Testing
for Intelligence?
The introduction of the Stanford Binet intelligence
scales in the United States by Terman occurred in close proximity to World War
I. Seeing the success of this approach to measuring mental ability, the U.S.
Army set about to devise a means of evaluating recruits. A group of
psychologists headed by Robert Yerkes (1876–1956) subsequently developed the
Army Alpha and Army Beta examinations, which quickly became the most widely
used group intelligence tests in the world. This widespread use also had the
effect of familiarizing literally millions of individuals with the concept of
intelligence testing and made it an acceptable enterprise. Not long afterward,
the College Entrance Examination Board began development and employment of what
became the SAT, a conglomerated measure of achievement and intelligence.
The development and success of the Binet-Simon
Scale, and subsequently the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test and the U.S. Army
testing programs, ushered in the era of widespread intelligence testing in the
United States. Following the model of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test,
other assessment experts developed and released their own intelligence tests.
Some of the tests were designed for individual administration (such as the
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test) while others were designed for group
administration. Some of these tests placed more emphasis on verbal and
quantitative abilities while others placed more emphasis on visual-spatial
and/or abstract problem-solving abilities. As a general rule, research has
shown with considerable consistency that contemporary intelligence tests are
good predictors of academic success. This correlation is to be expected
considering this was the precise purpose for which they were initially developed
over 100 years earlier. In addition to being good predictors of school
performance, research showed that IQs are fairly stable over time.
Nevertheless, these tests became controversial as a result of the
often-emotional debate over the meaning of intelligence. To try and avoid this
association and possible misinterpretations, many test publishers adopted more
neutral names such as “academic potential,” “scholastic ability,” “school
ability,” “mental ability,” or simply “ability” to designate essentially the
same construct to which the term intelligence referred.
Intelligence and intelligence testing are two of the
most controversial and highly polemic of all topics in the field of psychology.
It seems that psychologists, educators, and indeed, the lay public alike, all
have a love-hate relationship with the concept of intelligence and even more so
with intelligence testing. Some form of intelligence testing is one of the most
widely used of all forms of psychological tests. While tests for special
aptitudes are available, and these are widely used for specialized diagnostic
purposes as well as specialized aspects of personnel selection, these tests all
measure some aspect of intellectual function. This entry describes more
generally intelligence testing, provides a brief history of intelligence tests,
presents their fundamental assumptions, applications, and an introduction to
their interpretation.
There is More to Intelligence than IQ
For example, Carraher, Carraher, and Schliemann
(1985) studied a group of children that is especially relevant for assessing
intelligence as adaptation to the environment. The group was of Brazilian
street children. Brazilian street children are under great contextual pressure
to form a successful street business. If they do not, they risk death at the
hands of so-called "death squads," which may murder children who,
unable to earn money, resort to robbing stores (or who are suspected of
resorting to robbing stores). The researchers found that the same children who
are able to do the mathematics needed to run their street business are often
little able or unable to do school mathematics. In fact, the more abstract and
removed from real-world contexts the problems are in their form of
presentation, the worse the children do on the problems. These results suggest
that differences in context can have a powerful effect on performance.
Such differences are not limited to Brazilian street
children. Lave (1988) showed that Berkeley housewives who successfully could do
the mathematics needed for comparison shopping in the supermarket were unable
to do the same mathematics when they were placed in a classroom and given
isomorphic problems presented in an abstract form. In other words, their
problem was not at the level of mental processes but at the level of applying
the processes in specific environmental contexts.
In our own research, we have found results
consistent with those described above. These results have emanated from studies
both in the U.S. and in other countries. We describe here our international
studies because we believe they especially call into question the
straightforward interpretation of results from conventional tests of
intelligence that suggest the existence of a general factor.
In a study in Usenge, Kenya, near the town of
Kisumu, we were interested in school-age children's ability to adapt to their
indigenous environment. We devised a test of practical intelligence for
adaptation to the environment (Sternberg, Nokes, Geissler, Prince, Okatcha,
Bundy, & Grigorenko, 2001). The test measured children's informal tacit
knowledge for natural herbal medicines that the villagers believe can be used
to fight various types of infections. At least some of these medicines appear
to be effective (Dr. Frederick Okatcha, personal communication), and most
villagers certainly believe in their efficacy, as shown by the fact that
children in the villages use their knowledge of these medicines an average of
once a week in medicating themselves and others. Thus, tests of how to use
these medicines constitute effective measures of one aspect of practical
intelligence as defined by the villagers as well as their life circumstances in
their environmental contexts. Middle-class Westerners might find it quite a
challenge to thrive or even survive in these contexts, or, for that matter, in
the contexts of urban ghettos often not distant from their comfortable homes.
We measured the Kenyan children's ability to
identify the medicines, where they come from, what they are used for, and how
they are dosed. Based on work we had done elsewhere, we expected that scores on
this test would not correlate with scores on conventional tests of
intelligence. In order to test this hypothesis, we also administered to the 85
children the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices Test, which is a measure of
fluid or abstract-reasoning-based abilities, as well as the Mill Hill
Vocabulary Scale, which is a measure of crystallized or formal-knowledge-based
abilities. In addition, we gave the children a comparable test of vocabulary in
their own Dholuo language. The Dholuo language is spoken in the home, English
in the schools.
References:
http://www.education.com/reference/article/intelligence-testing/
http://www.wwu.edu/culture/Sternberg.htm
