APA Dictionary of Psychology

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.