Teaching and Testing to Develop Fluid Abilities

Abstract

Fluid abilities are important both as aptitudes for success in formal schooling and as outcomes of formal schooling. However, the aptitude function has been overemphasized, and the outcome function ignored altogether, primarily because fluid abilities are often mistakenly thought to be innate. Two methods for developing and assessing these abilities are discussed. In the first method, students are asked to solve increasingly unfamiliar problems in a domain. This usually requires the adaptation of existing problem-solving strategies or the assembly of new strategies to solve increasingly ill-structured problems. In the second method, students are required to organize knowledge in new ways or to view it from different perspectives. In both cases, assessment requires that students’ personal perspectives be elicited. This raises several difficult philosophical and psychometric problems. These problems and the implications for education are discussed.