Application of Research

The research on adolescent thinking has been applied to the study of learning,
personality, and social behavior during adolescence. For example, research
on adolescent cognition has influenced the development of both
curricula and teaching methods at the middle-school and high-school levels.
As individuals who are entering the stage of formal thinking, adolescents are better equipped to handle abstract topics such as geometry and
physics. Their emerging ability to consider systematically the effects of several
factors when solving a problem make adolescents good candidates for
laboratory science courses.

Some applications of research on adolescent cognitive skills are the subject
of much debate, however; ability tracking is a case in point. Psychometric
research indicates that intellectual functioning becomes relatively
stable in preadolescence. From this point onward, children continue to perform
at the same level relative to their age-mates on standardized measures
such as IQ tests. The stability of test performance has been used to support
the creation and maintenance of ability tracks beginning in the middleschool
years. Proponents of tracking maintain that ability grouping, or
tracking, enables teachers to challenge more able students without frustrating
less capable students. Opponents of tracking maintain that less able students
benefit from both the academic challenges and the competent role
models provided by superior students in ungrouped classrooms. In fact,
critics of tracking charge that the level at which performance stabilizes actually
results from subtle differences in how teachers interact with their students,
differences often based on inaccurate assumptions about student potential.
Perhaps students with low test scores, many of whom are poor or
minority students, perform poorly because people expect them to be less
capable.