Quick look at... IQ tests
I've been really busy with university for a while now so I thought I'd combine working with blogging by talking about something we've discussed in one of my modules: intelligence!
Arguably, Binet (1904) was the first to develop the IQ test in its earliest form; he proposed the idea of a 'mental age', or a measure of intelligence in comparison to the average mental abilities of those in a similar age group. His first intelligence test underwent multiple revisions and ultimately became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which continues to be a popular IQ measuring assessment today.
The problem is that this test isn't exactly universal - different cultures place importance on different things. For example, Western cultures tend to consider intelligence to mean being academic, while some African communities consider an individual to be intelligent in terms of cleverness and social responsibility combined. Even more basically, different cultures have different needs and adapt as such - how could you measure the intelligence of a tribe with no language for numbers with a Stanford-Binet test? As Einstein once said (or at least the Internet says so), "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
IQ tests have other major criticisms such as the Flynn effect, whereby each generation appears to get consistently more intelligent than the generation before. There isn't much of an explanation for this but the most likely is that the test simply isn't that reliable, neither cross-culturally or over time. So many factors influence intelligence that it seems impossible to create a standard test...but do you think there's any credit to measuring IQ? How do you think we could measure intelligence?
IQ tests are based on the notion that we have a measurable general intelligence ('g') that influences our mental ability, as suggested by Spearman (1904) when he noticed that children's performance across school subjects was positively correlated. If a student did well across all subjects, even those that were completely unrelated, he proposed that we must have some sort of general level of functioning that influences intelligence.
Arguably, Binet (1904) was the first to develop the IQ test in its earliest form; he proposed the idea of a 'mental age', or a measure of intelligence in comparison to the average mental abilities of those in a similar age group. His first intelligence test underwent multiple revisions and ultimately became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which continues to be a popular IQ measuring assessment today.
The problem is that this test isn't exactly universal - different cultures place importance on different things. For example, Western cultures tend to consider intelligence to mean being academic, while some African communities consider an individual to be intelligent in terms of cleverness and social responsibility combined. Even more basically, different cultures have different needs and adapt as such - how could you measure the intelligence of a tribe with no language for numbers with a Stanford-Binet test? As Einstein once said (or at least the Internet says so), "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
IQ tests have other major criticisms such as the Flynn effect, whereby each generation appears to get consistently more intelligent than the generation before. There isn't much of an explanation for this but the most likely is that the test simply isn't that reliable, neither cross-culturally or over time. So many factors influence intelligence that it seems impossible to create a standard test...but do you think there's any credit to measuring IQ? How do you think we could measure intelligence?
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