educational psychology.
APTITUDE THEORY 7
all, then initial possession of the fact is ephemeral and thus not an indicant
of aptitude. On the other hand, not knowing or understanding a particular
fact may be an indicant of deep-seated, ingrained beliefs or naive personal
theories that may inhibit new learning over a long period. Such beliefs
ought to be counted as aptitude (or in this case inaptitude) even if with
substantial instructional effort the beliefs can be changed. There is thus a
continuum from stable to malleable to ephemeral, and the line that bounds
the domain of aptitude is necessarily fuzzy. Even when potential inaptitudes
are easily remediated, aptitude research may still be needed to pinpoint
what needs remediation and how this may best be done for each person in
need.
Similarly, characteristics of situations that are ephemeral or superficial
may produce differential learning in the short term. But if the effect is easily
erased by minor changes in the situation, it too is of little lasting concern.
As in the case of person characteristics, aptitude research ought to focus on
the major, relatively stable dimensions along which situations vary or can
be made to vary. Yesterday's aptitude theory concerned only the situational
variations that defined school subject matter or vocational domains.
Today's focus has added many other dimensions of instructional treatment
design.
With this reconstructed concept of aptitude, Cronbach and I set out in the
late 1960s to investigate aptitude-treatment interactions (ATI) in instruc-
tional research. Cronbach (1957) had recognized that yesterday's aptitude
research was limited to demonstrations of test-test and test-criterion
correlations that ignored situational variations, just as experimental re-
APTITUDE THEORY '1
Research Association meetings, AT1 was listed as just one of many fads that
educational researchers had lived through and discarded in recent years.
Space does not permit me to address these criticisms here. It should be
clear to anyone who studies the literature, however, that the AT1 phenom-
enon is no fad, even if the theory and methodology used to study it in some
particular era or domain proved inadequate. The just-noted Shute (1990a,
1990b) and Swanson (1990) results taken alone are enough to show that AT1
are easily found and can help in understanding instructional effects more
deeply, when investigators bother to include provision for this sort of
analysis in their work. Furthermore, educational researchers continue to
make good use of ATI-style theory and research in evaluations of large-
scale educational programs (e.g., Corno, 1988; Peterson, 1988). Note also
that in research on alternative psychotherapies, AT1 is now a booming
frontier (Dance & Neufeld, 1988; Shoham-Salomon & Hannah, 1991;
Snow, 1991a). In short, aptitude research via the AT1 paradigm is hardly
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dead.
TABLE 1
Aptitude Constrllcts That Might Be Studied in Relation to High School Science Learning
Aptitude Constructs
Aptitude
Category Sfable? Malleable? Ephemeral?
Conceptual structures Crystallized intelligence Prior knowledge of physics Believes concept X
Explains concept X
Quantitative ability Computes automatically
Procedural skills Fluid intelligence Selective attention Infers relations
Detects cues
Visualization ability Imagery Graphs relations
Representation of goals Tests hypotheses
Learning strategies Deep versus surface Heuristics, and mnemonics Checks progress
processing
Adaptation of strategy Works alone
Self-regulatory functions Independence-flexibility Action orientation Protects intention
Conformity-responsibility Content motivation Works extra
Motivational orientations Extraversion-ascendancy Investigative interest Explores resources
Need for achievement Mastery orientation Seeks explanation
Test anxiety Self-orientation Worries about failure
implications for assessment and research. Some "new" aptitude constructs
in the middle column may also be interpreted as constituents of the more
molar constructs. The right column lists even more molecular aspects of
aptitude differences; some of these may identify learning skills or strategies
that can easily be changed, but some may also be seen as constituents or
behavioral manifestations of constructs listed to their left.
In the rows of Table 1, five categories of cognitive and conative
constructs are identified: conceptual structures; procedural skills involved
in learning, thinking, and reasoning; learning styles, strategies, and tactics;
self-regulatory and action control functions; and motivational orientations.
I consider the first two categories cognitive, the last two conative, and the
middle one a mixture. But distinctions within the resulting matrix are rather
arbitrary. Knowledge, skill, strategy, control, and motivation intermingle in
learning, and all have both cognitive and conative aspects. Thus, some
constructs straddle categories, and some could be shifted easily to other
positions. Continuing research would be expected to revise this matrix
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Aptitude Complexes
Let us move back now to consider in the abstract what aptitude theories are
today and should be tomorrow. The question is, What kind of framework
for aptitude theories should we construct and pursue?
'There are important connections to be built between AT1 research and the methods used in
cognitive analyses of expert and novice performance. Experiments with task conditions chosen
to characterize expert-novice performance differences are formally equivalent to within-
person AT1 designs; the expert-novice contrast is the aptitude variable. Unfortunately, little
work that integrates the two approaches has yet been done.
APTITUDE THEORY 17
TABLE 2
Constituents of an Aptitude Theory
1. Convergent and discriminant validity
2. Predictive validity
3. Differential validity
4. Process explanation
5. Other boundary conditions
6. Short-term malleability
7. Long-term development
8. Measurement model
9. Methodological model
10. Selection decision rules
11. Classification decision rules
12. Education decision rules
not yet have any theories in this full form today. Here I identify these points
briefly in order to devote the remainder of this article to Point 4 in Table 2,
which I think is the most important for theory-oriented aptitude research
today and tomorrow.
Points 1 and 2 are obvious. Any aptitude theory must include convergent
and discriminant validation of its constructs and measures. To be consid-
ered aptitude, there must also be evidence of prediction to some valued
criterion. Yesterday's aptitude research pretty much stopped with these first
points.
Point 3 adds differential validation with respect to varying situations; this
is the basic AT1 view. Because the concept of aptitude always implies
prediction, it always implies some particular educational (or job or thera-
peutic) treatment situation wherein persons will function. Describing the
situation is thus part of defining the aptitude. Unless the aptitude in
question is truly general, there must be situations in.which that aptitude is
less propaedeutic to success or not propaedeutic at all. Thorough differen-
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Thus, in the line of research that has developed from this view, thinking
skills reside in the person-situation interaction, not solely in the mind of the
20 SNOW
My colleagues and I (for a list of project participants, see Snow, 1989a) had
accumulated by the mid-1970s many AT1 results that cried out for detailed
analysis. We thus began information-processing studies of key aptitude
differences, hoping to reach deeper interpretations. We concentrated on
of cognitive interrelations and yet was also consistent with the old factor
analytic results (see Snow, Kyllonen, & Marshalek, 1984). With this sort of
map in hand we could study the degree to which information-processing
models of single tasks could be stitched into continua of tasks in the
multivariate space. After all, an information-processing theory of partic-
ular abilities has to depict the similarities and differences between tasks, just
as the correlations between tests do. An information-processing theory of
cognitive abilities has to be consistent with the correlational structure of
ability tests in general. This would also be true for a theory of personality
differences in learning, and we are currently at work on similar multivariate
maps in this domain.
At least for cognitive abilities, we believe we succeeded in demonstrating
that a Radex structure provides a fitting and useful map (see Snow et al.,
1984). It distinguishes the more complex and general ability constructs in
the center of the Radex from the simpler, more specialized and domain-
specific abilities distributed around the periphery and suggests that the
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A Sampling-Assembly-Control Model of
Person-situation Interaction
Putting these views and results together with evidence from many other
investigators as it accumulated, we reached a way of describing both
intraindividual adaptation and interindividual differences, both within and
across situations, that seemed flexible enough to capture the dynamics of
processing in person-situation interactions. An early version was called
simply a response sampling model to honor the Thorndike-Thomson
origin, although the whole is better described as a sampIing-assembly-
control model, and the sampling is assumed to be bidirectional (see Snow &
Lohman, 1984).
The basic event at the interface of person and situation is a sampling, of
person by situation and situation by person, governed by associative
networks of stimulus and response components residing in the inner
environment of the person and the outer environment of the situation.
Although based on associative networks of components, the model is by no
means limited to a stimulus-response association theory. Rather, the
associative network provides the base from which a variety of structures
and representations can be assembled as needed in a particular
person-situation match. The neutral term component is used to cover
stimulus-response bonds but also other kinds of hypothesized mental units
or connections, including information-processing components, plans, im-
ages, learning sets, schemata, nodes in semantic networks, productions in
production systems, and the like. The model is thus not restricted to any one
cognitive representational construct and accommodates nonrepresenta-
tional constructs as well. Furthermore, although components are conve-
niently described in the model as bits and pieces of knowledge (and skill),
the term component can apply as well to key aspects of conative and
affective aptitudes.
First consider the inner environment of the person. Each individual3
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To say that affordances are perceived means that information specifying the
affordances is available in the stimulation and can be detected by a properly
attuned perceptual system. To detect affordance is, quite simply, to detect
meaning.
Different animals engage in very different behaviors. The potential purposive
behaviors are called its effectivities. . . . Whether an animal flies, swims,
walks, or slithers; whether it pecks, nibbles, sucks, or licks; whether it
smokes, watches television, or mugs old people will "determine" the
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is, the samples drawn by the two situations overlap substantially. The size
of the correlation suggests how large is the overlap.
8. Aptitude-treatment interaction occurs because the affordance profiles
of person-situation interfaces differ. To continue the earlier example, a
relatively incomplete and unstructured situation samples just the kinds of
assemblies that persons described as able, independent, mastery oriented,
flexible, and the like are tuned to produce. Highly structured and complete
instruction does not provide that opportunity for them. It does, however,
provide some of the assemblies that less able, less independent, less
mastery-oriented learners cannot provide for themselves, and it does not
sample what such learners cannot produce.
9. The three major cognitive aptitude constructs can be distinguished in
this assembly and control process. Fluid intelligence reflects the more
flexible assembly and adaptation of strategies for performance in novel
unfamiliar tasks. Crystallized intelligence reflects more the retrieval and
adaptation of old assemblies for familiar tasks. Visualization ability reflects
a collection of specialized skills that pop in and out of relevance in a variety
of tasks that afford their use; other special abilities can be similarly
described.
10. Finally, one can think of a performance assembly pathway, from
activation in and retrieval from the person's bank of experience, to
adaptation in the person-situation interface, to action in the task or
instructional situation. Performance is assembled and reassembled along
this path to meet the characteristic affordance profile of this situation. An
analysis of this profile with respect to familiarity-novelty, structure com-
pleteness, and the use of special knowledge and skills will provide a picture
of its cognitive aptitude requirements and opportunities for each person.
However, each person's mental bank contains not only bits and pieces of
knowledge and skill, but also wishes, wants, needs, intentions, interests,
attitudes, etc. These are also component networks that may differ in
strength and that can be triggered in whole or in part by situational
affordances. In parallel with the performance assembly pathway, one can
think of a performance commitment pathway, from activation to action,
that accounts for the appearance of conative and affective aptitude
differences. The operation of such aptitude constructs as achievement
motivation, anxiety, mastery versus performance orientation, conformity-
responsibility, independence-flexibility, and extraversion-ascendancy may
also be describable in terms of the assembly and control of sampling
processes and the tuning of these processes to affordances in the
person-situation interface (see Snow, 1989b), The job for tonncrrow's
aptitude theorists will be to convert each of these constructs, along with the
cognitive constructs, into more detailed affordance sampling descrilptions in
the treatment situations with which they have been associated m i AT1
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research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REFERENCES