Week 7 - Intelligence and Academic Achievement Flashcards
Who came up with the first intelligence test?
Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who studied intelligence developed an easy-to-administer objective test of intelligence
g or general intelligence
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
Fluid intelligence
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
Crystallised intelligence
factual knowledge
Fluid and crystallised intelligence
supported by the fact that each type of intelligence correlates more strongly with types of tests that examine the same type
Three-stratum theory of intelligence
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
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
widely used test designed to measure the intelligence of children above 6; Wechsler’s test is consistent with Carroll’s three-stratum framework
Measuring intelligence
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
Continuity of IQ scores
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.
IQ scores as predictors
IQ scores serve as good predictors of academic, economic, and occupational success.
Genetic contribution to intelligence
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.
Genotype-environment relations
passive, evocative, and active effects; proposed by Sandra Scarr
Passive effects
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
Evocative effects
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
Active effects
emerge through children’s choosing their own environment
HOME
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
Flynn effect
consistent rise in average IQ scores that has occurred over the past 80 years in many countries
environmental risk scle
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.
Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory
proposes that people possess at least eight kinds o intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalistic, bodily-kinestetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal;
theory of successful intelligence
Sternberg’s theory of intellect, based on the view that intelligence is the ability to achieve success
Stages of reading development
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.
Phonemic awareness
the ability to identify components of sounds within words
Phonological recoding skills
the ability to translate words into sounds and to blend sounds together into words
Visually based retrieval
processing of a word’s meaning directly from its visual form
Strategy-choice process
procedure for selecting among alternative ways to solve a problem
Simple view of reading
perspective that comprehension depends solely on decoding skills (translation of printed words into their meaning) and comprehension of oral language
Situation model
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
comprehension monitoring
process of keeping track of one’s understanding of a verbal description of text
