The investment prospective of adult intellectual development that builds on work of Raymond Cattell – I call it “PPIK” because it combines intelligence-as-Process, Personality, Interests, and intelligence-as-Knowledge  (Ackerman, 1996).  The PPIK approach builds on the interactions among traits that people have as a basis for understanding individual differences in knowledge as a function of the direction and level of cognitive resources that people devote to acquiring academic knowledge and information about the world around.  This approach differs from “content-free” approaches to adult intellect and knowledge acquisition (e.g., intelligence as “g” a general ability).  That is, in this framework, intellectual abilities are contextualized in particular domains – which differ between individuals and within individuals over time.

What are the (most important) unsolved problems?

We have identified “positive achieving trait complexes” and a “negative achieving trait complexes;” the right configuration of ability-personality-interests leads to higher levels of achievement.  People are more likely to fail at post-secondary education (or are less likely to pursue educational opportunities in adulthood) when they are characterized by the negative achieving trait complexes.  An unsolved problem is the ability to identify these different achievement trait complexes in people in order to create an intervention that would lead to success in the education system.

There are substantial gender differences in knowledge and achievement.  An example can be found in the College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Exams.  In the last year,  574,000 men and 667,000 women took AP tests, however only 217,000 females compared to 225,000 men received passing scores of a 4 or 5.  That is, 92,000 more females took the AP exams, but they got 8,000 fewer passing scores than males did.  These are fundamentally important differences.  It is difficult to understand the reasons for sex differences in achievement because the female and male students are coming from the same classes, have the same education experience, and, we assume, the same amount of motivation. This issue does not get addressed very often.  These differences in AP scores are across most subject domains (except, for example, in the foreign language domains).  Such results have a knock-on effect when it comes to performance in advanced levels of collegiate specialization, as can be seen by gender differences in the GRE “subject” tests, and in the subsequent “under-representation” of women at Ph.D. levels of education in the United States.

A third unsolved problem is in the area of motivational skills, which are addressed in the work done by Ruth Kanfer (e.g., Kanfer & Heggestad, 1997).  There are two types of motivational skills that promote different types of educational outcomes.  The first is “emotion-control skills;” these skills come into play when individuals are confronted with different novel tasks. These skills allow learners to keep frustration and anxiety at bay while they work through the problem.  This is often a major problem for middle-aged learners.  People with high emotion-control skills are able to better focus their attention on learning when struggling through a new problem or skill to learn.  The second type is called “motivation control skills;” these skills allow students to push on past the point of basic understanding of a problem. They allow for the continued motivation to keep working through problems to get an even deeper level of understanding.  As psychologists, we do not pay adequate attention to these motivational skills in the learning environment.  These are motivational skills that can be trained, but often are not because they tend to be content-domain independent.

What should be included in an agenda for research?

First, we need to find better ways to answer questions about positive and negative achieving trait complexes; how can we identify people at risk, and give them the extra skills that they need to succeed, and how do we identify those individuals with high achievement trait complexes.

Second, we need to have a better understanding of why men and women achieve different levels of domain knowledge.  There is substantial folklore as to why this is true (and a highly controversial body of empirical research on how schools treat girls and women), but there is not a lot of research that can help explain these differences in knowledge acquisition.  It is not a question of whether women can acquire the knowledge, but instead why they do not acquire the same level of knowledge as men, especially within constrained environments.

Finally we need to have specific training interventions that include issues concerning emotion control and motivation control that can be developed to help students.  This is especially important for at-risk students.

What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)?

Within higher educational there is not a lot of intervention that takes into account individual differences in combinations of abilities-personality-interests.   Earlier work by Lee J. Cronbach, Richard E. Snow, and their colleagues suggested that aptitude-treatment interactions were likely to be a function of trait complexes (combinations of traits that facilitate or impede learning).  However, because of the complexity of this kind of work, few researchers in recent years have attempted to address these important issues.  With the increased availability of intelligent computer-aided instruction, it is indeed possible to implement theory-based interventions in an individualized fashion.

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education?

There is too large a focus on trendy things, like critical thinking.  At the elementary and secondary school level, educators are attending too much to issues such as self-esteem or, for example, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.  In contrast, they spend far too little time on developing knowledge and expertise.  Skills such as critical thinking require a basic foundation of content knowledge, which is too often lacking at this level.  In post-secondary educational settings, students are often confronted with the need to acquire extensive content knowledge without the necessary skills for acquisition and retention.  Moreover, educational institutions make too little use of potentially available information about the students.  SAT scores, for example, are generally ignored subsequent to initial matriculation.  Personality and interest assessments typically never enter into advising and curricular decision-making.

Another problem that is particularly applicable to non-traditional students is our inability to build on students’ existing knowledge.  Non-traditional students come to the university with a large base of knowledge, but we do not build on it; at traditional 4-year institutions, we treat them the same as any other student.  There is a real need to identify students’ base knowledge profiles in order to further build on them. We need to structure instruction that builds on the domain knowledge that students have. 

Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

If we focus more on what our students know, we can substantially improve their learning.

We spend too much time studying “maximal” performance situations, such as the SAT, when what we are really interested in is long term knowledge retention and use, which is better represented in “typical” performance situations.  Predicting whether a student succeeds beyond the first year of college/university study, remains very much uncharted territory.

What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)?

There is a real disconnect between “cognitive/experimental” psychology and education.  In many ways, cognitive/experimental psychology has failed to concern itself with real-world learning and performance issues.  Bringing educators, policy makers, and applied-oriented cognitive psychologists together may yield an important increment to both basic and applied research concerns. 

Gender differences in educational settings – especially at the level of higher education are currently understudied.  It is an easily identified problem that needs more research, especially in light of the well-researched basis for gender differences in basic cognitive and affective traits.

Unfortunately, though, many of the findings from empirical research suggest that there are no “easy fixes” to problems of education and achievement.  There is no single button to push or medium in which to present information that represents the perfect educational environment for everyone.  Methods must be found that orient students toward knowledge acquisition, and incrementally improve educational outcomes.  Such solutions are not flashy – they cannot readily be encapsulated in slogans on phrases.  Empirical research aimed at increasing student achievement and retention in higher education must be carefully scaffold in the same way that principled knowledge is.