"Instead of building cumulative knowledge around core phenomena, we end up with competing frameworks that may be describing similar underlying realities. Teachers receive mixed messages about what works, not because the evidence is unclear, but because different research communities have wrapped similar insights in different conceptual packaging."
This quote is too long for a T-shirt, but it deserves both airing and wearing--anything to get the message out. In my field of reading it's exemplified by the confusion many have between Mark Seidenberg's triangle model and Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping, both of which reveal the importance of uniting phonology, orthography, and semantics in learning to read. Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist, bases his theory on computational simulations, and Ehri, an educational psychologist, bases hers on empirical studies in the classroom. I communicated with one professor who was familiar with Seidenberg's TM but not Ehri's OM--and yet, it's the latter that is most familiar to teachers. The challenge, as you say, "is developing the conceptual sophistication to distinguish meaningful differences from terminological confusion."
Thanks for bringing this important issue to our attention!
"The glibness with which we differentiate between achievement and intelligence is explained in part by the fact that our language is at fault. To use an illustration given by Thorndike (1904, page 14), the expression "college student," found so frequently in general discussions, covers a multitude of classes: male and female; part time, full time; extension students and those in residence; native, foreign; lower class-[page break] men, upper classmen, graduates ; etc. In each connection the expression "college student " sounds the same, and thus we come to treat it as a single concept. Dr. Thorndike quotes Professor Aikins as describing this as the "jingle" fallacy because there is merely a verbal resemblance and no sufficient underlying factual similarity between the classes.
"Equally contaminating to clear thinking is the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as though they were in truth different. The doing of this latter the writer will call the "jangle" fallacy. "Achievement" and “intelligence" sound as though they were different; they have different "jangles," and thus we treat them as though they were different in truth. There is a modicum of difference between them, and in so far as this only is the issue, it is proper to distinguish them, just as we may use two nearly related words to draw a fine distinction; thus, " He is upright but not honorable" or " He is fearful but not cowardly," etc. Literary ingenuity creates for our entertainment the man who is fearful but not a coward. It may be that such men exist in blood and bone, but certainly by no known means can the rank and file be classified separately upon these two traits. Nor can they upon the of achievement and intelligence. We can mentally conceive of individuals differing in these two traits, and we can occasionally actually find such by using the best of our instruments of mental measurement, but to classify all the members of a single school grade upon the basis of their difference in these two traits is a sheer absurdity. The deviation of achievement- age-minus-mental-age from zero, or of achievement-age- divided-by-mental-age from 1.00, are such measures of difference, and neither is ordinarily to be trusted." (pp. 63-64)
And because I tend to go down the rabbit hole on things like this, I discovered that "Professor Aikins" is actually Herbert Austin Aikins.
Thank you so much for this extended excerpt. I asked ChatGPT to explain the penultimate sentence. Do you agree with this statement:
"Just comparing a child’s academic performance to their measured cognitive ability—using subtraction or ratios—doesn’t give a clear or trustworthy picture of how well they’re doing or what they need. These methods were once common, but they are now considered too simplistic."
Language is a slippery thing. Suppose you try to pin down meaning, particularly in conversations in the staffroom or at an educational conference. In these cases, you are likely to either generate a lot of silence or even an accusation of pedantry. It's even more complicated when terminology is associated with external frames of reference. The most obvious example of this is political beliefs, as you pointed out when you wrote about AERO. Perhaps it's inevitable when we work in a social science, and it's something we have to navigate through discourse, but it's exhausting.
With regard to "language is a slippery thing," your comment reminds me of this Samuel Johnson quote, from the preface to his famous dictionary: "When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation."
This is like how the current fad of "Deep Reading" (Wolf, 2018) is pretty much the same "active reading" that Mortimer Adler was talking about in 1940.
It's also similar to how grit, growth mindset, meritocracy, deficit ideology, and and "back to basics" keeps rearing its ugly head in different iterations under new names. More recently, with "science of..." movements.
Big Lies of Education: Growth Mindset and Grit, by P. L. Thomas:
"Despite the lack of evidence to support either growth mindset or grit, both continue to be implemented in many schools; some scholars raise concerns that this support is driven by ideology (deficit ideology, bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy) and racism/classism."
"Instead of building cumulative knowledge around core phenomena, we end up with competing frameworks that may be describing similar underlying realities. Teachers receive mixed messages about what works, not because the evidence is unclear, but because different research communities have wrapped similar insights in different conceptual packaging."
This quote is too long for a T-shirt, but it deserves both airing and wearing--anything to get the message out. In my field of reading it's exemplified by the confusion many have between Mark Seidenberg's triangle model and Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping, both of which reveal the importance of uniting phonology, orthography, and semantics in learning to read. Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist, bases his theory on computational simulations, and Ehri, an educational psychologist, bases hers on empirical studies in the classroom. I communicated with one professor who was familiar with Seidenberg's TM but not Ehri's OM--and yet, it's the latter that is most familiar to teachers. The challenge, as you say, "is developing the conceptual sophistication to distinguish meaningful differences from terminological confusion."
Thanks for bringing this important issue to our attention!
Here is the original extract from Kelley:
"The glibness with which we differentiate between achievement and intelligence is explained in part by the fact that our language is at fault. To use an illustration given by Thorndike (1904, page 14), the expression "college student," found so frequently in general discussions, covers a multitude of classes: male and female; part time, full time; extension students and those in residence; native, foreign; lower class-[page break] men, upper classmen, graduates ; etc. In each connection the expression "college student " sounds the same, and thus we come to treat it as a single concept. Dr. Thorndike quotes Professor Aikins as describing this as the "jingle" fallacy because there is merely a verbal resemblance and no sufficient underlying factual similarity between the classes.
"Equally contaminating to clear thinking is the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as though they were in truth different. The doing of this latter the writer will call the "jangle" fallacy. "Achievement" and “intelligence" sound as though they were different; they have different "jangles," and thus we treat them as though they were different in truth. There is a modicum of difference between them, and in so far as this only is the issue, it is proper to distinguish them, just as we may use two nearly related words to draw a fine distinction; thus, " He is upright but not honorable" or " He is fearful but not cowardly," etc. Literary ingenuity creates for our entertainment the man who is fearful but not a coward. It may be that such men exist in blood and bone, but certainly by no known means can the rank and file be classified separately upon these two traits. Nor can they upon the of achievement and intelligence. We can mentally conceive of individuals differing in these two traits, and we can occasionally actually find such by using the best of our instruments of mental measurement, but to classify all the members of a single school grade upon the basis of their difference in these two traits is a sheer absurdity. The deviation of achievement- age-minus-mental-age from zero, or of achievement-age- divided-by-mental-age from 1.00, are such measures of difference, and neither is ordinarily to be trusted." (pp. 63-64)
And because I tend to go down the rabbit hole on things like this, I discovered that "Professor Aikins" is actually Herbert Austin Aikins.
Thank you so much for this extended excerpt. I asked ChatGPT to explain the penultimate sentence. Do you agree with this statement:
"Just comparing a child’s academic performance to their measured cognitive ability—using subtraction or ratios—doesn’t give a clear or trustworthy picture of how well they’re doing or what they need. These methods were once common, but they are now considered too simplistic."
Language is a slippery thing. Suppose you try to pin down meaning, particularly in conversations in the staffroom or at an educational conference. In these cases, you are likely to either generate a lot of silence or even an accusation of pedantry. It's even more complicated when terminology is associated with external frames of reference. The most obvious example of this is political beliefs, as you pointed out when you wrote about AERO. Perhaps it's inevitable when we work in a social science, and it's something we have to navigate through discourse, but it's exhausting.
With regard to "language is a slippery thing," your comment reminds me of this Samuel Johnson quote, from the preface to his famous dictionary: "When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation."
This is like how the current fad of "Deep Reading" (Wolf, 2018) is pretty much the same "active reading" that Mortimer Adler was talking about in 1940.
It's also similar to how grit, growth mindset, meritocracy, deficit ideology, and and "back to basics" keeps rearing its ugly head in different iterations under new names. More recently, with "science of..." movements.
Big Lies of Education: Growth Mindset and Grit, by P. L. Thomas:
"Despite the lack of evidence to support either growth mindset or grit, both continue to be implemented in many schools; some scholars raise concerns that this support is driven by ideology (deficit ideology, bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy) and racism/classism."
https://radicalscholarship.com/2025/05/05/reconsidering-growth-mindset-and-grit-evidence-overview/
Completely agree that this fallacy makes it far easier to dismiss new ideas under the 'seen it all before' mantra! Thank you for posting.
On a similar note, is there a meaningful difference between short term memory and working memory? Or do they describe the same idea?
I recently read a book that talks about both, with working memory considered a sub-category of short term memory but it just confused me!