Cognitive Psychology and Education Improving Intellectual PerformanceThe material in this chapter leads to many suggestions about how you can improve your performance in academic settings and in a wide range of other settings as well. For example, we know that people often rely on a hill-climbing strategy and therefore get bogged down when a problem requires them to “move backward” briefly in order to “move forward.” Simply knowing this—and, specifically, knowing the limitations of hill climbing—can be useful and might encourage you to continue your efforts even when (unexpectedly) your strategy does seem momentarily to be moving you away from your goal.
Likewise, we know that people underutilize analogies, largely because they tend to focus on the superficial features of the problems they encounter rather than on the problems’ underlying dynamic. You can therefore improve your problem solving by doing more to focus on the deeper structure of the problems you meet. Thus, when thinking about problems that have already been solved, you might ask yourself why exactly the solution gets the job done and what the solution has in common with other problem solutions. That perspective will better prepare you to use the current problem as a basis for a productive analogy at some later point.
As a related point, research indicates that analogy use is more likely if you’ve seen multiple analogues in the past, not just one or two. Presumably, this exposure to multiple examples prompts you to think about what the examples have in common; this in turn will lead you to think about the examples’ underlying dynamic—exactly the right path toward promoting analogy use. This is, by the way, why a series of repetitive homework exercises is often useful. The exercises might seem redundant, but the redundancy turns out to have a function.
Perhaps more important, though, the chapter makes it clear that intellectual performance is often shaped by factors that don’t seem, strictly speaking, to be “intellectual” in nature. Concretely, performance in intellectual pursuits is often undermined by expectations of failure and fears that your poor showing will only confirm people’s worst beliefs about you. Guided by these fears, you’re likely to become anxious, which by itself can undermine your performance. You’re also likely to interpret early frustrations or slow progress as “proof” that the problems you’re working on are actually beyond your abilities. This interpretation can lead you to abandon your efforts or try less hard if you encounter early obstacles.
The factors just described are, of course, what the chapter discusses in terms of stereotype threat. In the chapter, we focused on how this form of threat can lead African Americans to underperform on intelligence tests. Similar factors, some authors argue, can lead women to underperform on math tests. Let’s emphasize, though, that the same factors and the same destructive dynamic can apply to anyone—with the result that many of us, guided by these expectations, do less well on intellectual tasks than we might otherwise.
How can we defeat these forces? Research points the way toward several suggestions. In one study, women did less well on a math test if they came into the test believing that differences between men and women in math abilities are rooted in genetics and, therefore, are unchangeable (Dar-Nimrod