2.4 Sternberg's theory of successful cognition

Consistent with Greenspan and Driscoll's distinction between academic and everyday competence is Sternberg's (1985a) distinction between academic and practical cognition. Practical cognition, however, is part of a more comprehensive theory of successful cognition (Sternberg, 1997a). According to the theory, successful cognition is the skill to achieve success in life, given one's personal standards, within one's sociocultural context. One's skill to achieve success depends on one's capitalizing on one's strengths and correcting or compensating for one's weaknesses through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical skills in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments.

The theory of successful cognition, first introduced in second section, serves as the basis for the work described throughout this book on practical cognition and tacit knowledge. We describe in greater detail in this section the main components of the theory. Then we describe a measure designed to assess these components, including the skill to apply knowledge to real-world, practical problems.

Sternberg's theory of successful cognition (Sternberg, 1988, 1997a) seeks to explain in an integrative way the relationship between cognition and (1) the internal world of the individual, or the mental mechanisms that underlie intelligent behavior; (2) experience, or the mediating role of one's passage through life between the internal and external worlds; and (3) the external world of the individual, or the use of cognitive mechanisms in everyday life in order to attain a functional fit to the environment. These three parts of the theory are referred to respectively as the componential subtheory, the experiential subtheory, and the contextual subtheory.

The componential subtheory. The componential subtheory seeks to elucidate the mental processes that underlie intelligent behavior by identifying three basic kinds of information-processing components, referred to as metacomponents, performance components, and knowledge-acquisition components.

Metacomponents are higher order, executive processes used to plan what one is going to do, to monitor it while one is doing it, and evaluate it after it is done. These metacomponents include (1) recognizing the existence of a problem, (2) deciding on the nature of the problem confronting one, (3) selecting a set of lower order processes to solve the problem, (4) selecting a strategy into which to combine these components, (5) selecting mental representation on which the components and strategy can act, (6) allocating one's mental resources, (7) monitoring one's problem solving as it is happening, and (8) evaluating one's problem solving after it is done.

Performance components are lower order processes that execute the instructions of the metacomponents. These components solve the problems according to the plans laid out by the metacomponents. Whereas the number of metacomponents used in the performance of various tasks is relatively limited, the number of performance components is probably quite large, and many are relatively specific to a narrow range of tasks (Sternberg, 1985a). Inductive reasoning tasks such as matrices, analogies, series completion, and classifications involve a set of performance components that provide potential insight into the nature of the general factor of cognition. That is, induction problems of these kinds show the highest loading on the general cognition factor, or g (Jensen, 1980; Snow and Lohman, 1984; Sternberg and Gardner, 1982). The main performance components of inductive reasoning are encoding, inference, mapping, application, comparison, justification, and response.

Knowledge-acquisition components are used to learn how to do what the metacomponents and performance components eventually do. Three knowledge-acquisition components seem to be central in cognitive functioning: (1) selective encoding, (2) selective combination, and (3) selective comparison.