iq # 2

From: Nate Schmolze (schmolze@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 25 1999 - 12:47:45 PST


Binet’s Strategy

The major push for a way to measure mental ability apart from
culturally-conditioned experience came from a source seemingly remote from
theoretical disputes among anthropologists about the possibility of
reconstructing history through a study of contemporary cultural variation or
issues of cross-cultural experimentation among psychologists. Early in this
century, Alfred Binet was asked to deal with a practical, social problem.
With the growth of public education in France, there was a growing problem
of school failure, or at least severe school under achievement. It seemed
not only that some children learned more slowly than others, but that some
children, who otherwise appeared perfectly normal, did not seem to benefit
much from instruction at all. Binet and his colleagues were asked to see if
they could find a way to identify slow-learning children at an early stage
in their education. If such identification were possible, special education
could be provided them, and the remaining children could be more efficiently
taught.

The subsequent history of IQ testing has been described too frequently to
bear repetition here, but a sketch of the basic strategy of research is
necessary as background to understand just how deeply IQ tests are embedded
in cultural experience.
To begin with, early test makers had to decide what to test for. The
decision seemed straightforward. They wanted to test people's ability to
perform the kinds of tasks that are required by schools. They observed
classrooms, looked at textbooks, talked to teachers, and used their
intuitions to arrive at some idea of the many different kinds of knowledge
and skills that children are eventually expected to master in school.

What Binet and his colleagues found was not easy to describe briefly, as
anyone who has looked into a classroom can quickly testify (and all of us
have done so, or we would not be reading these words). There was a very
obvious need to understand graphic symbols, such as alphabets and number
systems. So recognition of these symbols was tested. But mastery of the
rudiments of these symbols was not enough. Children were also expected to
manipulate these symbols to store and retrieve vast amounts of information,
to rearrange this information according to the demands of the moment, and to
use the information to solve a great variety of problems that had never
arisen before in the experience of the individual pupil. Thus, children's
abilities to remember and carry out sequences of movements, to define words,
to construct plausible event sequences from jumbled picture sequences, and
to recognize the missing element in graphic designs were tested (along with
many other components of school-based problems).
It was also obvious that to master more and more esoteric applications of
the basic knowledge contained in alpha-numeric writing systems, pupils had
to learn to master their own behavior. They had not only to engage in a
variety of "mental activities" directed at processing information; they also
had to gain control over their own attention, applying it not according to
the whim of the moment, but according to the whim of the teacher and the
demands of the text.

It was clearly impossible to arrive at a single sample of all the kinds of
thinking required by "the" school. Not only was there too much going on in
any one classroom to make this feasible; it was equally clear that the
school required different abilities from children of different ages. Binet
realized that estimates of "basic aptitude" for this range of material would
depend upon how much the child had learned about the specific content before
he or she arrived at school, but he felt knowing the child's current
abilities would be useful to teachers anyway.

In the face of these difficulties, Binet decided to construct a sample of
school-like tasks appropriate for each year of education, starting with
elementary grades, and reaching into higher levels of the curriculum. He
would have liked to sample so that all the essential activities were
included in his test and that tasks at one level of difficulty would be
stepping stones to tasks at the next higher level. But because no firmly
based theory of higher based psychological functions existed, Binet had to
rely on a combination of his own common sense and a logical analysis of
tasks that different classrooms seem to require (for example, you have to be
able to remember three random digits before you can remember four; you have
to know the alphabet before you can read). He also hit on the handy
strategy of letting the children themselves tell him when an item selected
for the test was appropriate. Beginning with a large set of possible test
questions, Binet hunted for items that half the children at a given age
level could solve. An "average" child would then be the one who solved
problems appropriate to his or her age level. Keeping items that
discriminated between children of different ages (as well as items that
seemed to sample the activities demanded of kids in their classrooms), he
arrived, with help from his colleagues, at the first important prototype of
the modern IQ test.

Of course a great deal of work has gone into the construction of tests since
Binet's early efforts, but the underlying logic has remained pretty much the
same: sample the kinds of activities demanded by the culture (in the form of
problems it requires that its children master in school) and compare
children's performance to see how many of these activities they have
mastered. Children who have mastered far less than we would expect given a
comparable sample of kids their own age are those who will need extra help
if they are to reach the level expected by the culture.

This strategy is perfectly reasonable, so long as we stay within the
framework that generated the item selection procedures in the first place.
However, much to the disapproval of Binet, people found new uses for the
tests of school-based knowledge that carried with them the seeds of the
current disputes over IQ testing.

 Although Binet specifically warned against the procedure, his test and
tests like it began to be used a measures of an overall aptitude for
solving problems in general, rather than samples of problem-solving
ability and knowledge in particular. Those engaged in such extrapolations
acknowledged that in principle it is important to make certain that everyone
given the test has an equal opportunity to learn the material that the test
demands. But in practice there was no way to guarantee this essential
prerequisite for making comparative judgments about basic abilities.

These are important issues in thinking about applications of IQ testing, and
they are extensively discussed in the psychological literature. However, it
is not until we back up and examine the possible significance of Binet's
work in the light of anthropological scholarship that we can see just how
limited an enterprise IQ testing was at the beginning, and how restricted it
remains today.



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