street intelligence

the skills people apply in their everyday lives. The term evolved from research conducted in the 1990s by psychologists Terezhina Nunes, David Carraher, and others, who found that street children in Brazil did very poorly in paper-and-pencil tests of the skills that they showed themselves well able to use in street contexts. The street intelligence of these children can be viewed as situated intelligence (see situated cognition) that failed to transfer to a specific testing environment.

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Psychology term of the day

May 9th 2024

Megan’s law

an amendment to the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act requiring that state registries of convicted but released sex offenders be disseminated to the public so that communities will be notified of offenders’ presence in a particular neighborhood. More formally known as the Community Notification Act, it was initially passed in New Jersey in 1994 after a repeat sex offender murdered a 7-year-old girl named Megan Nicole Kanka; it became a federal law in 1996.