May/June 2000
By David N. Perkins
Traditional schools usually emphasize the kind of intelligence students need to solve clearly defined problems. By stressing this kind of "laboratory intelligence," schools typically ask students to engage in focused, systematic tasks that have unambiguous goals and a clear choice of answers: learn this list of words and how to spell them, learn who the presidents were. The tasks may be challenging, but they are challenging in a predictable way. The attention paid to standards and assessments often works to increase the emphasis on this laboratory intelligence.
What's missing is an appreciation for what I like to call "intelligence in the wild." The phrase may conjure up images of someone trekking through the jungle, but it actually refers to intelligence as it is used to get along in the world, to handle gritty situations in smart ways. For example, "the wild" might be a classroom or the street or even a used-car lot. It might involve running a corporation or managing a scout troop. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them.
How does intelligence in the wild differ from laboratory intelligence? The two are certainly related. However, our research at Project Zero has shown that one of the most important aspects of intelligence in the wild is what's called thinking dispositions. Everyday terms like open-mindedness, curiosity, and skepticisim refer to thinking dispositions. Thinking dispositions have to do with 1) sensitivity to situations that call for thinking and learning and 2) the motivation to invest in thinking and learning.
Everyday decision-making offers a good example. Whatever situation I find myself in-teaching a class, fixing a car, pushing along an internet start-up, out on a date-it is important to be sensitive to when the situation invites a decision. If I do recognize that I'm facing a decision, then I have to ask whether it's worth the bother to make the decision thoughtfully. Many decisions aren't that important. Finally, if I do want to invest in a thoughtful decision, I have a fairly well-defined problem to figure out.
That "figure out" part is the most like laboratory intelligence. Schools often begin there, teaching kids how to deal with clearly defined problems. However, life is more confusing and complicated than that. Often the greatest challenge is just discerning whether there is a problem or what the problem is. You have to muck around and puzzle out what you want or need to do and where to invest your efforts. That's intelligence in the wild.
For a number of years, we have done research at Project Zero on thinking dispositions in an attempt to measure people's ability to detect the problems in situations. We usually use scenarios where reasoning goes awry-for instance, where somebody makes a decision without considering a range of options. Here's an example from our actual research: Mrs. Sanchez lives with her daughter in Chicago and works for Company A. Company A decides to relocate to Memphis. Mrs. Sanchez doesn't mind moving, but her daughter, who is in her last year of high school, wants to finish the school year with her friends. Mrs. Sanchez says, "You know, we really don't have any choice. I need the job. I need to follow the company." So they move, and the daughter is disappointed.
We measure how participants in our studies-mostly children in the latter half of elementary school-respond to stories like this. When they hear the story of Mrs. Sanchez, do they recognize that Mrs. Sanchez certainly has more choices than she thinks she does? She could refuse to go with the company and shop around for a similar job; she could move and let her daughter stay with a relative for the rest of the school year; she could negotiate with her company to move three months later. Interestingly, our findings show that once people realize that Mrs. Sanchez really does have options, they're pretty good at thinking of what some options might be. The bottleneck lies in recognizing that Mrs. Sanchez has jumped to her conclusion.
What's true of the story of Mrs. Sanchez is true of most of our findings. The principal roadblock to thinking well is usually detecting the problem in the first place and then caring enough to invest effort, not in following through. People tend to be much better at solving problems than detecting them. Although schooling and conventional intelligence tests emphasize solving well-defined problems, the greater challenge in the wild is problem detection.
But is problem detection just another face of laboratory intelligence? Maybe, but our research argues otherwise. As part of our method, we also use measures of laboratory intelligence-sometimes short-form IQ tests and sometimes other indicators. Our measures of problem detection do not correlate very strongly with these measures of laboratory intelligence, which tend to be based on solving clearly defined problems. In some of our studies, the correlation is zero, in others quite low. So the wild side of intelligence appears to be a different kind of beast.
This connects to another interesting pattern of results. In research on intelligence, creativity, school performance, and professional achievement within a field, professional achievement turns out to be not highly correlated with school performance or IQ. Suppose, for example, that you are studying physics. Without a doctoral degree and an IQ high enough to help you do the academic work to get it, you're probably not going to become a professional physicist. But once you get the degree, how well does your grade point average or your IQ predict your professional success as a physicist? Not very well. The correlations are around zero. In other words, while IQ contributes to mastering relevant academic knowledge and while credentialing is an important way to filter out those who just can't hack the physics, how high your IQ is or how well you did academically is not very predictive of your success as a creative professional physicist. The same appears to apply to other fields-doctor, business person, teacher.
In short, the traits and abilities that may have served you well academically-or not so well, if you didn't perform superbly-don't seem to matter as much in the wild. The wild side of intelligence has been neglected, both in psychological studies and in many patterns of schooling, and we do youngsters a disservice by neglecting it in our conceptions of intelligence and in our school practices. Very bright students who have done extremely well in conventional academic settings will sometimes be shocked to face life outside of those settings with much less success.
Schools at all levels, including universities, can do things to be more attentive to the wild side of intelligence. Certain methodologies can help. For instance, case-based learning can bring students closer to the wild than reading about somebody's theories in a textbook. Simulations also give a sharper sense of the wild and let students demonstrate their coping strategies and where they might need help. One can use assignments and activities that create a lot of space for problem detection; in other words, ill-defined problems are better than well-defined problems for helping people get the knack of coping with the murky wild. The murk is good; it is more authentic. At the high school or university level, internships provide similar experiences in the wild.
Intelligence in the wild can play out very effectively in collaborative environments. The wild does not connote the solo explorer at all. In the wild, people function collaboratively. In typical academic settings, one spends a lot more time functioning solo than in typical settings outside the academic context. One is supposed to show one's mettle and display one's skill as an individual. The notion of grading a team or giving a team a degree is completely alien. I am not saying that we should start giving degrees to teams, but I am saying that many academic settings offer too few opportunities for collaborative work.
At-risk kids often are thought of as slow learners because they are not particularly in tune with academic expectations. But they may have "street smarts" for which there is no measure or reward in a typical academic environment. Some people have strengths that only show up when the rules of the game are changed. Suddenly you find people who didn't look so smart before looking smarter, and vice versa. It's relatively commonplace in school settings to discover that when you make learning more open-ended, when you begin to use case-based learning or hands-on activities, different students come to the fore, ones you weren't noticing so much before.
By acknowledging intelligence in the wild and its importance, we can legitimately hope to find a connection with some youngsters who haven't been relating, responding, or learning well in the traditional academic mode. For others who are already doing fine in school, making them aware of the need to cultivate this other side of intelligence may help them to cope better today with their nonacademic lives and prevent a rude awakening later when they live and work in the wilds of "the real world."
Since 1971, David N. Perkins has served as co-director of Project Zero, a research and development group at Harvard Graduate School of Education concerned with learning, intelligence, creativity, and understanding in child and adult contexts. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He has published and spoken widely.
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