Week 7 - Intelligence and Academic Achievement

Question 1

Who came up with the first intelligence test?

Answer 1

Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who studied intelligence developed an easy-to-administer objective test of intelligence

Question 2

g or general intelligence

Answer 2

cognitive processes that influence the ability to think and learn all intellectual tasks;
some researchers viewed intelligence as a single trait - supporting this idea is the fact that performance on al intellectual tasks is positively correlated

Question 3

Fluid intelligence

Answer 3

ability to think on the spot, e.g. drawing inferences, understanding relations between concepts, adaptation to novel tasks, speed of information processing, working-memory functioning, and the ability to control attention

Question 4

Crystallised intelligence

Answer 4

factual knowledge

Question 5

Fluid and crystallised intelligence

Answer 5

supported by the fact that each type of intelligence correlates more strongly with types of tests that examine the same type

Question 6

Three-stratum theory of intelligence

Answer 6

proposed by John B. Carrol; places g (general intelligence) at the top of the intelligence hierarchy, eight moderately general abilities in the middle, and many specific processes at the bottom

Question 7

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children

Answer 7

widely used test designed to measure the intelligence of children above 6; Wechsler’s test is consistent with Carroll’s three-stratum framework

Question 8

Measuring intelligence

Answer 8

must be based on observable behaviour, intelligence requires assessing a much broader range of abilities than are assessed by current intelligence tests, current intelligence tests are culturally biased, reducing a person’s intelligence to a number (the IQ score) is simplistic and ethically questionable

Question 9

Continuity of IQ scores

Answer 9

Longitudinal studies that have measured the same children’s IQ scores at different ages have, in fact, shown impressive continuity from age 5 onward. IQ score may be the most stable of all psychological traits.

Question 10

IQ scores as predictors

Answer 10

IQ scores serve as good predictors of academic, economic, and occupational success.

Question 11

Genetic contribution to intelligence

Answer 11

The genetic influence becomes larger by adolescence and adulthood. IQ scores of adopted children and those of their biological parents become increasingly correlated as the children develop.
(a) Genetic processes do not exert their effects until late childhood.
(b) Children’s increasing independence with age allows them greater freedom in choosing environments that are more compatible with their own genetically based preferences.

Question 12

Genotype-environment relations

Answer 12

passive, evocative, and active effects; proposed by Sandra Scarr

Question 13

Passive effects

Answer 13

arise when children are raised by their biological parents; they occur because the overlap between their parents’ genes and those of the children, e.g children who are predisposed to read a lot are likely to be surrounded by books because their parents also enjoy reading

Question 14

Evocative effects

Answer 14

emerge through children influencing other people’s behaviour; e.g if a child’s parents see that their child enjoy reading to them, they are more likely to read more bedtime stories to them

Question 15

Active effects

Answer 15

emerge through children’s choosing their own environment

Question 16

HOME

Answer 16

measures various aspects of children’s home life, e.g organisation and safety of living space, intellectual stimulation offered by parents, whether children have books of their own, amount of parent-child interactions, parents’ emotional support

Question 17

Flynn effect

Answer 17

consistent rise in average IQ scores that has occurred over the past 80 years in many countries

Question 18

environmental risk scle

Answer 18

proposed by Arnold Sameroff to assess the impact of multiple environmental influences; measures the risk for low IQ scores based on the presence and number of environmental risks, e.g head of household being unemployed, low-status occupation, mother who did not complete high school, large number of stressful life events, etc.

Question 19

Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory

Answer 19

proposes that people possess at least eight kinds o intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalistic, bodily-kinestetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal;

Question 20

theory of successful intelligence

Answer 20

Sternberg’s theory of intellect, based on the view that intelligence is the ability to achieve success

Question 21

Stages of reading development

Answer 21

proposed by Call (1979):
(1) Stage 0 (birth until the beginning of 1st grade): during this time, children acquire prereading skills, e.g knowing the letters of the alphabet and gaining phonemic awareness
(2) Stage 1 (1st and 2nd grade): children acquire phonological recoding skills
(3) Stage 2 (2nd and 3rd grade): children gain fluency in reading simple material
(4) Stage 3 (4th through 8th grade): children acquire reasonably complex, new information through written text
(5) Stage 4 (8th through 12th grade): adolescents are able to coordinate multiple perspectives, appreciate the subtleties in sophisticated novels and plays.

Question 22

Phonemic awareness

Answer 22

the ability to identify components of sounds within words

Question 23

Phonological recoding skills

Answer 23

the ability to translate words into sounds and to blend sounds together into words

Question 24

Visually based retrieval

Answer 24

processing of a word’s meaning directly from its visual form

Question 25

Strategy-choice process

Answer 25

procedure for selecting among alternative ways to solve a problem

Question 26

Simple view of reading

Answer 26

perspective that comprehension depends solely on decoding skills (translation of printed words into their meaning) and comprehension of oral language

Question 27

Situation model

Answer 27

cognitive process used to represent a situation or sequence of events; reading comprehension involves forming an initial situation model to represent a situation or idea being depicted in the text, then continuously updating the model as new information appears

Question 28

comprehension monitoring

Answer 28

process of keeping track of one’s understanding of a verbal description of text