Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology

Volume 11, Number 3, 2012

Classical Articles

Introduction to André Rey’s

“A Method for Assessing Educability:
Some Applications in Psychopathology”
H. Carl Haywood
Vanderbilt University

R
ey’s (1934) paper on assessment of educability is so rich in insight, in interpretation
of individual differences in test performance, and in relatively new concepts (such as
“educability,” which led inevitably to “learning potential”) that there is still value in
mining it, 78 years later, for subtle implications—and even for more obvious ones. In the
1930s, the IQ was king. Intelligence was seen as constant, fixed, and worse, as the primary
determinant of individual differences in learning effectiveness and achievement. The idea
that educability could be estimated (aside from IQ) was revolutionary. Like many revolution-
ary ideas early in their development, it attracted scant attention, possibly because such an idea
was contrary to the stream of scientific thought. As we know now, individual differences in IQ
are associated with no more than 50% of the variance in school achievement. Rey was one of
only a few to ask how to attribute the other 50%.
He was not the first to suggest the potential value of assessing the processes by which
individuals learn new tasks. Binet (1911), for one, had made that suggestion earlier—but
then had done nothing to indicate how one might go about doing that. Vygotsky (1934/1986)
suggested that providing some guidance to children’s learning can help to reveal unsuspected
abilities. Rey (1934) extended those ideas by using a very simple task and observing extremely
closely, primarily by examining kinds and patterns of errors, his subjects’ progression through
a task that required new learning. By doing so, he provided a basic technology for the estima-
tion of learning potential (educability) and a rudimentary structure for dynamic assessment.
Although Rey (1934) was meticulous in the observation and recording of error pat-
terns and of obstacles to effective learning, he did not record in such detail the precise
nature of help that one might give to learners. In fact, he seemed rather more interested
in ­classification than in remediation. In any case, it was left to his successors, and to

© 2012 Springer Publishing Company 271

http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1945-8959.11.3.271
272 Haywood

­ ygotsky’s, to specify the kinds of examiner intervention that might produce insight on
V
learning ­processes.
The main points of Rey’s (1934) presentation are the following:

1. Performance may not be the best indicator of “educability” or learning potential.

2. Educability can be estimated.
3. To do so, one needs to focus on the processes that subjects use in actual learning tasks.
4. Some kinds of intervention may be necessary to enable examiners to see beyond some
common obstacles to good performance, obstacles such as impoverished vocabulary,
failure to understand task requirements, inadequate motivation to engage in learning
tasks, active resistance to learning, and engrained unproductive habits of observation
and problem solving.
5. Analysis of the kinds and succession of errors can help to reveal the nature of learning
processes and relative mastery of learning strategies.

In spite of Rey’s enthusiasm for a dynamic approach in assessment, he was also enam-
ored of developmental and clinical norms, as exemplified by his subsequent production of a
large number of psychological tests, many complete with modest normative data and of clas-
sification as a goal of assessment.
Rey’s within-the-test intervention fell short of what one would see today as mediation of
basic cognitive and metacognitive processes. It was, however, a clear indication that examin-
ers should avoid being deceived by noncognitive obstacles to good learning and performance
and should not be ruled in this enterprise by standardized procedure. Of course, departures
from standard procedure in testing renders test norms useless, but the trade-off is a richer
disclosure of learning potential.

TRANSLATION OBSERVATIONS
Several of the key professional terms and phrases have shifted meaning or nuance both in
French and in English since Rey (1934) wrote the article. Here are some such key concepts,
with some explanation from the translator:

Educability. Readers will recognize this as a central concept in cognitive education. Cogni-
tive educators seek not merely to impart knowledge but to enhance learners’ effective-
ness in learning in ways that enable them to generalize their learning ability across
domains of content. Rey’s view was quite consistent with such a goal, but this article
was about assessment, ways to distinguish between experiential deficits and incapacity.
It is important to observe that Rey intended the term educabilité to encompass learning
in various contexts rather than being limited to academic learning; indeed, his assess-
ment method was more akin to laboratory learning than to classroom learning.
Accommodation. This term, in its exact French equivalent, appears throughout the ­article.
It refers to behavior changes that imply that learning has occurred. Sometimes Rey
means “achievement” or “accomplishment,” sometimes “learning” but always the
product of a learning process. After repeated exposure to Rey’s use of the term, it be-
comes increasingly clear that he used “accommodation” in the Piagetian sense of a
A Method for Assessing Educability 273

change within a person’s cognitive repertoire, often signaling a new or revised capacity
to act on information; in other words, a change in the person.
Assimilation. Rey also reflects Piaget’s use of this term to refer to changes in a person’s percep-
tion of or attribution of meaning to information. During the learning process, Rey’s sub-
jects reached a time when they began to see the task situation in a different light, to look
at the problem array in a different way, thus changing the meaning of that information.
Reaching such assimilation seemed often to be an essential step in reaching a subsequent
accommodation; indeed, Rey warned against artificial separation of these two concepts.
Manual Maze. Readers who are already familiar with Rey’s assessment instruments,
­several of which appear in one form or another in Feuerstein’s Learning Propensity
­Assessment Device (LPAD) or in Haywood’s (Haywood & Lidz, 2007) dynamic assess-
ment materials, will recognize the task described in this article as the Plateaux Test.
Neural Organization; Mental Organization. These terms are used throughout the article
to indicate levels or stages of cognitive development. By use of the term “neural orga-
nization” as well as by his use of several biological examples, Rey betrays his basic bio-
logical orientation, leading one to wonder whether this was a product of the ­Zeitgeist
at the University of Geneva during Rey’s and Piaget’s tenure or merely a personal
predilection.
Conduite. Basically, this word means “behavior,” but as is so often true in the French lan-
guage, it has multiple nuances. In Rey’s article, I have translated it often as “strategy,”
meaning the relatively organized sequence of behavior that subjects follow while trying
to meet the challenge of the manual maze task. I am certain that my attempt at consis-
tency led to some off-the-mark interpretations.
Syncretic. This is an adjective referring to efforts to reconcile or fuse different theories or
points of view. In a broader sense, it refers to the practice of bringing knowledge from
diverse sources to bear on a common problem solution.

In several places, I have substituted current language for terms that were used profession-
ally in the 1930s but are no longer considered acceptable, such as “intellectual disability” for
“mental retardation.”

REFERENCES
Binet, A. (1911). Les idées modernes sur les enfants [Modern ideas about children]. Paris, France: Flammarion.
Haywood, H. C. & Lidz, C. S. (2007). Dynamic assessment in practice: Clinical and educational ­applications.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rey, A. (1934). Un procédé pour évaluer l’éducabilité: Quelques applications en psychopathologie [A method
for assessing educability: Some applications in psychopathology]. Archives de Psychologie, 24, 96.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1934)

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Marco Hessels and Christine Hessels-Schlatter for their careful
­review of my French-to-English translation of Rey’s paper and for their suggestions to improve preci-
sion and clarity.

Correspondence regarding this article should be directed to H. Carl Haywood, Vanderbilt University,
144 Brighton Close, Nashville, TN 37205. E-mail: carl.haywood@vanderbilt.edu