The Need for Redefining "Talent" and "Talent Loss": A Plan for Practical Action and Research.
The terms "talent" and "talent loss" are capable of a number of definitions and interpretations. Despite this fact, the concepts of talent and talent loss common to social scientists and educators doing research on these subjects have been surprisingly uniform and limited. It is our intention to point out some of the fallacies and limitations of these definitions and interpretations and to suggest some alternative approaches. It is currently popular to define talent in terms either of school grades or-more frequently-scores on aptitude and intelligence tests. Students who make scores above a certain level are "talented," and others with lower scores are, by implication, "untalented." At first glance, this sort of definition appears eminently practical: Test scores and grades are easy and inexpensive to obtain, they are statistically reliable, and they permit us to label students talented and untalented with the greatest of ease. But the practical advantages of grades and aptitude-test scores as indexes of talent do not justify their current popularity. For if an index of talent does not have marked relevance to talented performance, it gives misleading estimates of potential talent and of talent loss. Since scores on aptitude tests are of little intrinsic societal value, the use of such scores as measures of talent assumes that they are related to other variables. To take a simple example, we could use the color of a person's eyes as an index of talent on the basis of its convenience and reliability. But we do not do so because we believe it is unrelated to talented performance. Our acceptance of any personal attribute as an index of talent is based on its known or assumed relevance to talented performance.