Intelligence Flashcards
Binet definition of Intelligence:
“the tendency to take and maintain a definite direction; the capacity to make adaptations for the purpose of attaining a desired end, and the power of autocriticism”
Spearman:
ability to deduce either relations or correlates
Freeman:
intelligence is “adjustment or adaptation of the individual to his total environment,” “the ability to learn,” and “the ability to carry on abstract thinking”
Das
the ability to plan and structure one’s behavior with an end in view
Gardner:
defined intelligence in terms of the ability “to resolve genuine problems or difficulties as they are encountered”
Sternberg:
defined intelligence in terms of “mental activities involved in purposive adaptation to, shaping of, and selection of real-world environments relevant to one’s life”
Anderson:
intelligence is two-dimensional and based on individual differences in information-processing speed and executive functioning influenced largely by inhibitory processes
Intelligence is a construct
What makes a person intelligent - smart, solve problems, good memory, learn quickly
Intellectual skills vs. physical skills
What should it predict
Taylor identified three independent research traditions that have been employed to study the nature of human intelligence:
1 - the psychometric
examines the elemental structure of a test
2 - the information processing
examine the processes that underlie how we learn and solve problems
3 - the cognitive approaches
focuses on how humans adapt to real-world demands
The Problem of Defining Intelligence
A test such as the Binet that examines one’s ability to define words and identify numerical sequences certainly does not meet the standards of all or even most definitions of intelligence.
There is a correlation between socioeconomic background and scores on all standardized intelligence tests - including Stanford-Binet
many people have charged that intelligence tests are biased, especially against ethnic minorities, the poor (Hays, 2001), and non-native speakers
Ironically, intelligence tests were initially developed to eliminate subjectivity in the evaluation of children’s ability.
Proponents hold that properly used intelligence tests provide an objective standard of competence and potential
Critics charge that intelligence tests are biased - not only against certain racial and economic groups but also used by those in power to maintain the status quo
1904 - French minister officially appointed a commission with an assignment
Assignment - : to recommend a procedure for identifying so-called subnormal (intellectually limited) children.
Binet - demonstrated his qualification by his earlier research on human abilities
Binet on defining intelligence
Study by Wissler - simple functions such as reaction time and sensory acuity failed to discriminate well among individuals of high and low scholastic ability
As a result - Binet looked for complex processes in his struggle to understand human intelligence
First problem for Binet was to define intelligence
Principles of Test Construction
Binet defined intelligence as the capacity:
1 - Find and maintain a definite direction or purpose
2 - To make necessary adaptations - strategy adjustments - to achieve that purpose
3 - To engage in self-criticism so that necessary adjustments in strategy can be made
Still problem of deciding what he wanted to measure
Concentrate on tasks related to judgmental, attention and reasoning facilities of the individual
Used trial and error, experimentation and hypothesis testing procedures
Guided by two major concepts - that underlie not only the binet scale but also major modern theories of intelligence: age differentiation and general mental ability
Principle 1 - Age DIfferentiation
refers to the simple fact that one can differentiate older children from younger children by the former’s greater capabilities
For example, whereas most 9-year-olds can tell that a quarter is worth more than a dime, a dime is worth more than a nickel, and so on, most 4-year-olds cannot
Binet looked for tasks that could be completed by 66-75 percent of the children of a particular age group and also by a smaller proportion of younger children but a larger proportion of older
Estimate the mental ability of a child regardless of chronological age = mental age
Principle 2 - General Mental Ability
Measure only the total product of the various separate and distinct elements of intelligence = general mental ability
Freed himelf from identifying each element or independent aspect of intelligence - also freed from finding the relation of each element to the whole
Decision to measure general mental ability was based on practical considerations
Judge the value of any particular task in terms of its correlation with the combined result (total score) of all other tasks
Tasks with low correlations could be eliminated and tasks with high correlations retained
General mental ability is critical to understanding modern conceptions of human intelligence as well as the various editions of the BInet
Galton -
notion of a general mental ability factor underlying all intelligent behavior
Spearman -
intelligence consists of one general factor - g - plus a large number of specific factors
Numerical reasoning, vocabulary, mechanical skill
Notion of a general mental ability -
psychometric g - based on the well-documented phenomenon that when a set of diverse ability tests are administered to large unbiased samples of the population- almost all of the correlations are positive
Positive manifold - according to Spearman - resulted from the fact that all tests, no matter how diverse are influenced by g
For spearman - g best conceptualized in terms of mental energy
Spearman - factor analysis
One can determine how much variance a set of tests or scores has in common
Common variance represents the g factor - g in a factor analysis of any set of mental ability tasks can be represented in the first unrotated factor in a principal components analysis
As a general rule - approx half of the variance in a set of diverse mental ability tests is represented in the g factor
Today spearman’s g is the most established and ubiquitous predictor of occupational and educational performance
Implications of General Mental Intelligence -g
Concept of general mental intelligence can best be represented by a single score g - that presumably reflects the shared variance underlying performance on a diverse set of tests
True performance on any given individual task can be attributed to g as well as some specific or unique variance
If the set of tasks is large and broad enough the role of any given task can be reduced to a minimum
Differences in unique ability stemming from the specific task tend to cancel each other and overall performance comes to depend most heavily on the general factor
Such reasoning guided the development of the Binet scale as well as all its subsequent revisions through the most current fifth edition
The gf-gc Theory
Recent theories of intelligence have suggested that human intelligence can be best conceptualized in terms of multiple intelligences rather than a single score
Two basic types of intelligence = fluid - f and crystalilized - c
Fluid intelligence: abilities that allow us to reason, think and acquire new knowledge
Crystallized intelligence = knowledge and understanding that we have acquired - stuff that you have actually put in your head using the fluid intelligence
0.5 = r
1905 Binet-Simon Scale
individual intelligence test consisting of 30 items presented in increasing order of difficulty - Recognize food, detect familiar objects, distinguish btw paired abstract items
Binets time - 3 levels of intellectual deficiency - identify intellectually subnormal children
1 - Idiot - most severe form of intellectual impairment. The ability to follow simple directions and imitate simple gestures was the upper limit of adult idiots - item 6
Ability to identify parts of the body or simple objects - item 8 - rule our most severe impairment
2 - Imbecile - moderate impairment
Upper limit was 16
3 - Moron - most moderate level
SOLVED:
Determined exactly what he wanted to measure
Developed items for this purpose
CONS:
Lacked an adequate measurement unit
Lacked normative data and evidence to support validity - 50 kids standardization sample
1905 Binet-Simon Scale - Fell short:
Lacked an adequate measuring unit to express results
Lacked normative data and evidence to support its validity
The classifications Binet used can hardly be considered sufficient for expressing results - little had been done to document the scales validity
Norms were based on only 50 children who had been considered normal based on average school performance
1908 Scale
Retained the principle of age differentiation
1908 scale was an age scale - items were grouped according to age level rather than simply on set of items of increasing difficulty as in the 1905 scale
Provided a model for innumerable tests still used in educational and clinical settings
1908 Scale - Challenges
- When items are grouped according to age level, comparing a child’s performance on different kinds of tasks is difficult if not impossible unless items are exquisitely balanced as in the 5th edition
—- Current edition allows test users to combine all verbal items into a single scale and all nonverbal items into a single scale - to overcome problems with age scale format - Scale produced one score almost exclusively related to verbal, language and reading ability
Binet claimed a single score was consistent with the notion of general mental ability and therefore appropriate
Made little effort to diversify the range of abilities tapped - heavily weighted on language, reading and verbal skills at the expense of other factors such as the integration of visual and motor functioning
Problems were not addressed until the 1986
