Carmichael and his colleagues attacked the problem with zeal, picking up information and teaching hints wherever they could find them. they tested a range of methods in the classroom, searching for the special combination of elements that would work. As Carmichael acknowledged, "We didn't start from some theoretical base." The theory, however, came quickly, thanks, in large measure, to Arthur Whimbey, a psychologist and testing expert whose book Intelligence Can Be Taught was published in 1975 and who shortly thereafter became involved with the Xavier effort.

Whimbey's creed is summed up ni his book's title. Intelligence ("skill at interpreting materials accurately and mentally reconstructing the relationships," as Whimbey defines it) can be taught much like skiing or playing the piano. By forcing students to think about every step in the problem-solving process and providing feedback as they go along, one can correct their bad reasoning habits, he insisted. One method is to pair students up and have one solve a mathematics problem aloud (a practice Whimbey calls "thinking aloud problem solving") as the partner critiques the analysis. Whimbey does much the same with word problems. He will ask two students the same question, such as, "In how many days of the week does the third letter of the day's name immediately follow the first letter of the day's name in the alphabet?" and one student will talk it through as the other listens for errors. "For longer reading selections," he explained in the Journal of Reading, "both students read the selection and answer the questions silently. Then they compare answers. Where they differ, students must provide their partners with a detailed explanation of their answers, pinpointing facts or sections in the passage, and reconstructing their chain of reasoning." Whimbey also gives students scrambled sentences and has them arrange in a logical order. The object is to get the students thinking about thinking, not necessarily to have them learn the works of Shakespeare or Chaucer. In the scheme of things, Whimbey said, it's more important that students understand the reasoning process that undergirds clear writing than that they have read and savored good literature.

English teachers, Whimbey acknowledged, may find his approach repugnant and even heretical. "Teachers are saying, 'I love literature. I want students to love literature. I'm not going to stop teaching literature.'" All that is just fine, Whimbey believes, but teachers must also realize that assigning literature doesn't necessarily develop reading skills. "It does for a few," but not, he maintains, for most students.

Carmichael and his crew listened closely to Whimbey's advice, but they also recognized that poor abstract reasoning ability was not the only hurdle that many of their students had to overcome. It quickly became clear, Carmichael recalled, that a large part of the problem was that "they just had not read enough in their lives. They didn't know words that are common." The only way to change that situation quickly, Carmichael concluded, was with no-frills vocabulary-building exercises. Carmicahel's message to students was direct: "We hope that you gain an appreciation for reading somewhere down the line, but we don't have time to ... give you an appreciation for reading now. What we're trying to do is quick and dirty remediation. You've got to memorize a bunch of words."

The faculty at Xavier University realized that if their efforts were to have the maximum impact, they needed to start work even before students showed up for their freshmen classes. In 1977, the school launched a summer program called SOAR (for Stress on Analytical Reasoning). Aimed at students who had not yet started college, the program immediately became the foundation of Xavier's educational uplift efforts. Though the university has tinkered with SOAR throughout the years (it went from six weeks, for instance, to four), the basic approach remains much as it was in the beginning.