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High Ability Studies

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Giftedness as Developing
Expertise: A theory of the
interface between high
abilities and achieved
excellence
Robert J. Sternberg
Published online: 14 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Robert J. Sternberg (2001) Giftedness as Developing Expertise: A

theory of the interface between high abilities and achieved excellence, High Ability
Studies, 12:2, 159-179, DOI: 10.1080/13598130120084311

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 High Ability Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2001

Giftedness as Developing Expertise: a

theory of the interface between high
abilities and achieved excellence
ROBERT J. STERNBERG

This article describes how giftedness can be viewed as developing expertise. The general
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conception of giftedness as developing expertise is outlined. Then research examples are

given that, in conjunction, seem odd under traditional interpretations of abilities but that
make sense as a whole in the context of the developing expertise model. It is concluded that
this new model offers potential for better understanding the nature of giftedness.

Giftedness as Developing Expertise

There are two basic kinds of views of abilities and how they contribute to giftedness
(see Heller et al., 2001). One view is that giftedness is some relatively stable attribute
of individuals that develops as an interaction between heredity and environment.
This view is based on conventional views of abilities (e.g. Spearman, 1927; Thur-
stone, 1938; Guilford, 1967), which view intelligence as a relatively static entity.
Although certain kinds of intelligence may increase or decrease with age, rank orders
remain fairly stable. Even modern theories often take this position, whether they
suggest one kind of ability or many kinds (e.g. Carroll, 1993; Ceci, 1996; Gallagher
& Courtright, 1986; Gardner, 2000; Jensen, 1998; Renzulli, 1978, 1986; Sternberg,
1985; see essays in Sternberg & Davidson, 1986). An alternative view is that
giftedness is to be found within a zone of proximal development—that it is an
unusual ability to advance from abilities that are ready to be developed to those that
are developed (Feuerstein, 1979; Vygotsky, 1978; see also Kanevsky, 1992; More-
lock, 2000, for descriptions of how this view applies to giftedness, and Grigorenko
& Sternberg, 1998; Lidz, 1987, 1991, for discussions of issues of assessment).
The argument of this article is that a particular construct, that of developing
expertise, can integrate these two views of giftedness—one static, the other dynamic.
In speaking of developing expertise, I refer to the path from rank-novice level
accomplishment to the most outstanding, distinguished accomplishment—a path
whose end can be approximated but perhaps never quite reached. This view is based

Author’s address: Robert J. Sternberg, Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205,
New Haven, CT 06520–8205, USA.

ISSN 1359-8139 print; 1469-834X online/01/020159-21 Ó 2001 European Council for High Ability
DOI: 10.1080/13598130120084311
 160 R. J. Sternberg

on that of Sternberg (1998, 1999a, 2000a), according to which abilities can be

viewed as forms of developing expertise.
On this view, intelligence tests and related tests can be viewed as measuring not
some prior existing set of abilities, but rather, developing expertise. Developing
expertise is deŽ ned here as the ongoing process of the acquisition and consolidation
of a set of skills needed for a high level of mastery in one or more domains of life
performance. Good performance on any kinds of tests requires a certain kind of
expertise, and to the extent this expertise overlaps with the expertise required by
schooling or by the workplace, there will be a correlation between the tests and
performance in school or in the workplace. But such correlations represent no
intrinsic relation between abilities and other kinds of performance, but rather,
overlaps in the kinds of expertise needed to perform well under different kinds of
circumstances.
The main goal of this article is to develop neither a new theory of abilities nor a
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new theory of expertise. Rather, it is to develop what, it is hoped, is a somewhat

novel theory of the relation between abilities and expertise. Rather than viewing them
as two distinct constructs to be studied separately, the article views them as
completely intertwined.
There is nothing privileged about ability tests. One could as easily use, say,
academic achievement to predict ability-related scores. For example, it is as simple
to use the SAT-II (a measure of achievement) to predict the SAT-I (a measure
formerly called the Scholastic Assessment Test and before that the Scholastic
Aptitude Test) as vice versa, and of course, the levels of prediction will be the same.
Both tests measure achievement, although the kinds of achievements they measure
are different. Indeed, verbal skills tests that are called measures of achievement on
some tests (e.g. the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children—Kaufman & Kauf-
man, 1983) are called measures of achievement on other tests (e.g. the Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children III—Wechsler, 1991).
According to this view, although ability tests may have temporal priority relative
to various criteria in their administration (i.e. ability tests are administered Ž rst, and
later, criterion indices of performance, such as grades or achievement test scores, are
collected), they have no psychological priority. All of the various kinds of assess-
ments are of the same kind psychologically. What distinguishes ability tests from
other kinds of assessments is how the ability tests are used (usually predictively)
rather than what they measure. There is no qualitative distinction among the various
kinds of assessments. All tests measure various kinds of developing expertise.
Conventional tests of intelligence and related abilities measure achievement that
individuals should have accomplished several years back (see also Anastasi &
Urbina, 1997). Tests such as vocabulary, reading comprehension, verbal analogies,
arithmetic problem-solving, and the like are all, in part, tests of achievement. Even
abstract reasoning tests measure achievement in dealing with geometric symbols,
which are skills taught in Western schools (Laboratory of Comparative Human
Cognition, 1982; Serpell, 2000). One might as well use academic performance to
predict ability test scores. The problem regarding the traditional model is not in its
statement of a correlation between ability tests and other forms of achievement but
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 161

in its proposal of a causal relation whereby the tests re ect a construct that is
somehow causal of, rather than merely temporally antecedent to, later success.
Some tests do not appear to measure school achievement, and so might seem
immune from the developing expertise argument. Non-verbal, abstract reasoning
tests would seem to be examples of such tests. But the opposite is true. The skills
required to do such tests appear to be those most affected by schooling, and scores
on such tests are the ones that are most susceptible to educational effects (Ceci,
1996; Neisser, 1998). Thus, we should not assume that because a test does not
appear, on the surface, to measure developing expertise, that it actually is not.
Logical reasoning skills are to a large extent school-socialized.
The developing expertise view in no way rules out the contribution of genetic
factors as a source of individual differences in who will be able to develop a given
amount of expertise. Many human attributes, including intelligence, re ect the
covariation and interaction of genetic and environmental factors. But the contribu-
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tion of genes to an individual’s intelligence cannot be directly measured or even

directly estimated. Rather, what is measured is a portion of what is expressed,
namely, manifestations of developing expertise, the kind of expertise that potentially
leads to re ective practitioners in a variety of Ž elds (Schön, 1983). This approach to
measurement is used explicitly by Royer et al. (1996), who have shown that it is
possible to develop measurements of reading skill re ecting varying levels of devel-
oping expertise. In such assessments, outcome measures re ect not simply quanti-
tative assessments of skill, but qualitative differences in the types of developing
expertise that have emerged (e.g. ability to understand technical text material, ability
to draw inferences from this material, or ability to draw out “big ideas” in technical
text).
According to this view, measures of abilities should be correlated with later
success, because both measures of intelligence and various measures of success
require developing expertise of related types. For example, both typically require
what I have referred to as metacomponents of thinking: recognition of problems,
deŽ nition of problems, formulation of strategies to solve problems, representation of
information, allocation of resources, and monitoring and evaluation of problem
solutions. These skills develop as results of gene–environment covariation and
interaction. If we wish to call them intelligence, that is certainly Ž ne, so long as we
recognize that what we are calling intelligence and related abilities represent a form
of developing expertise.
Gifted individuals, then, are those who develop expertise at a more rapid rate, or to a
higher level, or to a qualitatively different kind of level than do non-gifted individuals.
Gifted individuals show greater promise for the development of expertise than do
non-gifted individuals, but they show such promise by means of assessment that are
themselves measures of developing expertise. We can view such measures as predic-
tive of later gifted performance, but they are themselves assessments of kinds of
gifted performance. The predictors do not differ qualitatively from the criteria,
except, perhaps, in our minds as a form of wishful thinking.
A major goal of work under the point of view presented here is to integrate the
study of intelligence and related abilities (see reviews in Sternberg, 1990, 1994a,
 162 R. J. Sternberg

2000b) with the study of expertise (Chi et al., 1988; Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson &
Smith, 1991; Hoffman, 1992; Shore, 2000). These literatures, typically viewed as
distinct, are here viewed as ultimately involved with the same psychological mecha-
nisms. According to this view, then, abilities and expertise are two different faces of
the same coin.1

The SpeciŽ cs of the Developing Expertise Model

The speciŽ cs of the developing expertise model are shown in Figure 1. At the heart
of the model is the notion of developing expertise—that individuals are constantly in
a process of developing expertise when they work within a given domain. They may
and do, of course, differ in rate and asymptote of development. Gifted individuals
show faster rates or higher asymptotes of development. The main constraint in
achieving expertise is not some Ž xed prior level of capacity, but purposeful engage-
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ment involving direct instruction, active participation, role modeling, and reward.

Elements of the Model

The model of developing expertise has Ž ve key elements (although certainly they do
not constitute an exhaustive list of elements in the development of expertise):
metacognitive skills, learning skills, thinking skills, knowledge, and motivation.
Gifted individuals excel in the development of expertise in some combination of
these elements, and, at high levels of giftedness, in all of them. Although it is
convenient to separate these Ž ve elements, they are fully interactive, as shown in
Figure 1. They in uence each other, both directly and indirectly. For example,
learning leads to knowledge, but knowledge facilitates further learning.
These elements are, to a large extent, domain-speciŽ c. The development of
expertise in one area does not necessarily lead to the development of expertise in
another area, although there may be some transfer, depending upon the relationship
of the areas, a point that has been made with regard to intelligence by others as well
(e.g. Gardner, 1983, 1999, 2000; Sternberg, 1997, 1999b).
In the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 1985, 1997, 1999b), intelli-
gence is viewed as having three aspects: analytical, creative, and practical. Our
research suggests that the development of expertise in one creative domain (Stern-
berg & Lubart, 1995) or in one practical domain (Sternberg et al., 1995; Sternberg,
Forsythe et al., 2000) shows modest correlations with the development of expertise
in other such domains. Psychometric research suggests more domain generality for
the analytical domain (Jensen, 1998). Moreover, people can show analytical, cre-
ative, or practical expertise in one domain without showing all three of these kinds
of expertise, or even two of the three.

1. Metacognitive skills. Metacognitive skills (or metacomponents—Sternberg, 1985)

refer to people’s understanding and control of their own cognition. For example,
such skills would encompass what an individual knows about writing papers or
solving arithmetic word problems, both with regard to the steps that are involved
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 163
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Figure 1. The developing expertise model

and with regard to how these steps can be executed effectively. Seven metacognitive
skills are particularly important: problem recognition, problem deŽ nition, problem
representation, strategy formulation, resource allocation, monitoring of problem-
solving, and evaluation of problem-solving (Sternberg, 1985, 1986). All of these
skills are modiŽ able (Sternberg, 1986, 1988; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2000; Stern-
berg & Spear-Swerling, 1996). Gifted individuals excel in metacognitive skills
(Borkowski & Peck, 1986; Jackson & ButterŽ eld, 1986; Shore, 2000).

2. Learning skills. Learning skills (knowledge acquisition components) are essential

to the model (Sternberg, 1985, 1986), although they are certainly not the only
learning skills that individuals use. Learning skills are sometimes divided into
explicit and implicit ones. Explicit learning is what occurs when we make an effort
to learn; implicit learning is what occurs when we pick up information incidentally,
without any systematic effort. Examples of learning skills are selective encoding,
which involves distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information; selective combi-
nation, which involves putting together the relevant information; and selective
comparison, which involves relating new information to information already stored
in memory (Sternberg, 1985).
 164 R. J. Sternberg

3. Thinking skills. There are three main kinds of thinking skills (or performance
components) that individuals need to master (Sternberg, 1985, 1986, 1994b). It is
important to note that these are sets of, rather than individual, thinking skills.
Critical (analytical) thinking skills include analyzing, critiquing, judging, evaluating,
comparing and contrasting, and assessing. Creative thinking skills include creating,
discovering, inventing, imagining, supposing, and hypothesizing. Practical thinking
skills include applying, using, utilizing, and practicing (Sternberg, 1997; Sternberg
& Grigorenko, 2000). They are the Ž rst step in the translation of thought into
real-world action.

4. Knowledge. There are two main kinds of knowledge that are relevant in academic
situations. Declarative knowledge is of facts, concepts, principles, laws, and the like.
It is “knowing that.” Procedural knowledge is of procedures and strategies. It is
“knowing how.” Of particular importance is procedural tacit knowledge, which
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involves knowing how the system functions in which one is operating (Sternberg et
al., 1995; Sternberg & Forsythe et al., 2000).

5. Motivation. One can distinguish among several different kinds of motivation. A

Ž rst kind of motivation is achievement motivation (McClelland, 1985; McClelland
et al., 1976). People who are high in achievement motivation seek moderate
challenges and risks. They are attracted to tasks that are neither very easy nor very
hard. They are strivers—constantly trying to better themselves and their accomplish-
ments.
A second kind of motivation is competence (self-efŽ cacy) motivation, which refers
to persons’ beliefs in their own ability to solve the problem at hand (Bandura, 1977,
1996). Experts need to develop a sense of their own efŽ cacy to solve difŽ cult tasks
in their domain of expertise. This kind of self-efŽ cacy can result both from intrinsic
and extrinsic rewards (Amabile, 1996; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). Of course, other
kinds of motivation are important too. Indeed, motivation is perhaps the indispens-
able element needed for school success. Without it, the student never even tries to
learn.
A third kind of motivation is motivation to develop one’s own intellectual skills.
Dweck (1999) has distinguished between “entity” and “incremental” theorists
among children. The former believe intelligence largely to be Ž xed; the latter believe
it to be modiŽ able. Those who believe that intelligence is modiŽ able are more likely
to make the effort to improve their skills simply because they believe that these skills
are subject to improvement.

6. Context. All of the elements discussed are characteristics of the learner. Returning
to the issues raised at the beginning of this document, a problem with conventional
tests is that they assume that individuals operate in a more or less decontextualized
environment. A test score is interpreted largely in terms of the individual’s internal
attributes. But a test measures much more, and the assumption of a Ž xed or uniform
context across test takers is not realistic. Contextual factors that can affect test
performance include native language, emphasis of test on speedy performance,
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 165

importance to the test taker of success on the test, and familiarity with the kinds of
material on the test (Ceci, 1996; Sternberg, 1997). I go on to discuss studies
showing how context can affect test performance.

Interactions of Elements
The novice works toward expertise through deliberate practice. But this practice
requires an interaction of all Ž ve of the key elements. At the center, driving the
elements, is motivation. Without it, the elements remain inert. Eventually, one
reaches a kind of expertise, at which one becomes a re ective practitioner of a
certain set of skills. But expertise occurs at many levels. The expert Ž rst-year
graduate or law student, for example, is still a far cry from the expert professional.
People thus cycle through many times, on the way to successively higher levels of
expertise. They do so through the elements in Figure 1. Those who are able to
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combine the elements in a particularly effective way so as to advance more quickly

to expertise, or to a quantitatively higher level of expertise, or to a qualitatively
superior kind of expertise, are called gifted. Those who merely show up as gifted on
tests when they are young, but not in more consequential kinds of performance
when they are older, often are viewed as gifted individuals who failed to fulŽ ll their
potential. This explanation may be correct, or it may simply be that the main
expertise of these individuals was in taking tests of the kinds used to label young
people as gifted.
Motivation drives metacognitive skills, which in turn activate learning and think-
ing skills, which then provide feedback to the metacognitive skills, enabling one’s
level of expertise to increase (see also Sternberg, 1985). The declarative and
procedural knowledge acquired through the extension of the thinking and learning
skills also results in these skills being used more effectively in the future.
All of these processes are affected by, and can in turn affect, the context in which
they operate. For example, if a learning experience is in English but the learner has
only limited English proŽ ciency, his or her learning will be inferior to that of
someone with more advanced English language skills. Or if material is presented
orally to someone who is a better visual learner, that individual’s performance will
be reduced.
The developing expertise model is not, strictly speaking, competitive with theories
of the structure of intelligence, such as those of Gardner (1999), Guilford (1967),
Spearman (1927), Sternberg (1997) or other theories. Rather, it is a way of viewing
the structures posited in those theories—namely, as  exible rather than Ž xed, and as
dynamic rather than static.
How does this model of developing expertise relate to the construct of intelligence
and to other abilities as well?

How the Developing Expertise Model Accounts for the g-Factor

Some intelligence theorists point to the stability of the alleged general factor of
human intelligence as evidence for the existence of some kind of stable and
 166 R. J. Sternberg

overriding structure of human intelligence. Theorists of giftedness might then view

gifted individuals as those who excel in this general ability (e.g. Gallagher &
Courtright, 1986). But the existence of a g factor may re ect little more than an
interaction between whatever latent (and not directly measurable) abilities individu-
als may have and the kinds of expertise that are developed in school. With different
forms of schooling, g could be made either stronger or weaker. In effect, Western
forms and related forms of schooling may, in part, create the g phenomenon by
providing a kind of schooling that teaches in conjunction the various kinds of skills
measured by tests of intellectual abilities. Individuals may be identiŽ ed as “gifted”
because they possess abilities that are key to performance only in somewhat limited
spheres of human endeavor. Thus, high levels of g re ect a high level of developing
expertise of the kind schools value and attempt to socialize in their students.
Suppose, for example, that children were selected from an early age to be schooled
for a certain trade. Throughout most of human history, this is in fact the way most
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children were schooled. Boys, at least, were apprenticed at an early age to a master
who would teach them a trade. There was no point in their learning skills that would
be irrelevant to their lives. To bring the example into the present, imagine that we
decided that certain students, from an early age, would study English (or some other
native language) to develop language expertise; other students would study math-
ematics to develop their mathematical expertise. Still other students might specialize
in developing spatial expertise to be used in  ying airplanes or doing shop work or
whatever. Instead of specialization beginning at the university level, it would begin
from the age of Ž rst schooling.
This point of view is related to, but different from, that typically associated with
the theory of crystallized and  uid intelligence (Cattell, 1971; Horn, 1994). In that
theory,  uid ability is viewed as an ability to acquire and reason with information
whereas crystallized ability is viewed as the information so acquired. According to
this view, schooling primarily develops crystallized ability, based in part upon the
 uid ability the individual brings to bear upon school-like tasks. In the theory
proposed here, however, both  uid and crystallized ability are roughly equally
susceptible to development through schooling or other means societies create for
developing expertise. One could argue that the greater validity of the position
presented here is shown by the near-ubiquitous Flynn effect (Flynn, 1987; Neisser,
1998), which documents massive gains in IQ around the world throughout most of
the twentieth century. The effect must be due to environment, because large genetic
changes worldwide in such a short time frame are virtually impossible. Interestingly,
gains are substantially larger in  uid abilities than in crystallized abilities, suggesting
that  uid abilities are likely to be as susceptible as or probably more susceptible than
crystallized abilities to environmental in uences. Clearly, the notion of  uid abilities
as some basic genetic potential one brings into the world, whose development is
expressed in crystallized abilities, does not work.
These students, then, would be given an omnibus test of intelligence or any
broad-ranging measure of intelligence. There would be no general factor because
people schooled in one form of expertise would not have been schooled in others.
One can imagine even negative correlations between subscores on the so-called
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 167

intelligence test. The reason for the negative correlations would be that developing
expertise in one area might preclude developing expertise in another because of the
form of schooling.

How General is the g Factor: data calling the g factor into question
This line of argument regarding negative correlations is not merely hypothetical. In
a collaborative study among 85 children between the ages of 12 and 15 near
Kisumu, Kenya (see Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997; Sternberg et al., in press), we
devised a test of practical intelligence that measures informal knowledge for an
important aspect of adaptation to the environment in rural Kenya, namely, knowl-
edge of the identities and use of natural herbal medicines that could be used to
combat illnesses. The children use this informal knowledge an average of once a
week in treating themselves or suggesting treatments to other children, so this
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knowledge is a routine part of their everyday existence. By informal knowledge, we are

referring to kinds of knowledge not taught in schools and not assessed on tests given
in the schools. The idea of our research was that children who knew what these
medicines were, what they were used for, and how they should be dosed would be
in a position better to adapt to their environments than would children without this
informal knowledge.
We found substantial individual differences in the tacit knowledge of like-aged
and schooled children about these natural herbal medicines. More important,
however, was the correlation between scores on this test and scores on an English
language vocabulary test (the Mill Hill), a Dholuo equivalent (Dholuo is the
community and home language), and the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices. We
found signiŽ cantly negative correlations between our test and the English language
vocabulary test. Correlations of our test with the other tests were trivial. The better
children did on the test of indigenous tacit knowledge, the worse they did on the test
of vocabulary used in school, and vice versa. Why might we have obtained such a
Ž nding?
Based on ethnographic observation, we believe a possible reason is that parents in
the village may emphasize either a more indigenous or a more Western education.
Some parents (and their children) see little value to school. They do not see how
success in school connects with the future of children who will spend their whole
lives in a village, where they do not believe they need the expertise the school
teaches. Other parents and children seem to see Western schooling as of value in
itself or potentially as a ticket out of the conŽ nes of the village. The parents thus
tend to emphasize one type of education or the other for their children, with
corresponding results. The kinds of developing expertise the families value differ,
and so, therefore, do scores on the tests. From this point of view, the intercorrela-
tional structure of tests tells us nothing intrinsic about the structure of intelligence
per se, but rather, something about the way abilities as developing forms of expertise
structure themselves in interaction with the demands of the environment. Someone
could be gifted in terms of the skills needed to adapt to the environment, and yet do
poorly on conventional tests of intelligence and in school. Gifted musicians, athletes,
 168 R. J. Sternberg

artists, and others may choose to sacriŽ ce the development of academic skills in
favor of the development of skills relevant to the domains in which they wish to
become world-class experts.
This Ž nding suggests that both academic and practical skills represent somewhat
different forms of developing expertise. Usually, they are, perhaps, developed in
tandem, leading to a g factor, but in special circumstances, they may not be
developed in tandem and may even be developed in opposition to each other.
Children may develop academic skills or practical skills, but limitations in time and
other resources tend to steer them in one direction or the other. In the Kenyan case,
this divergence produced a negative correlation between the two kinds of developing
expertise. So, it would be foolish to speak of a single group as gifted. Students may
be academically or practically gifted or, in exceptional circumstances, may be gifted
in both ways. But we cannot routinely expect such dual gifts as a matter of principle
or practice.
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Nuñes (1994) has reported related Ž ndings based on a series of studies she
conducted in Brazil (see also Ceci & Roazzi, 1994). Street children’s adaptive
intelligence is tested to the limit by their ability to form and successfully run a street
business. If they fail to run such a business successfully, they risk either starvation
or death at the hands of death squads should they resort to stealing. Nuñes and her
collaborators have found that the same children who are doing the mathematics
needed for running a successful street business cannot well do the same types of
mathematics problems presented in an abstract, paper-and-pencil format.
From a conventional abilities standpoint, this result is puzzling. From a develop-
ing expertise standpoint, it is not. Street children grow up in an environment that
fosters the development of practical but not academic mathematical skills. We know
that even conventional academic kinds of expertise often fail to show transfer (e.g.
Gick & Holyoak, 1980). It is scarcely surprising, then, that there would be little
transfer here. The street children have developed the kinds of practical arithmetical
expertise they need for survival and even success, but they will get no credit for these
skills when they take a conventional abilities test.
It also seems likely that if the scales were reversed, and privileged children who do
well on conventional ability tests or in school were forced out on the street, many of
them would not survive long. Indeed, in the ghettoes of urban America, many
children and adults who, for one reason or another end up on the street, in fact
barely survive or do not make it at all.
Jean Lave (1989) has reported similar Ž ndings with Berkeley housewives shopping
in supermarkets. There is no correlation between their ability to do the mathematics
needed for comparison shopping and their scores on conventional paper-and-pencil
tests of comparable mathematical skills. And Ceci and Liker (1986) found, similarly,
that expert (one might say “gifted”) handicappers at race tracks generally had only
average IQs. There was no correlation between the complexity of the mathematical
model they used in handicapping and their scores on conventional tests. In each
case, important kinds of developing expertise for life were not adequately re ected
by the kinds of developing expertise measured by the conventional ability tests.
One could argue that these results merely re ect the fact that the problem that
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 169

these studies raise is not with conventional theories of abilities, but with the tests
that are loosely based on these theories: These tests do not measure street math-
ematics, but more abstracted forms of mathematical thinking. But psychometric
theories, I would argue, deal with a similarly abstracted general factor. The abstrac-
ted tests follow largely from the abstracted theoretical constructs. In fact, our
research has shown that tests of practical intelligence generally do not correlate
with scores on these abstracted tests (e.g. Sternberg et al., 1995; Sternberg et al.,
2000).
The Nuñes, Lave, and Ceci Ž ndings suggest that what is superŽ cially the same
expertise may in fact be quite different at a deeper level. Individuals are not just
“good” at some kind of numerical factor (Thurstone, 1938) or even mathematical
intelligence (Gardner, 1999). Rather, how good they are depends on the context in
which they use these skills—in other words, upon the expertise they have developed
in one setting or another. An individual might be gifted in making deals on the
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street—knowing when and how to compute mark-ups, mark downs, and proŽ t
Ž gures—and be quite plodding in doing structurally isomorphic problems in the
classroom. Or an individual might appear to be gifted on classroom-based math-
ematical tests but be unable to use these skills on the street. The distinction need not
be so extreme: Many of us who have taught statistics and then worked with students
in research have found that there can be a large discrepancy between the students’
performance on a classroom test and in actually analyzing real statistical data from
an experiment. The kinds of expertise can be quite different.

Three Aspects of Giftedness as Developing Expertise: analytical, creative, and practical

The problem with the conventional model of abilities does not just apply in what to
us are exotic cultures or exotic occupations. In a collaborative study with Michel
Ferrari, Pamela Clinkenbeard, and Elena Grigorenko (Sternberg et al., 1996; Stern-
berg et al., 1999), 326 high school students identiŽ ed as gifted were tested for
their analytical, creative, and practical abilities via multiple-choice and essay items.
The multiple-choice items were divided into three content domains: verbal,
quantitative, and Ž gural pictures. Consider three examples of item types. A verbal
practical item type asked students to solve school adjustment problems faced
by students their own age. A quantitative creative problem type required students
to solve numerical problems with novel number operations. For example, one
numerical operation (e.g. addition) might be performed if the Ž rst number to be
operated on was greater than the second, and another numerical operation (e.g.
subtraction) might be performed if the second number was greater than the Ž rst.
A Ž gural analytical item type asked students to solve matrix problems. Students’
scores were factor analyzed and then later correlated with their performance in a
college-level introductory-psychology course (taken by 199 of the original 326
students tested).
We found that when students were tested not only for analytical abilities, but for
creative and practical abilities too (as follows from the model of successful intelli-
gence, Sternberg, 1985, 1997), the strong general factor that tends to result from
 170 R. J. Sternberg

multiple-ability tests becomes much weaker. Of course, there is always some general
factor when one factor analyzes but does not rotate the factor solution, but the
general factor was weak, and of course disappeared with a varimax rotation. We also
found that all of analytical, creative, and practical abilities predicted performance in
the introductory psychology course (which itself was taught analytically, creatively,
or practically, with assessments to match). Moreover, although the students who
were identiŽ ed as high analytical were the traditional population—primarily white,
middle to upper middle class, and well educated, the students who were identiŽ ed
as high creative or high practical were much more diverse in all of these attributes.
Most importantly, students whose instruction better matched their triarchic pattern
of abilities outperformed those students whose instruction more poorly matched
their triarchic pattern of abilities.
This result is not limited to the USA. In a recent study, we tested over 2000
students in the USA, Spain, and Finland (Sternberg & Castejón, et al., 2000). Using
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conŽ rmatory factor analysis, we found that a triarchic model of intelligence better
accounted for the data than did conventional models of intelligence, including a
g-based model.
Why might students of different ethnic or economic groups develop different
patterns of expertise in analytical, creative, and practical skills? We believe that the
differences re ect a combination of genetic and socializing effects. Students brought
up in middle- to upper middle-class backgrounds have the luxury of being able to
concentrate upon analytical skills in their development. Children brought up in
more challenging or even hostile environments may have to develop their creative
and practical skills in order to survive.
Thus, conventional tests may unduly favor a small segment of the population by
virtue of the narrow kinds of developing expertise they measure. When one measures
a broader range of developing expertise, the results look quite different. Moreover,
the broader range of expertise includes kinds of skills that will be important in the
world of work and in the world of the family. Who is identiŽ ed as gifted, then, will
depend upon the range of abilities assessed.
Analytical, creative, and practical abilities, as measured by our tests or anyone
else’s, are simply forms of developing expertise. Which kinds of expertise a given
individual will develop will depend in part upon genetic predispositions and in part
upon the kinds of socializing experiences.
All are useful in various kinds of life tasks. But conventional tests may unfairly
disadvantage those students who do not do well in a fairly narrow range of kinds of
expertise. By expanding the range of developing expertise we measure, we discover
that many children not now identiŽ ed as able have, in fact, developed important
kinds of expertise. The abilities conventional tests measure are important for school
and life performance, but they are not the only abilities that are important.

Instruction and Developing Expertise

Teaching in a way that departs from notions of abilities based on a general factor
also pays dividends. In a recent set of studies, we have shown that 213 generally
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 171

lower socio-economic class third-grade and 141 generally middle-class eighth-grade

students who are taught social studies (a unit in communities) or science (a unit on
psychology) for successful intelligence (analytically, creative, and practically, as well
as for memory) outperform students who are taught just for analytical (critical)
thinking or just for memory (Sternberg et al., 1998a, 1998b). Teaching for memory
meant emphasizing things like who did what, who said what, what did they do, how
did they do it, and so on. Teaching for analytical thinking meant emphasizing things
like analyzing arguments, comparing and contrasting ideas, critiquing pieces of
work, and evaluating strengths and weaknesses of a product. Teaching for creative
thinking meant creating and generating ideas, inventing new things, fashioning new
products, and imagining what would happen if things were different from the way
they are. Teaching for practical thinking meant applying and using what one has
learned, or simply putting it into practice.
The students taught “triarchically” outperformed the other students not only on
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performance assessments that look at analytical, creative, and practical kinds of

achievements, but even on tests that measure straight memory (multiple-choice tests
already being used in the courses). The memory tests were multiple-choice assess-
ments measuring factual knowledge base. The analytical, creative, and practical tests
were performance assessments asking children to, respectively, analyze, compare
and contrast, evaluate; imagine, suppose, and discover; and apply, use, and put into
practice what they have learned.
We believe that triarchic teaching is successful in large part because it taps into the
elements of the developing expertise model. It encourages students to develop
analytical, creative, and practical thinking and learning skills in order to acquire
knowledge. This knowledge is encoded in multiple ways so that its retrieval is
facilitated when students need it. The instruction is very metacognitive in character,
requiring students not only to think and learn, but also to re ect on their thinking
and learning. And perhaps most importantly, our results show that our theory-based
instruction motivates both teachers and students more than does conventional
instruction. The students develop higher levels of expertise in part because they are
motivated to do so.
None of this is to say that analytical abilities are not important in school and
life—obviously, they are. Rather, what our data suggest is that other types of
abilities—creative and practical ones—are important as well and that students need
to learn how to use all three kinds of abilities together.
Thus, teaching students in a way that takes into account their more highly
developed expertise and that also enables them to develop other kinds of expertise
results in superior learning outcomes, regardless of how these learning outcomes are
measured. The children taught in a way that enables them to use kinds of expertise
other than memory actually remember better, on average, than do children taught
for memory.

The Acquisition of Informal Procedural Knowledge as Developing Expertise

We have also done studies in which we have measured informal procedural knowl-
edge in children and adults. We have done such studies with business managers,
 172 R. J. Sternberg

college professors, elementary-school students, sales people, college students, and

general populations. This important aspect of practical intelligence, in study after
study, has been found to be uncorrelated with academic intelligence as measured by
conventional tests, in a variety of populations, occupations, and at a variety of age
levels (Sternberg et al., 1995; Sternberg, Forsythe et al., 2000; Horvath, 1995).
Moreover, the tests predict job performance as well as or better than do tests of IQ.
The lack of correlation of the two kinds of ability tests suggests that the best
prediction of job performance will result when both academic and practical intelli-
gence tests are used as predictors. Most recently, we have developed a test of
common sense for the workplace—for example, how to handle oneself in a job
interview—that predicts self-ratings of common sense but not self-ratings of various
kinds of academic abilities (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1999).
Although the kind of informal procedural expertise we measure in these tests does
not correlate with academic expertise, it does correlate across work domains. For
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example, we found that subscores (for managing oneself, managing others, and
managing tasks) on measures of informal procedural knowledge are correlated with
each other and that scores on the test for academic psychology are moderately
correlated with scores on the test for business managers (Sternberg et al., 1995;
Sternberg, Forsythe et al., 2000). So, the kinds of developing expertise that matter
in the world of work may show certain correlations with each other that are not
shown with the kinds of developing expertise that matter in the world of the school.
Both conventional academic tests and our tests of practical intelligence measure
forms of developing expertise that matter in school and on the job. The two kinds
of tests are not qualitatively distinct. The reason the correlations are essentially null
is that the kinds of developing expertise they measure are quite different. The people
who are good at abstract, academic kinds of expertise are often people who have not
emphasized learning practical, everyday kinds of expertise, and vice versa, as we
found in our Kenya study. Indeed, children who grow up in challenging environ-
ments such as the inner city may need to develop practical over academic expertise
as a matter of survival. As in Kenya, this practical expertise may better predict their
survival than do academic kinds of expertise. The same applies in business, where
tacit knowledge about how to perform on the job is as likely or more likely to lead
to job success than is the academic expertise that in school seems so important.
The practical kinds of expertise matter in school too. In a study at Yale, Wendy
Williams and I (cited in Sternberg et al., 1993) found that a test of tacit knowledge
for college predicted grade-point average as well as did an academic ability test. But
a test of tacit knowledge for college life better predicted adjustment to the college
environment than did the academic test.

Taking Tests
Developing expertise applies not only to the constructs measured by conventional
intelligence tests, but also to the very act of taking the tests. In a collaborative study
near Bagamoyo, Tanzania (Sternberg, Grigorenko, Ngorosho et al., in press), we have
been investigating dynamic tests administered to children. These tests are based on
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 173

the notion that when one teaches at the time of testing, results can be obtained that
are different from when one simply assesses. In such tests, children learn at the time
of assessment, and then their learning in the testing situation is evaluated. Although
dynamic tests have been developed for a number of purposes (see Grigorenko &
Sternberg, 1998), one of our particular purposes was to look at how dynamic testing
affects score patterns. In particular, we developed more or less conventional mea-
sures but administered them in a dynamic format. The tests were a form test, which
measures largely spatial and planning abilities; a syllogisms test, which measures
primarily deductive reasoning ability; and a 20-questions test, which measures
inductive reasoning ability. First, 358 students in grades 2–5 took a pre-test. Then
they received a short period of instruction (generally no more than 10–15 minutes)
on how to improve their performance in the expertise measured by these tests. Then
the children took a post-test.
A Ž rst Ž nding was that the correlation between pre-test scores and post-test
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scores, although statistically signiŽ cant, was weak (about 0.3). In other words, even
a short period of instruction fairly drastically changed the rank orders of the students
on the test. The critical question, of course, is not whether there is a change, but
what it means. In particular, which predicts other kinds of cognitive performance
better, pre-test scores or learning? We found that post-test minus pre-test learning
scores predicted other kinds of cognitive performance about four times as well as did
pre-test scores. We examined the pre-test data for  oor effects, as the lower
correlation for the pre-test might have been due to such effects. There were no such
effects.
We again interpret these results in terms of the model of developing expertise. The
Tanzanian students had developed very little expertise in the skills required to take
American-style intelligence tests. Thus, even a short intervention could have a fairly
substantial effect on their scores. When the students developed somewhat more of
this test-taking expertise through a short intervention, their scores changed and
became more re ective of their true capabilities for cognitive work.
Sometimes the expertise children learn that is relevant for in-school tests may
actually hurt them on conventional ability tests. In one example, we studied the
development of children’s analogical reasoning in a country day school where
teachers taught in English in the morning and in Hebrew in the afternoon (Stern-
berg & Rifkin, 1979). We found a number of second-grade students who got no
problems right on our test. They would have seemed, on the surface, to be rather
stupid. We discovered the reason why, however. We had tested in the afternoon, and
in the afternoon, the children always read in Hebrew. So they read our problems
from right to left, and got them all wrong. The expertise that served them so well in
their normal environment utterly failed them on the test.
Our sample was of upper middle-class children who, in a year or two, would know
better. But imagine what happens with other children in less supportive environ-
ments who develop kinds of expertise that may serve them well in their family or
community lives or even school life, but not on the tests. They will appear to be
stupid rather than lacking the kinds of expertise the tests measure.
Patricia GreenŽ eld (1997) has done a number of studies in a variety of cultures
 174 R. J. Sternberg

and found that the kinds of test-taking expertise assumed to be universal in the USA
and other Western countries are by no means universal. She found, for example,
that children in Mayan cultures (and probably in other highly collectivist cultures as
well) were puzzled when they were not allowed to collaborate with parents or others
on test questions. In the USA, of course, such collaboration would be viewed as
cheating. But in a collectivist culture, someone who had not developed this kind of
collaborative expertise, and moreover, someone who did not use it, would be
perceived as lacking important adaptive skills (see also Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition, 1982).

Conclusion
Assessments of abilities measure developing expertise. Static views of abilities isolate
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a slice of performance in time. Dynamic views of abilities isolate a region of

performance in time. Both views, though, represent only slices in the long-term
continuum of developing expertise. (Table 1 summarizes differences among the
static, dynamic, and developing expertise views.) Gifted individuals who excel in
static or dynamic assessments, or both kinds of assessments, excel in developing
expertise. The kinds of developing expertise assessed to identify gifted children may
or may not correspond well to the kinds of developing expertise that are rewarded
in adults. Often, the two kinds of developing expertise do not correspond well.
Tests can be created that favor the kinds of developing expertise formed in any
kind of cultural or subcultural milieu. Those who have created conventional tests of
abilities have tended to value the kinds of skills most valued by Western schools.
This system of valuing is understandable, given that Binet and Simon (1905) Ž rst
developed intelligence tests for the purpose of predicting school performance.
Moreover, these skills are important in school and in life. But in the modern world,
the conception of abilities as Ž xed or even as predetermined is an anachronism.
Moreover, our research and that of others (reviewed more extensively in Sternberg,
1997) shows that the set of abilities assessed by conventional tests measures only a
small portion of the kinds of developing expertise relevant for life success. It is for
this reason that conventional tests predict only about 10% of individual-differenc e
variation in various measures of success in adult life (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994).
Not all cultures value equally the kinds of expertise measured by these tests. In a
study comparing Latino, Asian, and Anglo subcultures in California, for example,
we found that Latino parents valued social kinds of expertise as more important to
intelligence than did Asian and Anglo parents, who more valued cognitive kinds of
expertise (Okagaki & Sternberg, 1993). Predictably, teachers also more valued
cognitive kinds of expertise, with the result that the Anglo and Asian children would
be expected to do better in school, and did. Teachers may thus come to view as
“gifted” those students whose gifts happen to correspond to the gifts that lie within
the teachers’ Ž eld of vision. Other kinds of gifts may be ignored.
Of course, cognitive expertise matters in school and in life, but so does social
expertise. Both need to be taught in the school and the home to all children. This
 Giftedness as Developing Expertise 175

Table 1. Comparison of static, dynamic, and developing-expertise views of giftedness

Nature of Giftedness
Static View: high levels of trait-like qualities (e.g. intelligence)
Dynamic View: large zone of proximal development
Developing Expertise View: advanced level—quantitatively or qualitatively—of developing
expertise

IdentiŽ cation of Giftedness

Static View: static assessments of trait-like qualities, often measured by past learning
Dynamic View: dynamic assessments of learning at the time of test
Developing Expertise View: assessments of levels of developing expertise, taking into account
history of accomplishment (to assess rate of development) and projected future trajectory of
accomplishment (to assess anticipated asymptote of development)

Domain-Generality of Giftedness
Static View: largely domain-general: some individuals are broadly gifted, others, not
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Dynamic View: largely domain-general: some individuals have a larger zone of proximal
development, others a smaller one
Developing Expertise View: largely domain-speciŽ c: individuals differ in their developing expertise
across many different kinds of domains of expertise

Role of Environment in Producing Giftedness

Static View: low: to a large extent, people are born gifted or not, although of course environment
interacts with genetics to some extent
Dynamic View: very high: to a large extent, the zone of proximal development responds to
scaffolding and mediated learning experience
Developing Expertise View: high: people develop expertise in large part as a result of the coaching
(or other forms of training) they receive, although genetic differences can in uence development

Cultural/Contextual SpeciŽ city of Giftedness

Static View: low: who is gifted will be largely the same across cultures, depending on levels of
IQ, creativity, motivation, etc.
Dynamic View: moderate: people who have a high zone of proximal development are likely to
have it anywhere, but different cultures may bring it out differentially well
Developing Expertise View: high: different kinds of expertise are valued by different cultures and
contexts

Some Theoretical Origins

Static View: Galton, Binet, Spearman, Thurstone, Terman, Hollingworth
Dynamic View: Vygotsky, Feuerstein, Budoff
Developing Expertise View: Simon, Chi, Glaser, Ericsson, Sternberg
Note. Binet, however, believed in the notion of mental orthopedics, by which children could
improve their intellectual skills; in this way, his thinking also represented a precursor for the
developing-expertise view.

latter kind of expertise may become even more important in the workplace. Until we
expand our notions of abilities, and recognize that when we measure them, we are
measuring developing forms of expertise, we will risk consigning many potentially
excellent contributors to our society to bleak futures. We will also be potentially
 176 R. J. Sternberg

overvaluing students with expertise for success in a certain kind of schooling, but not
necessarily with equal expertise for success later in life.

Acknowledgement
Preparation of this article was supported under a grant from the National Science
Foundation (REC-9979843) and by a grant under the Javits Act Program (Grant
No. R206R000001) as administered by the OfŽ ce of Educational Research and
Improvement, US Department of Education. Grantees undertaking such projects
are encouraged to express freely their professional judgment. This article, therefore,
does not necessarily represent the position or policies of the National Science
Foundation or the OfŽ ce of Educational Research and Improvement or the US
Department of Education, and no ofŽ cial endorsement should be inferred.
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Note
1. To this end, we have initiated The Yale Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competen-
cies, and Expertise (PACE Center), devoted to the understanding of abilities as forms of
developing expertise.

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