Now moving on from general thinking into intelligence
and IQ testing.
I've got a couple of historical notes that I'm going to asterisk here.
What is Binet and Simon? Well, Simon is lost to history
and everybody now knows Binet. Published a test to diagnose French
children who are of sub
normal intelligence in 1905. Today we look at intelligence testing and we think
well it's got a lot of potential benefits. So, if you
identify somebody with sub normal intelligence that you could
help them, right? You could go, oh, this person will not necessarily benefit from a
mainstream
curriculum and teaching methods but they need to be helped
to get the maximum gains from what they could do
by giving them a specialized learning environment. But history is not that
kind.
That's not what they were doing. In Paris
they were looking at their public education system and saying some people
just don't seem to be
doing well and wouldn't it be better if we just got rid of them?
How can we figure out who will do well and who won't do well
so that we can get rid of the people who won't do well, not that they had some
special education program in mind to help those people out.
Their original impetus was just to
systemize it so that people were going to benefit, were going to stay in the class,
and those who weren't
were pulled out of the class. So this was the first accepted test of intelligence but of
course,
it was in French and you can't really give that to people in America.
So Terman comes along, and uses their tests,
revising for kids by putting it in English.
So in 1916 we've got this thing that's called now
the Stanford-Binet test. So Terman didn't put his own
name on it. He's pretty much translated Binet's into English
and then started norming it. As we'll see, norming is a very important concept, on
American kids,
and back then they had this thing they called IQ.
It was an intelligence quotient. It was a ratio.
As such, Terman is the name, that's the main thing to know.
People came up with this idea of intelligence quotient
where IQ meant
your mental age over your chronological age
times 100. So,
mental age is the age at which you are able to operate
intellectually based largely on school concepts
and very much restricted in terms of cultural
considerations. So these early tests were extremely biased
towards white middle-class American children.
Those are the ones who did the best on it because they didn't take
cultural sensitivity into account what so ever,
so that if you were poor or a minority, there's questions on this test
that are not part of your culture, and so you wouldn't get them right, not because you
weren't intelligent
but because you'd have no exposure to that kind of material at that time
in history. They say it's done quite a bit to correct that,
becoming much more culturally sensitive, norming on many, many different
groups
so that you're better able to make an assessment. But what we don't have any
more is intelligence quotient.
IQ is an outdated word or outdated term.
It's not valid anymore and you can see why pretty readily.
So, if I've got somebody's mental age, what I'm saying essentially is,
if their chronological age is 10,
and they can do the mental work of a typical twelve-year-old,
their mental age is 12. If they're able to do the mental work of an 8 year old,
then their mental age would be 8. So using 10 is a pretty easy basis.
If a kid's mental age is bigger
than their chronological age, so if I've got a 10-year-old who can do mathematics
or can write or interpret vocabulary like the typical twelve-year-old,
in typical schools, well then I'm going to times, that's going to be
a 120. It's going to be above 100,
above-average, because what would you expect most ten-year-olds to do,
chronologically,
it they're ten? Then, mentally, they're going to more or less perform like ten-year-olds
in academic curricula.
But if I got a kid who is chronologically 10
who is only able to do the mental work of an eight year old,
times 100, now I've got an 80. Well,
that sounds really good when you're working at that level but what happens
when you,
you know, you start getting older. Your chronological age keeps going up
but we don't really think that your mental abilities
continually increase. We think that IQ is a relatively stable structure
that when you say that you have an intelligence ability
at a younger age, you'll have a similar ability in an older age.
You'll be able to use that ability to get new information
and use new information, but your ability to use information
doesn't change drastically over time. There are some caveats to that. We'll talk a
little bit about those.
But just imagine for a minute that you have a kid who is 10,
test at age 12. Their IQ is now 120, right,
but let's say that their ability level stays the same
so they're still performing as a twelve-year-old mentally
but now they're twenty years old,
now they've got a sixty IQ. I had to do that cause mentally speaking, I don't do
mathematics well.
So I use little tools to help me along, right? So, how do you go from a 120 to 60?
You don't! It's an inherent problem with the formula,
right? His ability says the kid is advanced at this age,
but even if that advanced ability stays stable
eventually, yeah, they'll be able to do the work of an eighteen year old but
what's the work of a 36-year-old versus a 30-year-old or a forty-year-old versus
a 36-year-old? Eventually, you see where I'm going,
the chronological age is going to continue, the ability is going to stay relatively the
same, and pretty soon
it's a useless metric. And so they recognized this
and started working to fix it, and Wechsler
was the first person to really take it on full on in a way that
is still with us today. So Wechsler was chief psychologist at Bellevue
in the 30's, realizing that we have a problem,
and we need a solution because the concept of intelligence
is a concept that's with us our entire life. It's a concept that helps us
understand cognitive decline where
we're talking about dementia and things like that in
the memory chapter, right? You look at, well how is a person's
mental abilities affected by growing old? Well, you needed a test
that was valid no matter what your age group was.
And so looking at a way of refiguring,
statistically the information and norming it on different populations of
different ages or different
samples from different populations at different ages, he came up with the Wechsler's
Adult Intelligence Scale
known as the WAIS, which has been through several revisions. There's also one for
children, the WISC.
So, if you've ever been involved in intelligence testing in education or
elsewhere, you might have heard of the WISC
or the WAIS. Well, the W in that is Wechsler.
And all 3 of them have got a little asterisk because they're all vital in moving forward this
concept of intelligence testing. So, if you saw that as a bonus item
on your test and ye saw, well, which of the following people was most involved with
intelligence testing, you would know that all three of those were
involved heavily in moving it forward. So,
that gives you a little bit of a background but it's important to realize that IQ
is not exactly what you would think it is.