Differential Psychology

1. Differential Psychology

2. Differential Psychology • Mental ability • Intelligence • Prior learning • Cognitive preferences • Personality

4. Mental Ability • Involves one or more of the following themes • Capacity to learn • Total knowledge a person has acquired • Ability to adapt successfully to new situations and to the environment in general

5. Intelligence • IQ • General intelligence: g • Special factors: s • MI Theory?

6. IQ • Intelligence quotient • Mental age/chronological age x 100 • Mean is 100, 68% of population between 85 and 115, only 16% above 115 • Generally holds true for those for whom English is their first language

7. Predicted by IQ scores • Grades, reading comprehension, mathematical knowledge and knowledge of the academic content of the curriculum. • Occupational status, changes in occupational status, acquisition of knowledge in occupational settings, and income in occupations. • Knowledge in areas such as art, law, health, engineering, foreign travel, the Bible, etiquette, fishing, and so on. • Parental scores can predict child achievement as well.

8. g & s • Spearman (1904) -- intelligence consists of multiple factors. One general (g) and others more specific (s) • Every mental test correlated in some degree to other mental tests -- thus "g“ • One factor - said to be major determinant on intelligence tests

9. g & s • Factors within g • Fluid ability: biological ability to acquire knowledge and adapt to new situations and is presumably tapped by intelligence tests • Crystallized ability: Influenced more by acculturation. E.g., is vocabulary knowledge. • Special factors: s • Non-"g" -- specific factors (e.g., music)

10. How can you tell? • Consider convergent and discriminant validity

11. Prior learning • Influences learning • E.g., when activated reading comprehension improves • Amount of recall of text passages was related to prior knowledge when IQ was factored out. • Is most helpful for comprehension of material to be learned • Retention and recall of material • Formal reasoning ability • Assessed through a pretest in the domain • Predicts achievement in college students • Inverse relationship between the amount of prior knowledge and the amount of instructional support needed.

12. Instructional Influences • Well organized instruction facilitated learning for both college and high school students • Adaptive instruction was most useful for students with low prior knowledge • Stereotypic prior knowledge interfered with acquired knowledge • No effect of prior knowledge on selection of independent or teacher-directed learning opportunity for pre-service teachers.

13. Multiple Intelligences • Although the website mentioned MI theory, and it certainly does fit with the discussion of differential psychology, we will cover it in more depth with in biological basis of learning (as Driscoll does). • But, are multiple intelligences intelligences????

14. Cognitive Preferences • Cognitive styles • Learning styles

15. Cognitive Styles • Individuals preferred way of processing and organizing information and of responding to environmental stimuli. • Individuals differ in how they interact with the environment. • Cognitive styles are related to personality.

16. Learning Styles • Learners preferred mode for a particular learning environment (where, when, with whom and with what). • Student achievement increases when learning style is matched with teaching methods. • Differences in patterns of learning styles among cultural groups, and within cultural groups people differ as well.

17. "a dynamic organization, inside a person, of psychophysical systems that create the person's characteristic patterns of behavior, thought and feelings" (Allport, 1961). Introversion/extroversion Achievement Types Agreeableness Emotional stability Openness to experience Personality