4.1.3. Practical skills: movies, common sense, college
life, STATPractical
The failure of the STATPractical to load on the practical
measure suggests that there are very strong method
factors. Practical skills cannot be fully measured by the
kinds of multiple-choice measures that appear on the
original STAT. For this reason, in the new Rainbow
measures, creative and practical items will be mostly
performance-based.
The practical performance measures have good
reliability and appear to be effective measures of tacit
knowledge and practical skill. Together, the three
practical performance tests load on a higher-order
practical-skill factor, although they did not significantly
predict college GPA at the .05 alpha level after the
creative measures were entered into the regression
equation.
There are a number of issues yet to be resolved,
including deciding on an appropriate criterion against
which to assess responses to the practical measures,
and whether it should be sample-based or expertbased.
Another issue with practical intelligence is that
cumulative high school GPA is likely to reflect some
and perhaps many of the practical skills necessary for
academic success, particularly because it reflects
academic success over an extended period of time
and not simply in a single testing situation.