1. Introduction

Practical (or everyday) cognition is different from the kind of cognition associated with academic success. There are any number of ways in which we see this difference in our everyday lives. We see people who succeed in school and who fail in work, or who fail in school but who succeed in work. We meet people with high academic-test scores who seem inept in their social interactions. And we meet people with low test scores who can get along effectively with practically anyone. Laypersons have long recognized a distinction between academic cognition (book smarts) and practical cognition (street smarts or common sense). This distinction is confirmed by research on the implicit theories of cognition held by both laypersons and researchers (Sternberg, 1985b; Sternberg et al., 1981).

1.1 Academic versus practical cognition

There may be any number of reasons for the apparent difference between academic and practical cognition. We argue that a major source of this difference is the sheer disparity in the nature of the kinds of problems one faces in academic versus practical situations. The problems faced in everyday life often have little relation to the knowledge or skills acquired through formal education or used in classroom activities. Consider the following example of an observation made by Richard Wagner of a garbage collector in Tallahassee, Florida.

Tallahassee, priding itself on the service it provides to its citizens, requires garbage collectors to retrieve trash containers from the backyards of its residents. Each resident fills a large trash container in his or her backyard rather than placing standard-sized garbage cans on the curbside to be picked up. Trash collectors must locate and retrieve each full container from the backyard, heave it into the truck, and then drag the empty container back to each yard. Many of the garbage collectors are young high school dropouts who, because of their lack of education, might be expected to score poorly on cognition tests. On the surface, the job appears to be more physically than cognitively demanding. Each stop requires two trips to the backyard, one to retrieve the full can, and another to return it when it was empty.

One summer it was noticed that the collection routine had changed after a new, older employee joined the crew. This change involved relaxing the constraint that each household retain the same container. Because the trash bins were issued by the city, and not purchased using personal funds, they were identical. The new routine consisted of wheeling the previous house's empty container to the current house's backyard, leaving it to replace the full can, which was in turn wheeled to the truck to be emptied. Once emptied, this can was wheeled to the backyard of the next house to replace its full can, and so on. The new routine required only one trip to each house, where the previous one required two trips. The new employee's insights cut the work nearly in half. This solution had eluded other garbage collectors and the managers who trained them.