ABSTRACT
The educated person should be able to correlate the present with the past; both the past of personal experience and the vicarious past through which they know their culture. It is the business of psychology to provide some hints about how they can ensure that information presented does indeed get into the head, how it is organized when it gets there, and how it can be fetched upon demand. A test that measures the knowledge base acquired prior to entering into any training course will be, if it taps relevant knowledge, a good predictor of success. Some areas of knowledge are relevant to a wide variety of training programs. Language, including vocabulary, has perhaps the widest span of relevance and thus a measure of linguistic knowledge will be a good predictor of educational success in many settings. This chapter suggests a conceptual framework for thinking about how individual differences in information processing may affect the acquisition of knowledge.
