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