Talent Development vs Traditional Schooling

by Justin Skycak on January 03, 2024

Talent development is not only different from schooling, but in many cases completely orthogonal to schooling.

This post is part of the book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). Suggested citation: Skycak, J., advised by Roberts, J. (2024). Talent Development vs Traditional Schooling. In The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). https://justinmath.com/talent-development-vs-traditional-schooling/

At surface level, talent development and schooling may seem similar: after all, isn’t the purpose of schooling to develop students’ talents?

Renowned psychologist Benjamin Bloom, who researched this question extensively, discovered that the answer is a resounding “no” – the differences between talent development and traditional schooling are so numerous, so striking, and so critical that traditional schooling typically cannot even be characterized as supporting talent development.

Around the same time that Bloom coined the two-sigma problem, he was also immersed in a massive study of talent development. As summarized by other researchers (Luo & Kiewa, 2020), Bloom (1985) discovered striking commonalities in the upbringing of extremely successful individuals across a wide variety of fields, leading to a general characterization of the process of talent development:

"Research interest on talent development was sown by psychologist Benjamin Bloom's (1985) seminal book, Developing Talent in Young People. Bloom studied 120 highly talented individuals across six talent domains and discovered common factors that led to exceptional achievements across domains. In an interview, Bloom remarked:

'We at one time thought that the development of a tennis player would be very different from the development of a concert pianist or a sculptor or a mathematician or a neurologist. What we've found is that even though the content and the procedures may be enormously different in each field, there is a common set of characteristics in the home, the instruction, and the like. There is a very general process that seems to be central to the development of talent no matter what the field. (Brandt, 1985: 34)'"

Bloom believed (Brandt, 1985) that this talent development process was being leveraged much more effectively in athletic than in academic contexts, and that there was an opportunity to massively elevate students’ degree of learning and academic achievement by reproducing favorable conditions for talent development:

"I [Bloom] firmly believe that if we could reproduce the favorable learning and support conditions that led to the development of these [extremely successful] people, we could produce great learning almost everywhere.
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[T]hey [educators] do a very good job in sports. There's nothing we can tell coaches in high schools and colleges. But when we get beyond sports, things are sporadic, accidental. Students may have a good teacher one year and a very poor one the next. And even in the academic subjects, all kinds of chance circumstances are at work. ... Schools do not seem to have a great tolerance for students who are out of phase with other students in their learning process."

One of the main differences between traditional schooling and talent development, according to Bloom & Sosniak (1981), is that students are grouped primarily by age, rather than ability, and each group progresses through the curriculum in lockstep. Each member of the group engages in the same tasks, and it is expected that different students will learn skills to different levels.

"The school schedule and standards are largely determined by the age of the child. The curriculum and learning experiences are presumably appropriate to most students at that age or grade. While there may be some adjustments for different rates of progress and some adjustment of standards for individuals within a grade or classroom, each individual is instructed as a member of a group with some notion that all are to get as nearly equal treatment as the teacher and the instructional material can supply.
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[T]he group is central in the school learning process and only minimal adjustments are made for individual children. If the group as a whole has difficulty, the teacher will reteach the task or skill until some portion of the group has learned it. But generally, all the children are not expected to learn a task or skill to the same level and little is done with the use of feedback-corrective procedures to bring all children to the same standard of accomplishment.

Since it is not expected that each child will learn to the same standard or level, relative standards are emphasized, but the tasks are the same. Certain children are expected to learn a task to a high level while others are expected to learn it only to a much lower level."

In talent development, however, instruction is completely individualized. Learning tasks are chosen based on the specific needs of individual students, each student must learn each skill to a sufficient level of mastery before moving on to more advanced skills. Students progress through skills at different rates, but learn skills to the same threshold of performance. Their progress is measured not by their level of learning in courses that they have taken, but rather by how advanced the skills are that they can execute to a sufficient threshold of performance.

"Part or all of the instruction the talented individual received was on a one-to-one basis. The pianists had weekly or twice weekly private lessons. ... The swimmers worked with many other swimmers in the pool, but the instruction was individualized and personalized. The mathematicians had much less systematic instruction in the early years, but they almost always learned alone or with one adult or peer.

Some of the instruction each week was provided by a teacher (tutor) who diagnosed what was needed, set learning objectives, and provided instruction with frequent feedback and correctives. The teacher also suggested appropriate practice, emphasizing specific points or problems to be solved, and set a time by which the individual was expected to attain the objectives to a particular standard. At the end of the set time, the child performed and the teacher noted the gains and what had still to be accomplished, gave corrective instruction, and then gave further instruction for new material and procedures. The teacher praised and encouraged the child for his or her accomplishments, and when the standard was attained, set a new task and further objectives and standards. The cycle of learning tasks, objectives, standards, and motivation was repeated over and over as the child progressed.

In talent development, each child was seen as unique and the teacher (tutor) set appropriate learning tasks for the child, gave rewards which the child valued or responded to, and set the pace of learning believed to be appropriate for the individual child. The child's learning rate was central and there was continual adjustment to the child learning the talent. The objectives and standards set by the teacher were always in terms of specific tasks to be accomplished in particular ways by the individual child. While the child was frequently judged in comparison with other children, emphasis was on the accomplishment or mastery of the particular learning tasks set for the individual."

To recap, Bloom & Sosniak (1981) summarized these differences as follows:

"In general, school learning emphasizes group learning and the subject or skills to be learned. Talent development typically emphasizes the individual and his or her progress in a particular activity. In school group learning, little is done to help each individual solve his or her special learning problems, while in talent learning the instruction is regarded as good, at least by the parents, only if it helps the individual make clear progress, overcome learning difficulties, and move to higher and higher standards of attainment."

They also noted that these differences are closely related to the scope of a teacher’s responsibility: in traditional schooling, teachers focus on a “cross section” of many students covering a small subset of curriculum over a short period of time, whereas in talent development, teachers have “longitudinal” accountability for fewer students each learning long progressions of skills over a long periods of time.

"...[In talent development, the teacher] emphasizes the child's progress from lesson to lesson with the child's stage at one time as the benchmark for noting progress or gains. ... The teacher is concerned with the child's growth and progress toward what is possible at the highest level. This stems from the likelihood that the teacher will remain with the child over a number of years and also from the teacher's long term view of what is possible for the particular child.

In contrast, the schools are arranged by courses. Although the curriculum in a particular subject may extend over a period of ten or more years, each teacher has the child only for a term, year, or course. And the teacher is responsible only for what happens during that period of time. The teacher judges each child in terms of how well he or she is doing in comparison with other children at that grade level or in that class. Each teacher at a particular grade level is primarily concerned with the teaching and learning appropriate to that grade. Little attention is paid to what the child has already learned, or to what each child will need to effectively enter the next grade or course."

Bloom & Sosniak (1981) also observed that these differences are so critical that traditional schooling typically cannot even be characterized as supporting talent development. As Bloom describes, talent development is not only different from schooling, but in many cases completely orthogonal to schooling:

"For one portion of our sample, talent development and schooling were almost two separate spheres of their life. ... Usually the student made the adjustments, resolving the conflict by doing all that was a part of schooling and then finding the additional time, energy, and resources for talent development. ... Mathematicians found and worked through special books and engaged in special projects and programs outside of school.

Sometimes the schools or particular teachers made minor adjustments to dissipate the conflict. Mathematicians were sometimes excused from a class they were too advanced for and allowed to work on their own in the library. Sometimes they were accelerated one grade as a concession to their outside learning.
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Whether the individual or the school made these adjustments, it was clear that these adjustments minimized conflict but did little to assist in talent development. The individual was able to work at both schooling and talent development, although with minimum interaction. ... Talent development and schooling were isolated from one another. Schooling did not assist in talent development, but in these instances it did not interfere with talent development."

And while other participants that Bloom studied had more overlap between schooling and talent development, the overlap was not always positive. Rather, it yielded a mixed bag of experiences:

"For a second portion of our sample, school experiences were a negative influence on their talent development. For these individuals the conflicting requirements of talent development and schooling could rarely be resolved. Schooling was truly something to be suffered through. These individuals found that their efforts in the talent field were not well received by teachers, principals, or peers.
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For the third portion of our sample, we find the most encouraging role of the schools in talent development. School experiences became a major source of support, encouragement, motivation, and reward for the development of talent. ... Some individuals found private support for their development of talent from teachers or principals. These teachers or principals noticed the child's special development and recognized the quality of his or her work. ... They recognized the student's seriousness and shared with the student an eagerness for working toward very high standards and a commitment to excellence."

The general orthogonality of schooling and talent development, and the mixed bag of positive and negative experiences resulting from any overlap between them, echo one of Bloom’s quotes (Brandt, 1985) at the beginning of this post:

"...[W]hen we get beyond sports, things are sporadic, accidental. Students may have a good teacher one year and a very poor one the next. And even in the academic subjects, all kinds of chance circumstances are at work."

Unfortunately, in most fields and particularly in mathematics, there is no widely available solution to the lack of talent development by traditional schools other than private tutoring, which is prohibitively expensive for most families and schools. To get a sense of lower bound, financially: a successful low-cost tutoring intervention (40 minutes per school day, 1 tutor per 2 students) cost about $4,000 per student per year, with tutors being paid a yearly stipend of only $16,000 (plus benefits) while working through the entire school day (6 class periods) (Guryan et al., 2023). Under these conditions, a full hour of fully individualized tutoring (1 tutor per student) each school day would cost $12,000 per student per year (= $4,000 × 2 × 60/40).

It’s important to note that while these tutors possessed strong math skills, they were not long-term expert coaches in the sense of the preceding discussion on talent development. Rather, tutors were “willing to devote one year to public service – for example, recent college graduates, retirees or career-switchers – but do not necessarily have extensive prior training or experience as teachers.” Needless to say, long-term expert coaches would be far more costly and harder to find.

While there do exist mathematical “talent search” competitions in which top competitors are selected for talent development, only a tiny proportion of highly talented students take the exam and make the cut, and the duration of talent development that they receive is brief. To quote mathematician George Berzsenyi (2019):

"Participation in each of these [exams] is based on performance in the previous competition(s), and hence to a great extent the entire process is aimed at finding about 60 students for the three-week Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP), where six students are selected to represent the United States at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

It always bothered me to have several hundred thousand students take the AMC, learn that tens of thousands of them are talented, and then select 60 for a brief talent development program and ignore the rest, expecting them to develop their own capabilities and, if not discouraged, come back the following year to prove themselves again."

References

Berzsenyi, G. (2019). Talent search versus talent development. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 66(9).

Bloom, B. S., ed. (1985). Developing Talent in Young People. New York: Ballantine Books.

Bloom, B. S., & Sosniak, L. A. (1981). Talent development vs. schooling. Educational Leadership, 39(2), 86-94.

Brandt, R. S. (1985). On Talent Development: A Conversation with Benjamin Bloom. Educational Leadership, 43(1), 33-35.

Guryan, J., Ludwig, J., Bhatt, M. P., Cook, P. J., Davis, J. M., Dodge, K., … & Stoddard, G. (2023). Not too late: Improving academic outcomes among adolescents. American Economic Review, 113(3), 738-765.

Luo, L., & Kiewra, K. A. (2021). Parents’ roles in talent development. Gifted Education International, 37(1), 30-40.