Module 6 - Intelligence and Achievement Flashcards
Alfred Binet
a French psychologist who studied intelligence
believed that the key components of intelligence were high-level abilities, such as problem solving, reasoning, and judgment, and he maintained that intelligence tests should assess such abilities directly
Binet–Simon Intelligence Test—children were asked (among other things) to interpret proverbs, solve puzzles, define words, and sequence cartoon panels so that the jokes made sense.
g (general intelligence)
cognitive processes that influence the ability to think and learn on all intellectual tasks
Measures of g, correlate positively with school grades and achievement test performance
g correlates with information processing speed, speed of neural transmission, and brain volume (cognitive and brain mechanisms level)
Measures of g also correlate strongly with people’s general information about the world
fluid intelligence
ability to think on the spot to solve novel problems
fluid intelligence peaks around age 20 and slowly declines thereafter
the prefrontal cortex usually is highly active on measures of fluid intelligence
crystallized intelligence
factual knowledge about the world
Crystallized intelligence increases steadily from early in life to old age
prefrontal cortex tends to be less active on measures of crystallized intelligence
Two types of intelligence based on Cattell
fluid intelligence
crystallized intelligence
While fluid and crystallized intelligence are theoretically distinct, it is important to remember that they are related (think back to “g”). Tests of each type of intelligence are positively correlated with one another.
primary mental abilities
seven abilities proposed by Thurstone as crucial to intelligence
word fluency
verbal meaning
reasoning
rote memory
spatial visualization
numbering
perceptual speed
intelligence can reasonably be described at three levels of analysis:
as one thing (g- general intelligence)
as a few things (fluid intelligence/crystallized intelligence or 7 primary mental abilities)
or as many things (numerous, distinct processes such as remembering, perceiving, attending, comprehending, encoding, associating, generalizing, planning, reasoning, forming concepts, solving problems, generating and applying strategies, and so on.)
What is the proposed theory on how can the 3 competing perspectives on intelligence be reconciled?
three-stratum theory of intelligence
three-stratum theory of intelligence
Carroll’s model that places g at the top of the intelligence hierarchy, eight moderately general abilities in the middle, and many specific processes at the bottom
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)
widely used test designed to measure the intelligence of children 6 years and older
consistent with Carroll’s three-stratum framework, proposing that intelligence includes general ability (g), several moderately general abilities, and a large number of specific processes.
The test yields not only an overall score but also separate scores on five moderately general abilities—verbal comprehension, visual-spatial processing, working memory, fluid reasoning, and processing speed.
IQ (intelligence quotient)
a quantitative measure of a child’s intelligence relative to that of other children of the same age
normal distribution
pattern of data in which scores fall symmetrically around a mean value, with most scores falling close to the mean and fewer and fewer scores farther from it
standard deviation (SD)
measure of the variability of scores in a distribution; in a normal distribution, 68% of scores fall within 1 SD of the mean, and 95% of scores fall within 2 SDs of the mean
On most IQ tests, the standard deviation is about 15 points
Other predictors of success (beyond IQ)
Child characteristics that are also important:
motivation to succeed
conscientiousness
intellectual curiosity
persistence in the face of obstacles
creativity, physical and mental health, and social skills
Self discipline – the ability to inhibit actions, follow rules, and avoid impulsive reactions—is more predictive of changes in report card grades between 5th and 9th grades than is IQ score, though IQ score is more predictive of changes in achievement test scores over the same period
“practical intelligence”—skills useful in everyday life but not measured by traditional intelligence tests, such as accurately reading other people’s intentions and motivating others to work effectively as a team—predict occupational success beyond the influence of IQ score
self-discipline
ability to inhibit actions, follow rules, and avoid impulsive reactions
Bronfenbrenner’s (1993) bioecological model of development
envisions children’s lives as embedded within a series of increasingly encompassing environments.
A useful starting point for thinking about genetic and environmental influences on intelligence
Qualities of the child that influence intelligence development
Genetic contributions
Genotype-environment relations
Influence of the immediate environment on intelligence development
Family influences- share and non shared family environments
Influences of Schooling -
Influence of Society on intelligence development
Effects of poverty
Risk factors and intellectual development
Programs for helping poor children. Ex: Project head start
multiple intelligences theory
Gardner’s theory of intellect, based on the view that people possess at least eight types of intelligence
1) linguistic
2) logical- mathematical
3) spatial
4) musical
5) naturalistic
6) bodily-kinesthetic
7) intrapersonal
8) interpersonal
theory of successful intelligence
Sternberg’s theory of intellect, based on the view that intelligence is the ability to achieve success in life
given one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context
In his view, success in life reflects people’s ability to build on their strengths, compensate for their weaknesses, and select environments in which they can succeed. When people choose a job, for instance, their understanding of whether it will motivate them can be crucial to their success.
Sternberg proposed that success in life depends on three types of abilities:
1) Analytic abilities involve the linguistic, mathematical, and spatial skills measured by traditional intelligence tests.
2) Practical abilities involve reasoning about everyday problems, such as how to resolve conflicts with other people.
3) Creative abilities involve intellectual flexibility and innovation that allow adaptation to novel circumstances.
Chall (1979) described five stages of reading development.
- Stage 0 (birth until the beginning of 1st grade): During this time, many children acquire key prerequisites for reading. These include knowing the letters of the alphabet and gaining phonemic awareness, that is, recognition of the individual sounds within words.
- Stage 1 (1st and 2nd grades): Children acquire phonological recoding skills, the ability to translate letters into sounds and to blend the sounds into words (informally referred to as “sounding out”).
- Stage 2 (2nd and 3rd grades): Children gain fluency in reading simple material.
- Stage 3 (4th through 8th grades): Children become able to acquire reasonably complex, new information from written text. To quote Chall, “In the primary grades, children learn to read; in the higher grades, they read to learn”
- Stage 4 (8th through 12th grades): Adolescents acquire skill not only in understanding information presented from a single perspective but also in coordinating multiple perspectives. This ability enables them to appreciate the subtleties in sophisticated novels and plays, which almost always include multiple viewpoints.
phonemic awareness
ability to identify component sounds within words
phonological recoding skills
ability to translate letters into sounds and to blend sounds into words; informally called
sounding out
Kindergartners’ mastery of letter names is positively correlated with what?
their later reading achievement through at least 7th grade. However, no causal relationship exists between the two.
Phonemic awareness, on the other hand, is correlated with later reading achievement and also is a cause of it.
Words can be identified in two main ways:
phonological recoding and visually based retrieval.
visually based retrieval
proceeding directly from the visual form of a word to its meaning
strategy–choice process
procedure for selecting among alternative ways to solve a problem
When dyslexic children read, what are the two areas of their brains are less active than the corresponding areas in typical children reading the same words
One area is directly involved in discriminating phonemes;
the other area is involved in integrating visual and auditory data (in this case, integrating letters seen on the page with accompanying sounds).
At a cognitive level of analysis, dyslexia stems primarily from…
poor phonemic awareness
limited vocabulary for spoken words
and weak decoding skills
simple view of reading
perspective that comprehension depends solely on decoding skill and comprehension of oral language
situation model
cognitive processes used to represent a situation or sequence of events
What Basic processes are crucial to reading comprehension?
encoding (identification of key features of an object or event)
automatization (executing a process with minimal demands on cognitive resources)
Development of reading comprehension is also aided by
acquisition of reading strategies
Increasing metacognitive knowledge
increasing content knowledge
comprehension monitoring
process of keeping track of one’s understanding of a verbal description or text
writing requires focusing simultaneously on numerous goals, both low level and high level
low-level goals include forming letters, spelling words, using correct capitalization and punctuation, and adhering to grammatical rules.
high-level goals include making arguments comprehensible without the intonations and gestures that help us communicate when we speak, organizing arguments into a coherent framework, and providing the background information that readers need to understand the writing.
script
typical sequence of actions used to organize and interpret repeated events, such as eating at restaurants, going to doctors’ appointments, and writing reports
3 Crucial roles that Metacognitive understanding plays in writing.
1) recognizing that readers may not have the same knowledge as the writer and that the writing therefore needs to provide readers the information they need to grasp what is being said
2) involves understanding the need to plan before writing, rather than just jumping in and starting to write.
3) Understanding the need for revision
At what age do most children begin to learn arithmetic?
From about 5 years
numerical magnitude representations
mental models of the sizes of numbers, ordered along a less-to-more dimension
mathematical equality
concept that the values on each side of the equal sign must be equivalent
gesture–speech mismatches
phenomenon in which hand movements and verbal statements convey different ideas
One of Binet’s key insights was that…
intelligence includes diverse high-level capabilities that need to be assessed in order to measure intelligence accurately.
What was the purpose of Alfred Binet and his colleague Théophile Simon developing the first widely used intelligence test?
To identify children who were unlikely to benefit from standard instruction in the classroom. Modern intelligence tests are descendants of the Binet–Simon test.
Intelligence can be viewed as…
a single trait, such as g;
as a few separate abilities, such as Thurstone’s primary mental abilities;
or as a very large number of specific processes, such as those described in information-processing analyses.
Intelligence is often measured through use of IQ tests, such as
the Stanford–Binet and the WISC.
These tests examine general information, vocabulary, arithmetic, language comprehension, spatial reasoning, and a variety of other intellectual abilities.
A person’s overall score on an intelligence test, the IQ score, is a measure of what?
general intelligence. It reflects the individual’s intellectual ability relative to age peers.
Are most children’s IQ scores quite stable over periods of years?
Yes, true , though scores do vary somewhat over time
IQ scores correlate positively with what?
long-term educational and occupational success.
What other factors can influence success in life?
social understanding, creativity, and motivation also influence success in life.
Development of intelligence is influenced by what?
the child’s own qualities
the immediate environment
he broader societal context.
Genetic inheritance is one important influence on IQ score. This influence tends to increase with…
age, in part due to some genes not expressing themselves until late childhood or adolescence, and in part due to genes influencing children’s choices of environments.
A child’s family environment, as measured by the HOME, is related to the child’s IQ score.
The relation reflects within- family influences, such as parents’ intellectual and emotional support for the particular child, as well as between-family influences, such as differences in parental wealth and education.
Schooling positively influences what?
IQ score and school achievement.
What broader societal factors also influence children’s IQ scores?
poverty and discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities,
To alleviate the harmful effects of poverty, the United States has undertaken what?
Both small-scale preschool intervention programs and the much larger Project Head Start.
Both have initial positive effects on intelligence and school achievement, though the effects fade over time. On the other hand, the programs have enduring positive effects on the likelihood of not being held back in a grade and the likelihood of completing high school and enrolling in college.
The Carolina Abecedarian Project
Intensive intervention programs, that begin in the child’s first year and provide optimal childcare circumstances and structured academic curricula have produced increases in intelligence that continue into adolescence and adulthood.
What are some Novel approaches to intelligence that attempt to broaden traditional conceptions of intelligence?
Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory
Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence
Many children learn letter names and gain phonemic awareness before they start school. What are both of these skills correlated with ?
Both skills correlate with later reading achievement, and phonemic awareness also is causally related to it.
Word identification is achieved by two main strategies:
phonological recoding and visually based retrieval.
Why does Reading comprehension benefits from automatization of word identification?
because it frees cognitive resources for understanding the text. Use of strategies, metacognitive understanding, and content knowledge also influence reading comprehension, as does the amount that parents read to their children and the amount that children themselves read.
Although many children begin to write during the preschool period, writing well remains difficult for many years. Much of the difficulty comes from what?
the fact that writing well requires children to attend simultaneously to low-level processes, such as punctuation and spelling, and to high-level processes, such as anticipating what readers will and will not know.
As with reading, what is it that influences development of writing?
automatization of basic processes
use of strategies
metacognitive understanding
content knowledge
Most children use several strategies to learn arithmetic, such as…
adding by counting from 1, counting from the larger addend, and retrieving answers from memory.
Children typically choose in adaptive ways, using more time-consuming and effortful strategies only on the more difficult problems where such approaches are needed to generate correct answers.
Precise representations of numerical magnitudes facilitate…
learning arithmetic and other mathematical skills.
As children encounter more advanced math, what becomes more important?
conceptual understanding becomes increasingly important. Understanding mathematical equality, for example, is essential for grasping advanced arithmetic and algebra problems.
Mathematics anxiety can interfere with…
performance and learning because the heightened emotions reduce working- memory resources.
four key historical theories on intelligence
1 - Spearman’s G
2- Cattell: crystallized and fluid intelligence
3- Thurstone: 7 primary abilities
4- Carroll: 3 stratum model
Spearman’s “g” is positively correlated with:
Performance in school or on achievement tests
Information-processing speed
Speed of neural transmission
Brain volume
General knowledge
Fluid Intelligence- Raymond Cattell (1905-1998)
The ability to think on the spot and solve new problems. It is related to:
- adaptation to new tasks
- speed of information processing
- working memory
- attentional control
Fluid intelligence peaks at 20-25 years old
Crystallized Intelligence - Raymond Cattell (1905-1998)
Factual knowledge about the world. It reflects long-term memory for prior experience and is related to verbal skills
Crystallized intelligence increases over the lifespan
7 Primary mental abilities (Thurstone)
1 - Word Fluency – ability to produce words rapidly
2 - Verbal Comprehension – ability to define and understand words
3- Reasoning – ability to consider and work with rules
4 - Spatial Visualization - ability to visualize relationships between objects
5 - Numbering - ability to deal with numbers
6 - Rote Memory - ability to memorize and recall information
7 - Perceptual Speed - ability to see similarities and differences between objects
Is intelligence one thing or many?
Modern theory suggests that it is both.
Overall, intelligence is a broad psychological construct. Depending on your theoretical orientation, intelligence may be viewed as one overarching construct or as several related (but distinct!) constructs.
Intelligence is both:
1) someone’s general capacity to think, learn, and solve problems
2) that it consists of several related, but distinct, types of intelligence.
Who was the first to posit the idea that intelligence can be measured using observable behaviour?
Alfred Binet
Intelligence tests are created to have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. What does this mean?
This means that scores from 85-115 are within the average range of intelligence. It’s called average for a reason – in a given population, this is where 68% of people score.
How was IQ originally calculated?
IQ= Mental Age ÷ Chronological Age X 100
Mental age: the age-level of the person’s performance
Chronological age: how old the person is actually (in years)
The WISC-5 is one of the most common measures of intelligence for children used today. It lines up well with Carroll’s 3-stratum theory as it provides both
1) an overall intelligence quotient
2) separate scores for different types of intelligence.
WISC
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
Verbal comprehension
Visual Spatial
Fluid Reasoning
Working Memory
Processing Speed
Verbal Comprehension Tests (WISC)
Tests in this area assess abstract verbal reasoning and word knowledge. Scores on the verbal comprehension index are especially sensitive to learning opportunities and cultural experiences.
Fluid Reasoning tests (WISC)
Tests in this area assess abstract problem solving and reasoning.
Working memory tests (WISC)
Tests in this area assess auditory and visual short-term memory.
Processing Speed tests (WISC)
Tests in this area assess attention and motor/mental speed.
Pros of Measuring IQ
having an estimate of a child’s intelligence level might inform the type of supports they might need to learn at school. It might provide us with a better understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses.
intelligence testing provides psychologists and medical doctors with the information necessary to make certain diagnoses, like an intellectual disability or a learning disability.
Cons of measuring IQ
intelligence testing has a very dark history. Intelligence testing provided a way for the eugenics movement to test individuals they deemed “unfit” to procreate. In the early 1900s, intelligence tests were used to give diagnoses like “moron”, “imbecile”, and “idiot”. Sadly, these labels were used to justify forced sterilizations.
Early versions of modern intelligence tests were not culturally sensitive and norms were created primarily using middle or upper-class white participants. These inaccurate norms lead to ethnic minority students being falsely identified as being intellectually disabled. Even today, intelligence testing continues to be heavily influenced by test taking behaviour.
IQ scores can guide…
diagnostic or educational planning, BUT they provide only a snapshot of an individual’s competencies.
Grit
Self discipline
power of passion and perseverance (Duckworth)
An IQ score of 94.5 indicates
Average IQ
________ is more predictive of changes in elementary school grades than ________.
Self-discipline, IQ
Intelligence has a strong heritability component
Within a given population, it is estimated that approximately 50% of the variance in intelligence can be accounted for by genetics.
IQ scores are more similar as the degree of relatedness between people increases – indicating a genetic contribution.
BUT the correlation between IQ scores also depends on environment
For example, identical twins who are reared together have a stronger similarity in their IQ scores than identical twins raised apart.
the relative contribution of genes on intelligence increases with…
Age.
By adulthood, genetics account for a much greater proportion of the variance in intelligence scores than the shared environment.
For example, this means that adopted children start to have a greater resemblance to their biological parents over time.
This phenomenon is known as the Wilson Effect (heritability for IQ increases over development).
‘Wilson effect’ has a major caveat:
Research has mainly focused on middle class populations who are not facing extreme adversity in their development.
In other words, in a moderate environment, genetics play a stronger role than environment over time.
For children who are malnourished, face significant disease or trauma, or other extreme environmental conditions, the environment certainly continues to impact their intelligence.
According to Sandra Scarr, the environment can contribute to a child’s intelligence in a number of ways:
(Environmental contributions: Family on Intelligence)
1 - Passive Effects: effects on the child from environments selected by others. For example, a child might live in a home where there are lots of books available.
2 - Evocative Effects: what the child evokes from others. For example, a child who demonstrates an excited, positive reaction to being read to may lead their caregivers to take a stronger interest in reading with them.
3 - Active Effects: what the child actively seeks out in their environment. For example, a child might actively seek out books to read on their own.
Environmental Contributions: Society
the larger society in which we develop further contributes to intelligence.
Consider what knowledge was available to someone in the 1920’s versus the 2020’s – there have been countless advancements in technology and our knowledge of the world around us.
Indeed, research indicates that IQ scores have been increasing steadily over time. This phenomenon is known as the Flynn effect.
Flynn effect
Great- grandparents learned how to manipulate the world practically but we’ve learned how to classify it intellectually.
In last half century we have went through a profound change in the way we think (Cognitive revolution) since WWII we are requires to sort our world by conceptualizing it through scientific spectacles.
Whites 3/10 pints a year gained
Blacks 4.45/10 a year gained (gaining about 50% faster during that period - IQ gap can be closed environmentally)
What two factors are related to intelligence?
both genetic and environmental factors
With development, however, we know that genetic factors account for a greater proportion of the variance within IQ than the shared environment.
Over time, the influence of genes on intelligence:
Increases
The Flynn Effect tells us that:
Increases in IQ scores must be due to changes in society
academic achievement is related to many individual factors like IQ, motivation, grit, and personality. Environmental factors, like parental emphasis on achievement and school resources, also play a role. What are the three basic abilities?
Reading
Writing
Arithmetic
There are two main streams of thought on teaching reading:
phonics
whole language
Phonics - Children are taught to dissect unfamiliar words into parts and then join the parts together to form words. By learning these letter-sound relationships, the student is provided with a decoding formula that can be applied whenever they encounter an unfamiliar word. Experts argue that this strategy leads to better pronunciation strategies BUT it makes reading much more effortful and stories can lose their meaning.
Whole Language - Children are taught to focus on the meanings of written words embedded in stories. Students are taught critical thinking and are encouraged to use context clues to help them guess new words. Whole language teachers emphasize the meaning of texts over the sounds of letters. Experts argue that this strategy makes reading more interesting BUT students may be less accurate overall in their ability to read novel words.
Writing is more difficult for new learners to master because it involves many different components:
Low-level goals: forming letters, spelling words, correct punctuation
High-level goals: making text understandable, coherent, and providing enough information
Thus, writing takes up a lot of processing capacity in the early years. As you might expect, reading and writing skills are highly correlated
Arithmetic. There are notable individual and cultural differences when it comes to achievement in math:
Language -
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages tend to express numbers in more straightforward ways than in English. This is one reason why students who speak these languages may be more successful in math than others.
Stereotype Threat -
Math anxiety tends to be more common among girls than boys. This has nothing to do with gender differences in innate ability, but rather is thought to be related to adults’ beliefs about math. For example, a girl may internalize a teacher’s negative stereotype about girls and their ability to be successful with math.
majority of students will fall in the “average” range of intellectual ability and academic achievement. But what about people on the extremes?
Giftedness -
Learning Disabilities -
Learning Disabilities (LDs)
people with learning disabilities can be high academic achievers, especially when they have the appropriate academic accommodations.
LD’s affect one or more of the ways that a person takes in, stores, or uses information.
are typically diagnosed during childhood and are lifelong neurodevelopmental conditions that impact 5-10% of Canadians.
In order to diagnose a learning disability, there needs to be a significant discrepancy between someone’s cognitive ability level and their academic achievement. For example, an 8-year-old child might have an IQ similar to other 8-year-olds, but is reading at the level of a 5-year-old.
Giftedness
Reflects unusually high ability in any domain - this can be a specific area of intelligence, like verbal comprehension, or global IQ.
While giftedness does not have strict “diagnostic” rules per se, it is typically assessed using a standardized IQ test like the WISC-5. Children who score in ≥98th percentile may be considered gifted, which corresponds to an IQ score of ≥ 130. In other words, children who score in this range perform better on the task than 98% of their same-aged peers.
academic achievement across reading, writing, and math is related to both
individual factors (like IQ and grit)
contextual factors (like the language you learn in and teacher relationships).
Nursery rhymes are beneficial for reading development because:
they emphasize small sound differences between words (e.g., sam, ham)
A diagnosis of a learning disability means:
There is a discrepancy between someone’s ability (IQ) and their academic achievement
Protzko et al. (2013) conducted a meta-analysis of the environmental factors that may boost the intelligence of young children. What were the findings?
Early education programs raise the IQ of disadvantaged children by 4 points. These programs provide children with cognitively complex environments - books, puzzles, and stimulating verbal interactions.
Engaging in interactive reading with young children raises IQ by 6 points. This effect was larger when interactive reading occurred earlier in development.
Attending preschool raises IQ by 4 points. This effect is larger when preschool includes a specific language component.
