Misuse of IQ Tests

While Dr. Alfred Binet conducted his research, he stressed the limitations on IQ testing.  Dr. Binet believed that intelligence was not fixed, but malleable, able to change with environmental variables.  He also believed that testing needed to be created for and conducted on children from a similar background to get accurate results.  But even then, his tests only showed one aspect of intelligence, and did not represent a full view of a child's intelligence or abilities.

Unfortunately, not everyone listened to Dr. Binet.  Three groups in particular stand out in this regard:  the U.S. Army, Ellis Island officials, and the Eugenics Record Office.

At the onset of World War I, the U.S. Army faced the colossal task of placing scores of recruits in various positions.  In 1917, psychologist Robert Yerkes chaired the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits, where he and fellow committee members created two different IQ tests for recruits:

• Alpha test:  to test recruits who could read
• Beta test:  to test recruits who could not read

By the end of WWI, over 2 million recruits had been tested, and either marked as cannon fodder or officer material.  Click here if you want to see a sample of the WWI IQ tests.

After WWI, the Alpha and Beta tests migrated from the army to Ellis Island, where incoming immigrants were tested.  Records show that whole swaths of people were denied entry based on IQ testing, without anyone taking into account the variations in social backgrounds between the immigrants and the test creators.  People erroneously developed stereotypes based on these tests, such as immigrants from Poland being "dumb", and an attempt was made in Congress to pass laws that weed out the feeble-minded from the rest of the immigrants.

But the worst misuse of IQ testing, in my opinion, was that by the Eugenics Record Office.

Founded in 1910, the Eugenics Record Office attempted to categorize people by genetic traits in order to "guide human evolution".  The founder, Charles Benedict Davenport, believed that "the general program of the eugenicist is clear - it is to improve the race by inducing young people to make a more reasonable selection of marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently. It also includes the control by the state of the propagation of the mentally incompetent."  In other words, Davenport believed in the forced sterilization of those who he determined were mentally incompetent.  And Davenport used IQ testing to "prove" his claims of feeble-mindedness.  Now, it is possible that Dr. Davenport did not understand how the IQ testing worked, that it did not measure intelligence per se.  But as a Harvard graduate and rather intelligent man himself, I believe he chose to overlook these problems when utilizing IQ tests to determine whether the government would remove a fundamental biological function from people he already deemed mentally incompetent.

In the end, over 65,000 people were forcefully sterilized from the early 1900s to 1981.

  

Children and Multiple Intelligences, Part 2

Before we proceed to comparing the theories of multiple intelligences to the standard IQ tests, I believe a little history lesson is in order.

The modern intelligent quotient (IQ) test began in the early 1900s.  France passed a law requiring school for all children during this time, but the French officials worried about how much money to put into the system.  Specifically, they worried about slow learners.  This is where Dr. Alfred Binet and his team enter the picture.  Dr. Binet agreed to help the French government.  To get around the problem of testing pre-literate children, Dr. Binet used three criteria for his tests:

• Attention span
• Problem Solving Skills
• Memory

Soon, Dr. Binet and his team noticed that while the majority of children performed the tasks within one standard deviation, some children performed the tasks on par with children either significantly older or younger.  They created a formula to describe this phenomena:

Mental Age of Child

_______________

Real Age of Child

Note that this gives you the "quotient" part of IQ.

Dr. Binet multiplied the resultant number by 100 to get rid of the decimal.  So the first formula for IQ was

 Mental Age/Real Age x 100 = Intelligent Quotient

So if a child who is 10 years old performs as well as a 12 year old, her IQ is:

12/10 x 100 = 1.2 x 100 = 120

While a 10 year old child who performs as well as an eight year old child has an IQ of:

8/10 x 100 = .80 x 100 = 80

The scientific community latched onto Dr. Binet's work as ground-breaking in the arena of measuring intelligence, something that had not been done before.  But Dr. Binet stressed that his tests were limited in their scope, and that further research needed to be done.  Dr. Binet died before this research was completed, but several scientists took over, continuing his research and evolving the test to what we have today.

Children and Multiple Intelligences: A Short Aside

After posting Part 1, I realized that schools and school systems who have good test scores might be hesitant to implement any new teaching methodology or techniques.  Why?  After all, doesn't the present of good test scores mean that the schools use cutting edge ideas?

No, on the contrary, schools with good test scores only use the tried and true methods, because no one wants to be responsible for lowering the test scores.  Instead, it is the Title 1 schools and the schools with low test scores that feel free to try new teaching techniques, since they can theoretically only get better.

And people wonder why I never liked "No Child Left Behind".

Children and Multiple Intelligences, Part 1

Lately I've been contemplating and researching the various types of intelligence.  In case you are wondering, "What are types of intelligence?", I made a list of the nine generally accepted types of intelligence:

1. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) 
2. Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”) 
3. Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (Number/Reasoning Smart) 
4. Existential Intelligence 
5. Interpersonal Intelligence (People Smart”) 
6. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”) 
7. Linguistic Intelligence (Word Smart) 
8. Intra-personal Intelligence (Self Smart”)
9. Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”)

(For more information about the types of intelligence, see http://skyview.vansd.org/lschmidt/Projects/The%20Nine%20Types%20of%20Intelligence.htm)

I actually knew about the various types of intelligence when my kids were invited into the elementary school target program.  The Target teachers explained that all children have these types of intelligence, and that the Target program works to engage the children in more that linguistic or logical-mathematical intelligences.

Of course, my first thought was, "Why aren't regular teacher attempting to use this information in their teaching?" 

The answer is quite simple - teachers are given the materials they use to teach.  Teachers are not allowed to deviate from the script, figuratively speaking, because that might lead to lower test scores.  And the school systems practically worship test scores at the moment, thanks to No Child Left Behind.  

But I wonder if the children would learn better if the school system allowed the schools and teachers to explore various teaching techniques that utilized all nine type of intelligence.   Or what would happen if we allowed students to explore their strengths and weaknesses instead of expecting all students to fit into a mold?