Beyond I'm No Good At

By Sheila Tobias

Elementary and secondary school teachers are often frustrated by their students' tendency to put learning labels on themselves that limit their horizons and sap their motivation and achievement. Students, even very young ones, label themselves "good at math and science'' and think that means they're not good at social studies, English, or other subjects that emphasize reading and writing. Other students wear the "good in language arts'' label and are convinced they "can't do math.''

These attitudes are especially frustrating because current research on cognition shows what many teachers have known for a long time--learning skills do not, in fact, come packaged by subject area. There surely are individual differences in learning styles and learning preferences, but there aren't two kinds of brains. The kind of intelligence needed to decode words and sentences is not that different from the analytic skills needed to make sense of symbolic notation in math and science. To cite one little-publicized example, the best predictor of mathematical achievement in college is not high performance on the numeric section of the SAT exam alone, but a high combined score on both the numeric and the verbal sections. Properly motivated and trained, students who like and do well in high school social studies can master advanced algebra and trigonometry, foreign languages, and chemistry. The...