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| Re: Teaching Seen as Crucial in Topping Education Rankings (754417) | |||
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Re: Teaching Seen as Crucial in Topping Education Rankings |
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Posted by JayMan on Sat Mar 19 14:41:46 2011, in response to Re: Teaching Seen as Crucial in Topping Education Rankings, posted by AlM on Sat Mar 19 11:41:58 2011. Remember also that IQ doesn't faithfully measure pure intelligence.Yes, I'll return to that in a second. It partly measures exposure to ways of thinking as well as general knowledge. That depends on the IQ test. The less "g"-loaded ones like the Stanford-Binet and others like verbal tests do measure culture-dependent knowledge. More g-loaded tests like the Raven's Progressive Matrices measure reasoning ability more purely. I remember taking an IQ test when I was a kid where one of the questions was "What continent is Egypt in." I was indignant. The explanation I got is that knowledge is correlated to intelligence. It is, but needless to say, that is far more dependent on external factors. Someone who was never exposed to books and modern technology might score more poorly on such tests despite having a high level of g. But even when an IQ test poses a problem that you have to work out (which you'd think would measure intelligence), it's much easier to solve the problem if you've been exposed to similar problems many times before. Yes, that's why familiarity with the test lowers their g-loading. The most relevant factor underlying IQ tests is the "g"-factor -- or general intelligence. g is the correlation between seemingly unrelated mental abilities, like mathematic or verbal reasoning. All different mental abilities, as measured by IQ tests, are correlated with each other. An analogy is a decathlon. While different athletes will specialize more on some sports and perform better on those than others, an athlete's overall fitness will affect his performance, to some degree, on all the component events. g is like this fitness. The more g-loaded a test is, the better it predicts real world outcomes like grades or earnings, and g is the most heritable aspect of IQ. That being said, even with the same (or different) g, different individuals and groups can specialize on different things. For example, g doesn't measure creativity, which is distinct from intelligence to many degrees. Indeed, different races seems to have different strengths -- for example, blacks, despite having low g, have better short term memory and are more creative than other groups -- which might explain why blacks exceed at sports and music (think about how many black musicians there are, a great many of which come from impoverished areas). E. Asians have excellent mathematical reasoning but somewhat poorer verbal reasoning (fitting the stereotype). Inuits (Eskimos), who have the proportionally largest brains, excel at spatial reasoning despite having a low mean IQ (91). Ashkenazi Jews excel at both math and verbal reasoning, but suck at spatial reasoning. As well, there are pronounced gender differences -- men tend to be better at spatial reasoning, while women are better at verbal fluency, among other differences between men and women (men have a larger standard deviation in IQ and a 5 point mean advantage). |
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