Intelligence Educational Materials

Intelligence • Different meanings to different people • Can not be defined like a person’s height or weight • Ability to learn from experience, solve problems, use knowledge, and adapt to new situations Spearman’s Intelligence Theory (g) • Spearman (1893-1945) believed we had one general intelligence • Encompasses all intelligent behavior including how we do in school to survival skills • Factor analysis of statistical procedure of lots of variables that is expressed as a single intelligence score Thurstone’s Intelligence Theory • Thurstone (1887-1955) did not believe you should rank people with a single score • Identified primary mental abilities • Word fluency, verbal comprehension, spatial ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, inductive reasoning, and memory • However, the tendency to score well in one means you are likely to score well in all • Some argue this is the same as a general intelligence Cattell-Horn-Carroll Intelligence Theory • Cattell (1905-1998) and Horn (1928-2006) • Fluid intelligence (Gf): ability to reason speedily and abstractly when solving logic problems • Crystallized intelligence (Gc): accumulated knowledge as reflected in vocabulary • Carroll (1993) CHC Theory • Supported (g) intelligence and (Gf) and (Gc) and additional capabilities such as reading, writing, memory capacity, and processing speed Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences • Eight relatively independent intelligences Learning Styles • Gardner’s multiple intelligences continue to influence many educator’s beliefs that children have differing ”learning styles” • Relatively debunked and little evidence that a learning style actually impacts your comprehension (Nancekivell et al., 2019; Papadatou-Pastou et al., 2018) Savant Syndrome • Individuals who have an island of brilliance but score low on intelligence tests or may have limited or no language ability • About 4 in 5 people with Savant Syndrome are male and many may have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) How much does Intelligence matter? Or is it about hard work? Grit and Deliberate Practice • Skills that breed success do not sprout spontaneously • Expert performance in activities like chess, dance, sports, computer programming, music, and medicine takes about 10 years of intense, daily practice (Ericsson & Pool, 2016) • 11,000 hours on average and minimum of 3,000 hours of practice • Biology and intelligence may set the boundary conditions, but grit and practice foster the aptitude Emotional Intelligence • Perceiving emotions: Recognizing them in faces, music, stories, identifying one’s own emotion • Understanding emotions: Predicting them and how they may change and blend • Managing emptions: Knowing how to express them in varied situations and how to handle other’s emotions • Using emotions: Facilitate adaptive or creative thinking Intelligence Tests • Assess people’s mental aptitudes and compares them with those of other • Achievement tests: Reflect what you have learned • Aptitude tests: Predict what you will be able to learn Alfred Binet (Paris, 1857-1911) • Attempted to administer a fair fest • Each child has a mental age • Attempted to compare mental age to actual age and that the level of performance (i.e., homework) should be similar to actual age Stanford-Binet • Lewis Terman (1877-1956) • Revised Stanford’s test to create age norms from Paris-developed questions and age norms with students from California • Intelligence Quotient • Defined as the ratio between mental age and chronological age • Average performance is considered 100 Intelligence Quotients • Original IQ formular worked relatively well for children but not for adults • Dark history: During WWI, Terman worked with the US government to adapt the tests to evaluate arriving immigrants and WWI army recruits • World’s first occasion of mass administration of an intelligence test • Some interpreted the results to indicate inferiority of those that did not share an Anglo-Saxon heritage • Certainly should proceed with caution when considering IQ tests David Wechsler • Testing separate strengths • Similarities • Vocabulary • Block Design • Letter-number sequencing Basics of Test Construction • Standardization • Comparing test scores to groups of others • Provides a bell curve or normal curve • Reliability • When re-taken it provides reliable scores • • • • Split-half Test-Re-test Alternative forms of the test Correlation coefficients • Validity • Extent the test measures what it predicts or promises to measure • Predictive validity: IQ scores predicting future performance Diminishing of Predictive Validity • Aptitude tests do not predict school grades (Roth et al., 2015) • Aptitude tests are reasonly good predictors for children between 612, but diminish as students age • Intelligence scores correlate .81 for scores at age 11 (Deary et al., 2007; 2009b) • SAT scores is below .5 in predicting first-year college grades (Berry & Sackett, 2009) • GRE scores for graduate school is even less significant (+.4) (Kuncel & Hezlett, 2007) Extremes of Intelligence • Low extreme is considered an intellectual disability • Neurodevelopmental disability • Score of 70 or below on IQ tests • Teresa Lewis was executed in 2010 and had an IQ of 72 • Considered to have limited intellect and a dependent personality agreed to a plot in which two men killed her husband and stepson in exchange for a split in life insurance money • Flynn Effect (2002) • Ted Herring who scored 72 and 74 would have been on death row, yet could not report that summer followed spring or knew how to transfer buses was taken off Florida’s death row (Alvarez & Schwartz, 2014) Extremes of Intelligence • High Intelligence • Scores ranging over 135 • Research studies have found many of these individuals to become doctors, lawyers, professors, scientists, and writers, yet none were Nobel Prize Winners • About 1% of Americans earn doctorates, but for the 12 and 13-year old's who scored in the top 1 in 10,000 among those their age taking the SAT, 40% of them had earned a doctorate Stability of Intelligence • At age 11, intelligence scores become impressively stable • One study found high correlation between two sets of scores nearly 70 years apart of varied life experiences (Deary et al., 2013) Aging and Intelligence • Age positively and negatively impacts intelligence • Accumulated knowledge (Crystallized intelligence) grows • Vocabulary and analogies tests • Reasoning speedily or abstractly (Fluid intelligence) decreases • Solving logic problems Genetic Influences on Intelligence • 50-80% heritability • Identical twins share similar mental abilities • There are at least 52 intelligence-linked genes • Statistical reports show that IVF for screening candidates for embryos for intelligence would demonstrate a minimal impact • There is no one “smart gene” Gender and Intelligence • Men and women’s intelligence differences are minor • Girls tend to outpace boys in spelling, verbal fluency, reading, and locating objects • Boys tend to outperform girls on complex math problems and spatial ability, mental rotation of 3-D objects Race and Intelligence • Racial and ethnic groups differ in their average intelligence scores • Group differences in a heritable trait may be entirely environmental • • • • Genetics research that under the skin, humans are remarkably alike Race is not a neatly defined biological category Within the same population, there are generation to generation differences Schools and culture matter Bias in Intelligence Aptitude Tests • Stereotype threat: Negative stereotypes negatively impact performance on tests • E.g., Black students performed worse after being reminded of their race just before taking verbal aptitude tests (Spencer, 2002) • Minorities and women may have unrealized academic and professional potential because of this stereotype