Unit 9 Modules 21 24 1 Unit 9 Intelligence Module 21 Defining and Measuring Intelligence What is intelligence Psychologists have long debated how to best conceptualize and measure intelligence Psychologists have studied human intelligence since the 1880s There are several theories of intelligence and a variety of tests to measure intelligence Some define intelligence as whatever an intelligence test measures And most intelligence tests measure how much knowledge one has or in other words school smarts Intelligence a mental ability consisting of the ability to learn from experience solve problems and use knowledge to adapt to new situations Alfred Binet and Henri Simon began working to develop a measure that would differentiate students who were expected to be better learners from students to be slower learners The goal was to help teachers better educate these two groups of students Binet and Simon developed what most psychologists today regard as the first intelligence test which consisted of a wide variety of questions that included the ability to name objects define words draw pictures complete sentences compare items and construct sentences Binet and Simon believed that the questions they asked their students all assessed the basic abilities to understand reason and make judgments The correlations among these different types of measures were all positive students who got one item correct were more likely to also get other items correct Charles Spearman s two factor theory of intelligence He believed that one general intelligence influences other specific intelligences He hypothesized that there must be a single underlying construct that all of these items measure General intelligence factor g the construct that the different abilities and skills measured on intelligence tests have in common Virtually all psychologists now believe that there is a generalized intelligence factor g that relates to abstract thinking and that includes the abilities to acquire knowledge to reason abstractly to adapt to novel situations and to benefit from instruction and experience People with higher general intelligence learn faster Some of the tasks that Unit 9 Modules 21 24 2 psychologists will have the person do are intended to measure key skill sets often needed to be successful in traditional school settings o Verbal comprehension measure a person s ability to recognize and use vocabulary concepts and words o Abstract reasoning the process of perceiving issues and reaching conclusions through the use of symbols or generalizations rather than concrete factual information o Perceptual speed how fast one sees similarities differences between objects and or symbols o Information the level of knowledge that a person has about commonly known facts Soon after Binet and Simon introduced their test Lewis Terman developed an American version of Binet s test that became known as the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test It is a measure of general intelligence made up of a wide variety of tasks including vocabulary memory for pictures naming of familiar objects repeating sentences and following commands Although there is general agreement among psychologists that g exists there is also evidence for specific intelligence s Specific Intelligence s a measure of specific skills in narrow domains One empirical result in support of the idea of s comes from intelligence tests Although the different types of questions do correlate with each other some items correlate more highly with each other than do other items they form clusters or clumps of intelligences One distinction is between fluid intelligence Fluid Intelligence the capacity to learn new ways of solving problems manipulating and performing activities Decreases with age The ability to think and acquire information quickly and abstractly Crystallized intelligence the accumulated knowledge of the world we have acquired throughout our lives Increases with age Unit 9 Modules 21 24 3 Other researchers have proposed even more types of intelligences L L Thurstone proposed that there were seven clusters of primary mental abilities word fluency verbal comprehension spatial ability perceptual speed numerical ability inductive reasoning and memory These dimensions tend to be at least somewhat correlated showing the importance of g Although Dr Black acknowledges that some people excel in specific areas such as art or music he believes that a factor called general intelligence is responsible for overall performance on mental ability tests His belief about intelligence was originally hypothesized by Charles Spearman Measuring Intelligence Standardization The goal of most intelligence tests is to measure g Good intelligence tests are reliable they are consistent over time and demonstrate construct validity and they actually measure intelligence Because intelligence is such an important individual difference dimension psychologists have invested substantial effort in creating and improving measures of intelligence and these tests are now the most accurate of all psychological tests The ability to accurately assess intelligence is one of the most important contributions of psychology The questions we use to measure intelligence change with age Understanding intelligence requires that we know the norms or standards in a given population of people at a given age Standardization the method of administering a test to a large representative sample of people under uniform conditions so that the scores can be analyzed for setting norms It is important that intelligence tests be standardized periodically to determine that the average scores on the test at each age level remain the same in other words that the median score of 100 remains the same for each age level on the test over time James Flynn discovered that the mean IQ score of 100 between the years 1918 and 1995 had actually risen by about 25 points Flynn effect the observation that scores on intelligence tests worldwide have increased substantially over the past decades Increases approximately by 3 points per year if the test is not periodically standardized at least every 10 years Although the increase varies somewhat from country to country the average increase is about 3 IQ points every 10 years It is uncertain what causes this increase in Unit 9 Modules 21 24 4 intelligence on IQ tests But some of the explanations for the Flynn effect include better nutrition increased access to information and more familiarity with