Intelligence and the I.Q. Test
Taking the I.Q test as a group in class was fun. I could not picture in advance
how that was going to work. Thanks to Carolyn for our good score we should be placed in a challenging class. Certainly
we will not end up with the Educably Mentally Retarded (EMR). Lucky us. But some others are no so lucky.
According to the insert on page 129 in our text, seven boys were placed in EMR
class because of their scores on an I.Q. test. One boy's family initiated a law suit, claiming the I.Q. test was culturally
biased and had him retested. He was clearly not retarded. Subsequently, six more boys were retested by psychologists
who bent over backwards to nullify any possible bias. All of the boys scores were too high to justify being in the EMR
class and they were moved. Since then judges have ruled that the I.Q. test is not culturally biased.
However, as we took the test we could see that various parts were biased toward verbal understanding over visual or kinesthetic
and vice versa. Certainly this kind of test also does not evaluate for creative intelligence or practical intelligence.
I know these tests are biased no matter what anyone says.
When I taught at a small, academically advanced privaate school we gave every class
the California SAT in May. That included kindergarten. When my kindergarten class took the test the first year
they all missed three questions that had to do with sleds, sleighs, and two other snow vehicles, snow clothes, and blueberries.
The test was culturally biased against communities that lived along the Pacific Ocean. We would not have discovered this if
we had merely sent our tests backl to run through the machines, but at The Academy we simply traded and marked each others,
so we saw in what way each child had erred. One little girl in first grade who was extremely bright, did not answer
the question if none of the choices was good enough. She was too bright for the test; many of the answers were not good
enough to choose, and she scored unreasonably low. Again, we would not have knows if we had not examined the answers
ourselves.
I very mush dislike standardized tests, but I will use them to my advantage if
I must. As a parent I persuaded my son's fifth grade teacher to change his reading group based on his test score. After
explaining to my son what I thought of standardized tests, I told him that I was going to take his score to his teacher and
get him moved up. He and I already knew that he was in the wrong reading group. Based on which reading test
he had completed, he had been placed there upon moving from the alternative program into the standard program.
However, the alternative program used a lot of real literature and very little of the text. Although this was the same
school and principal they acted as if they were totally unfamiliar with what I ws talking about. They would not skip
him over the next three texts which he had mastered but not completed and they were moving along at less than a year's progress
in one school year. Presented with his reading score on the statewide standardized test however, they suddenly moved
him from the bottom group at fifth grade to the top! That wasn't really all that good either, but at least
it was better.
Even non-standardizsed tests frequently don't give a teacher anywhere near
enough information. I watched a third grade class take a test today on material they have been studying for a couple
of weeks. The test came with the math book. The teacher gave it as written. After it was over and she had
graded she had me present the test again to one student and read it to him because she decided that his reading was interfering.
One girl was upset about something that had just happened and did a poor job because she couldn't really concentrate.
One boy missed two questions that I have seen him apply just fine so he must not have understood the question. The point
is, testing is a rigid and out of context experience, so it is never going to give us a really clear picture of who can apply
what in real-life situations. The conclusion must be that testing should only be one piece of any comprehensive evaluation.
