5. Deriving Life Skills from Psychological Theories

Efforts to identify formal lists of employability skills are fairly recent developments. In contrast, the effort to describe and measure human intelligence has a history of over 100 years (Sternberg and Kaufman, 1998). The theories developed fall into a variety of paradigms, such as a psychometric paradigm, a cognitive or computational paradigm, a biological paradigm, an epistemological paradigm, an anthropological paradigm, a sociological paradigm, and a systems paradigm (Sternberg, 1990).

Not all of these paradigms are clearly relevant to our discussion. For example, cognitive theories have been applied primarily to tasks used in the laboratories of cognitive psychologists (e.g., Hunt, 1980) and to psychometric tasks (e.g., Sternberg, 1983), but they have not been equally applied to everyday activities. Thus, it is not clear that they meet the criteria of being necessary for success in life. Biological theories are helpful in relating intellectual functioning to the brain (see Matarazzo, 1994) but do not yet carry any implications for how one might go about understanding or assessing life skills. In an adult context, the epistemological paradigm (Piaget, 1972) has proven very useful for evaluating children's sensorimotor, logical, and scientific thinking skills. It has not, however, been shown to be equally useful for analyzing individual differences in adult performance; this is perhaps because the theory was explicitly proposed as a theory of human commonalities, not as a theory of individual differences. Finally, anthropological and sociological theories (e.g., Berry, 1974; Feuerstein, 1980; Greenfield, 1997; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982) point out the necessity of taking cultural and other contextual variables into account but are far from complete as theories of intelligence, much less life skills.

Because of their comprehensiveness and the fact that they are commonly used to discuss practical skills and abilities, the theories of greatest interest here are psychometric theories and systems theories. Even after limiting the scope to these two types of paradigms, one is still left with a number of theories that seem to make very different claims. Despite this apparent impasse, a closer examination reveals that these theories are in fact complementary. An analysis of the two can then lead toward a theory-based concept of a set of life skills, which can then be compared with the set of skills derived from the employability skills literature.

Psychometric theories

Early psychometric theories of intelligence focused on a single general intellectual ability, G (Spearman, 1904). Although the concept of G is still accepted by many psychometric theorists (see, for example, Jensen, 1998), most modern theories view human abilities as too complex to be captured by a single measure (e.g., Gustafsson, 1988). The large majority of psychometric theorists today accept some kind of hierarchical model with G at the top (e.g., Cattell, 1971) or see G as existing within a range of academic skills (Sternberg, 1997b). In any case, a life skills model requires concepts of intelligence that can be more clearly and more specifically defined, exemplified, and assessed than this broad and elusive concept.