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Originally Posted by ZooKeeper
I don't know that I believe all forms of human behavior are skills, as much as they are talent. You have to have talent before you can learn/acquire a skill. We all start out with different types and quantity of talent. Some people do not have the talent to learn the skill of critical thinking. I agree with what most have been getting at in this thread - that there are many more people who have the ability to learn how to think critically, but do not.
In hindsight, I can relate to what dennisw said about college students. Like many others at that stage in life, my priorities were not in line.
Great thread.
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ZooKeeper--
Sir, the cognitive psychologists address how the concept of 'talent' developed over the centuries in Western civilization. As it turns out, the concept of 'talent' was a product of religious and philosophical writing that is used to exert normative behavior on certain types of individuals and groups. For example, so extremely successful entrepreneurs will practice philanthropy. (FWIW, it took me a while to get my head around this interpretation. Fortunately, the professor teaching the class was patient.)
In contrast to the religious/philosophical interpretation, cognitive psychologists examined a number of skill to determine that it is
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increasingly clear that individuals could dramatically increase their performance [through] education and training, if they had the necessary drive and motivation....[T]he evidence from systematic laboratory research on prodigies and savants provides no evidence for giftedness or innate talent but shows that exceptional abilities are acquired often under optimal environmental conditions.
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These "optimal environmental conditions" include 'directed practice' in which skills are practiced for short intervals and in these sessions errors are corrected the moment they occur. In short, practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.*
The implications of this approach are that if a person has a sufficient level of motivation and has access to expert instruction, he or she can learn
anything and, with enough time, become experts within a domain of knowledge.
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* K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness, “Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition,”
American Psychologist 49:8 (August 1994): 725-747; K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “ The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,”
Psychological Review 100:3 (1993): 363-406; Geoffrey R. Norman and Henk G. Scmidt, “The Psychological Basis of Problem-based Learning: A Review of the Evidence,”
Academic Medicine 67:9 (September 1992):557-565 provide the information used in this post.