Week 7 - IQ

Question 1

Relevant Background: Civil Rights Movement

Answer 1

1854 - ends segregation in education
1957 - Little Rock Central High School - African American students selected for academic achievement, and faced harassment
–> Integration of Universities

1964 - Civil Rights Act passed (bans to discriminated groups)

Question 2

Relevant Background: Cognitive Testing. Head Start Program Aims (1965)

Answer 2

Cognitive Testing - showed differences: minority groups and low SES tend to perform WORSE
–> Resulted in President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’

Head Start Program Aims
1. To promote physical and emotional wellbeing in children
2. Create environments that help children develop strong cognitive skills
3. Foster stable family relationships
Focusing on early childhood education, health and parental assistance
–> Positive responses early on ‘newbie gains’
–> Optimism in program then began to fade (regression to mean)

Question 3

Relevant Background: What is intelligence and how is it measured?

Answer 3

IQ is a normal distribution score - looks at performance compared against the measures from the general population
–> Generally; intelligence correlated with G-Factor (a general intelligence) - seems to be STABLE

IQ measures: focus on verbal, non-verbal and culture-free
Norm = 100
99.7% of population 55-145
68% of population 85-115

Question 4

Relevant Background: What were Jensen’s early approaches and studies in IQ

Answer 4

Jensen 1968
- Paired association task, serial learning task - tested children with low/middle/high SES (and measured IQ)
FOUND
–> When intelligence is LOW: the low SES children outperform the high SES children
–> When intelligence is HIGH: the high SES outperform the low SES children
Concluded: IQ correlate to learning scores in mid/high SES
- Low correlation in low SES

Why? IQ tests often assess cultural learning

Culture-Free Tests: Raven’s Progressive Matrices (patterns) - still finds large differences between SES groups

Jensen’s Early Approaches
–> Shift to GENETICS
–>Heritability = the proportion of variation in a trait in a population that can be attirbuted to genetic differences
Has FIVE GENETIC LAWS
1. Genetic and environmental influences should not be considered independent (no trait is 100% heritable)
2. Heritability is a population statistic and does NOT apply to individuals
3. Level of heritability in one group does not mean its level will be the same in another group
4. Heritability in one group cannot be used to attribute mean differences between groups to genetic differences
5. High heritability does not mean that a trait is immutable

Question 5

Main Experiment (1969): Aims

Answer 5

Understand the discrepancy between IQ and achievement in low/high SES
–> To open up genetics as a potential avenue of research into IQ differences

Question 6

Experiment: Participants

Answer 6

N/A (African-Americans and European-Americans)

Question 7

Experiment: Methods

Answer 7

123 page review of recent research and debate

Question 8

Findings

Answer 8

1. African American (AA) IQ distribution is 15 IQ points BELOW the IQ distribution of European Americans (EA)
2. AA variance in IQ is smaller than EA variance
3. The partial genetic influence on these differences had been strongly denounced but not contradicted or empirically discredited
4. Jensen went on to review the evidence with reference to education
   –> In a BIASED way with indirect and inconclusive evidence (said that education should be tailored to low SES students)

Question 9

Controversy: Eugenics

Answer 9

Article published with 9 commentaries ALL against Jensen’s work
- Follow ups included many rebuttals offering limitations of the argument
Created: JENSENISM
–> Consequences for Jensen: death threats, protests, emotional rebuttals with little empirical support, asked to testify before congress

‘Scientific Truth’
–> Jensen claimed: perceptions of findings as ‘socially inappropriate’ stops scientific research - the truth is important to preserve

Question 10

Debate: Flynn Effect

Answer 10

Worldwide, IQ tests rise by 3 points per decade
–> Even with different test types and in different world regions

Genetic explanations are EXTREMELY unlikely due to the magnitude of the change
–> suggests that because our environments are changing to become more similar - this is why scores are changing rather than due to a genetic predisposition

Culture-Free Tests of Intelligence
- If RPM is ‘culture free’ then why do some cultures/SES perform better/worse
–> May be less to do with genetics and more about cognitive ability changing, or other issues eg. stereotype threat
o Steele and Aronson: stereotypes associated with identify can affect performance (eg. reminding women of gender before a maths test)

Question 11

Legacy and Impact

Answer 11

Interventions
- Jensen’s paper focused on SES not just race
- Interventions (eg. Head Start Program) did boost short-term IQ
- BUT: gains fail to show significance after a few years

Intelligence Testing
- Research on IQ and genetics –> hindered
- Evidence that cognitive ability affects performance (very little research)