Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Beyond IQ Series #10: Introduction to academic interests and attitudes




Background comment regarding this series

Interest in social-emotional learning and resiliency training (click here and here for just two examples) in education has shown a recent uptick on activity. Given this activity, IQs Corner is starting a series to explain the previously articulated Model of Academic Competence and Motivation (MACM), which was a model ahead of it's time (IMHO). The imporance of non-cognitive (conative) characteristics in learning have been articulated since the days of Spearman, the father of the construct of general intelligence. Richard Snow's work on the concept of "aptitude," which integrates cognitive and conative individual difference variables, is the foundation of the Beyond IQ MACM. This material comes a larger set of materials on the web (click here).

Current MACM Series Installment

This 10th installment in the Beyond IQ series introduces the subdomain of interests and attitudes [All installments in this series (and other related posts and research) can be found by clicking here].

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Circumscribing the constructs of academic interests, attitudes, and values is particularly difficult (Corno et al., 2002). As noted by Corno et al., values and attitudes are often classified as affective, interests as both motivational and affective, and beliefs as having both cognitive and volitional characteristics. Furthermore, values and career orientations are often discussed in the context of personality factors. For example, Holland (1973, 1985) developed a theory of personality based on the importance of 6 general career theme orientations (investigative, social, realistic, conventional, artistic, and enterprising).
In this document, I subscribe to Corno et al.’s (2002) decision to group these diverse domains together. Although Corno et al. (1996) included general values and career orientations in their aptitude taxonomy, they are dropped from the current taxonomy due to the paucity of evidence in support of their ability to predict academic or occupational outcomes (Cronbach, 1990).

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