CHC definition project

FYI post for those who may be unaware of this activity.

The Institute for Applied Psychometrics (IAP), in conjunction with Evans Consulting, recently initiated the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Definition Project as part of the Carroll Human Cognitive Abilities Project.

The primary goal of the CHC Definition Project is to continue the legacy of intelligence scholars who have contributed to the development of the CHC (Gf-Gc) taxonomy of human cognitive abilities, via the provision of a clearinghouse mechanism by which to reach consensus definitions of the major narrow (stratum I) and broad (stratum II) abilities that have been identified. Based on Carroll's (1993) treatise on the factor structure of human cognitive abilities, I (McGrew,1997--chapter in Flanagan et al., 1997, CAI1 book) originally abstracted brief definitions of the narrow and broad CHC abilities.

The real story behind the development of these definitions is that after abstracting rough draft definitions from Jack Carroll's book, I sent them to Dr. Carroll. He graciously took time to comment and edit this draft. I subsequently revised the defintions and sent them back. Jack and I went through a number of iterations until he was generally comfortable with the working definitions. So, the original definitions published in my 1997 book chapter did have the informal stamp of approval of Dr. Carroll --- that, my folks, "is the rest of the story."

These definitions were recently revised, expanded, and clarified and have been posted at the CHC Definition Project web page . The revised "working" definitions are based on a review of ability definitions from a variety of sources, including Carroll (1993), the original ETS Factor Reference Work group publications (Ekstrom et al., 1979), the Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence (Sternberg, 1994), the Dictionary of Psychology (Corsini, 1999), and recent published research.

Please send comments, suggestions, etc., regarding any aspect of these definitions (i.e., organization, labels, examples, wording, etc.) to the blogmaster at iap@earthlink.net.

For those interested in the HCA project, IAP is continuting to search for funding mechanisms to "kick start" this time-intensive activity. If you have ideas, please send them along.

Keywords: CHC teaching tool