CH. 6. S. 3. How Is Intelligence Measured

Intelligence quotient (IQ)

A numerical score on an intelligence test, originally computed by dividing the person's mental age by chronological age and multiplying by 100

What produces both physical symptoms and mental retardation, it arises from a chromosome?

down syndrome

Intelligence testing has a history of controversy, but most psychologists now view intelligence as a ________ _____ ____ that can be measured by ________ on a variety of ___

normally distributed trait; performance; tasks

Chronological Age (CA)

The number of years since the individual's birth

What are the three forces that changed the face of the country in the early 20th conspired to make intelligence testing seem like an orderly way out of turmoil and uncertainty?

1. The US was experiencing an unprecedented wave of immigration resulting form global economic, social, and political crisis 2. New laws requiring universal education-schooling for children-were flooding schools with students 3. When WWI began, the military needed a way of assessing and classifying new recruits

What are the four important features that distinguish the Binet-Simon approach?

1. They interpreted scores on their test as an estimate of current performance and not as a measure of innate intelligence 2. They wanted test score used to identify children who needed special help, not merely to categorize or label them as bright or dull 3. They emphasized that training and opportunity could affect intelligence and wanted to pinpoint areas of performance in which special education could help certain children identified by their test 4. They constructed the test empirically-based on how children were observed to perform- rather than thin the test to a particular theory of intelligence

You tested a 12 yr old child and found a mental age of 15. Using the original IQ formulate, what is her IQ?

125

Normal distribution (or normal curve)

A bell-shaped curve describing the spread of a characteristic throughout a population

Hypothetical Construct

A characteristic that is not directly observable must be inferred from behavior

What does it mean for intelligence to be normally distributed?

Intelligence is assumed to be spread through the population in varying degrees so that only a few people fall into the high or low ranges, while most cluster around a central average.

If intelligence is a normally distributed characteristic, In what part of the distribution would you expect to find most people's scores on a test of intelligence?

Near the middle of the distribution

Mental Retardation

Often conceived as representing the lower 2 percent of the IQ range, commencing about 30 points below average (below about 70 points).

Giftedness

Often conceived as representing the upper 2 percent of the IQ range, commencing about 30 points above average (at about 130 IQ points)

Normal Range

Scores falling near the middle of a normal distribution,

The American Association of Mental Retardation now offers a definition of mental retardation that does not even mention an IQ cutoff score. What does this method involve?

Significantly subaverage intellectual functioning that becomes apparent before age 18 and involves libations in at least two of the following areas: communication, self-care, home living, social skills, community use, self-direction, health and safety, functional academics, leisure and work

Mental age (MA)

The average age at which normal (average) individuals achieve a particular score

Intelligence

The mental capacity to acquire knowledge, reason, and solve problems effectively

What is the normal rang of IQ scores and what does it included?

The normal range is about 90-110 and includes about 50 percent of the population

What do more sophisticated definitions of mental retardation take account of?

They also take into account an individual's level of social functioning and other abilities

What are the most used instruments for measuring intelligence?

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI)

A problem with the original IQ formula is that it ave a distorted picture of the intellectual abilities of....

adults

Like the Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler tests are _____ tests.

individual

What do group tests consist of?

paper-and-pencil measures, involving booklets of questions and machine-scored answer sheets

What has the Binet-Simon test be changed into?

the IQ test

One of Binet's great ideas was the concept of mental age, which he defined as _____.

the average age at which individuals achieve a particular score. Or , in different words, mental age is determined by the average score achieved by individuals of a particle chronological age.

Where has the most respected of the new American tests of intelligence came from?

the lab of Stanford University professor Lewis Terman