Teaching Aptitude and General Mental Ability
This section mixes two different skills. Teaching aptitude tests whether you think like a teacher - how learning happens, how learners differ, how teaching is planned and evaluated. General mental ability tests reasoning speed: series, coding, blood relations, direction sense, syllogisms and analogies. Attempt reasoning items first; they are quick and unambiguous.
Teaching aptitude essentials
- Bloom's taxonomy (revised): Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create. A question asking students to 'design a model' sits at Create; 'list the parts' sits at Remember.
- Piaget: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational (7–11), formal operational (11+). Vygotsky: the Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding.
- Motivation: intrinsic (interest in the task) versus extrinsic (marks, prizes). Maslow's hierarchy places esteem above belongingness.
- Assessment: formative is ongoing and diagnostic; summative comes at the end. RTE Act 2009: free and compulsory education for ages 6–14.
Worked example
A teacher asks pupils to build a working rain-gauge from bottles and then explain their readings. Which Bloom level dominates? Building to a specification plus explaining results places the task at Create, with Apply in support - not at Remember, because no recall-only task is involved.
Marks-losing traps
- Reading 'learner-centred' as 'no discipline'; it means decisions begin from learner needs, with the teacher still structuring the lesson.
- Confusing formative with summative feedback.
- In number series, forcing an arithmetic pattern when the rule alternates (×2, +3, ×2, +3).
- In syllogisms, using real-world knowledge instead of the stated premises.
- In blood relations, drawing the whole family instead of only the branch the question names.