Posted by Innocent Warrior
(here)
I still have my human development book out from when I used it for another post, here's some excerpts on what it says about measuring intelligence...
"At the turn of the last century, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon produced the forerunner of modern intelligence tests. In 1904, they were commissioned by the French government to devise a test that would identify "dull" children who might need special instruction. Binet and Simon devised a large battery of tasks measuring the skills believed to be necessary for classroom learning: attention, perception, memory, reasoning, verbal comprehension, and so on. Items that discriminated between normal children and those described by their teachers as slow were kept in the final test.
The test was soon revised so that the items were age-graded. For example, a set of "6-year-old" items could be passed by most 6-year-olds but by few 5-year-olds; "12-year-old" items could be handled by most 12-year-olds but not by younger children. This approach permitted the testers to describe a child's mental age - the level of age-graded problems that the child is able to solve. Thus, a child who passes all items at the 5-year-old level but does poorly on more advanced items - regardless of the child's actual age - is said to have a mental age of 5.
Binet's test became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale after Lewis Terman of Stanford University translated and published a revised version of the test for use with American children. Terman developed a procedure for comparing a child's mental age (MA) with his chronological age (CA) by calculating an intelligence quotient (IQ), which consisted of MA divided by CA and then multiplied by 100 (IQ = MA/CA X 100). An IQ score of 100 indicates average intelligence, regardless of a child's age: The normal child passes just the items that age-mates typically pass; mental age increases each year, but so does chronological age. The child of 8 with a mental age of 10 has experienced rapid intellectual growth and has a high IQ (specifically, 125); if she still has a mental age of 10 when she is 15 years old, then she has an IQ of only 67 and is clearly below average compared with children of the same age.
The Stanford-Binet, now in its fifth edition, is still in use (Roid, 2003). Its test norms - standards of normal performance expressed as average scores and the range of scores around the average - are based on the performance of a large, representative sample of people (2-year-olds through adults) from many socio-economic and racial backgrounds. The concept of mental age is no longer used to calculate IQ; instead, individuals receive scores that reflect how well or how poorly they do compared with others of the same age. An IQ of 100 is still average, and the higher the IQ score an individual attains, the better the performance is in comparison with that of age-mates."
In the section under, "What is intelligence?", it admits there is no clear consensus on the definition of intelligence. Experts offer different definitions, many of them centering on the ability to think abstractly or to solve problems effectively. For anyone who is of the opinion that the standard IQ test falls short of providing an accurate measurement of one's intelligence, I agree with you and I found Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences to be a more comprehensive view on intelligence and how we could better go about measuring it.
"Howard Gardner (1993, 1999/2000; Chen & Gardner, 1997) rejects the idea that a single IQ score is a meaningful measure of human intelligence. He argues that there are many intelligences, most of which have been ignored by the developers of standardized intelligence tests. Instead of asking, "How smart are you?" researchers should be asking, "
How are you smart?" and identifying people's strengths and weaknesses across the full range of human mental faculties (Chen & Gardner, 1997). Gardner (1993, 2000) argues that there are at least eight distinct intellectual abilities:
1.
Linguistic intelligence. Language skills, such as those seen in the poet's facility with words.
2.
Logical-mathematical intelligence. The abstract thinking and problem solving shown by mathematicians and computer scientists and emphasised by Piaget.
3.
Musical intelligence. Based on an acute sensitivity to sound patterns.
4.
Spatial intelligence. Most obvious in great artist who can perceive things accurately and transform what they see.
5.
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. The skilful use of the body to create crafts, perform, or fix things; shown, for example, by dancers, athletes, and surgeons.
6.
Interpersonal intelligence. Social intelligence, social skill, exceptional sensitivity to other people's motivations and moods; demonstrated by salespeople and psychologists.
7.
Intrapersonal intelligence. Understanding of one's own feelings and inner life.
8.
Naturalist intelligence. Expertise in the natural world of plants and animals.
Traditional IQ tests emphasize the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence and to some extent test spatial intelligence, perhaps because these are the forms of intelligence Western societies value most highly and work the hardest to nurture in school. But IQ tests can be faulted for ignoring most of the other forms of intelligence. Although Gardner does not claim that his is the definitive list of intelligences, he presents evidence suggesting that each of these eight abilities is distinct. For example, it is clear that a person can be exceptional in one ability but poor in others - witness
savant syndrome, the phenomenon in which extraordinary talent in a particular area is displayed by a person otherwise mentally retarded (Treffert, 2000)."
Source: Rider, E., & Sigelman, C. (2009)
Life-span human development.
Note: The emphasis on "How are you smart?" is my own.
All about IQ tests
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