I work at a company that does psychometric assessments for the selection and development of candidates within a variety of companies. The assessments often indicate areas where individuals have competency gaps, and companies undertake to support these people by offering training or coaching to improve their skill set – for example say in assertiveness. The best predictor of job performance is however cognition, and all our candidates will do at least one cognitive tests to assesses their problem solving skills. These tests are commonly called assessments of abstract reasoning or analytical thinking. Now of course you could coach someone to do somewhat better in these assessments by getting them to practice various types of questions - butthat doesn’t improve intelligence, even though practised candidates may score better. Can you however get people to improve their analytical thinking skills through training and so doing helping them to think more intelligently. While I am conscious that we are all likely to have some set-point of intelligence or some narrow range in which we generally function, but do you think you can somehow coach/train/educate people to move beyond this narrow range. In short, can you help people to become more intelligent ?
Sure, many of us are taught magical ways of thinking as we grow up. Getting over that and learning how to emulate rational thought processes helps us make more analytically correct decisions.
It depends on how you define intelligence. Let me give you an example:
Yesterday, my GF got a link to an online psych study about memory. It was basically a series of memory tests like “remember which color goes with which shape and location” and “remember this series of digits”.
I outperformed her quite handily. But it wasn’t because I have better memory; it’s because I’ve been trained to do those tricks and I’ve practiced them. I know how to chunk. I know how to memorize with my eyes. I know a bunch of little tricks that help you to do these feats.
Does that count as intelligence? I mean, being able to remember a 10-digit phone number or a license plate of a hit&run are valuable life skills. Remembering where you parked is necessary to smooth living. So these skills that I’ve practiced aren’t useless, and I’m demonstrably better at them than her.
So you tell me: Did I “develop” my intelligence?
Yes you can. You start out as a fertilized egg with no intelligence, then some people eventually exhibit behavior that can reasonably interpreted as intelligent. I assume you are asking if an adult can increase the level of their intelligence. That cannot be proven until a means of measuring intelligence is developed. However, many of the components that appear to contribute to intelligence can be developed, such as memory, as Chessic pointed out. I think that all of those components can be developed, but some, perhaps not by any significant amount. But I can’t prove it, until many other processes of human thoughts and actions are better understood.
I think you developed an intelligence but I don’t think you developed the particular intelligence maslowcat had in mind.
I’m not trying to start an argument. I’m just saying maslowcat has a particular intelligence in mind and your memory tests are not it.
Have had this discussion with gf the psychologist in the past. IIRC, modern IQ tests are scored and scaled as to be age-independent. IOW< your score now is very correlated with your score in the future, indicating that whatever is being measured is inherent, and not a function of what you learned between then and now.
This may break down at the very low end of the scale, which is where she does most of her work, because even communicating instructions may be difficult among and across those being tested, so the actual precision of the test result is less.
But regular folks? Should be pretty much fixed by age if administered properly is the claim as I understood it
That doesn’t seem to jibe with what’s discussed in this very recent book, which is an excellent read for anyone interested in the OP’s question.
The comments there seem to indicate that book is a sophisticated pep talk for parents with kids in school.
What specifically does it say that indicates what can be done by folks to change the scores on an IQ test over a lifetime as opposed to simply doing better in school and developing a love of learning?
Based only on the reviews in your link, I now understand why people argue about education methods. Apparently many people haven’t yet realized some very obvious things. Sounds boring though. I realized those things when I was a child. Have you read the book? Does he address the issue that schools do very little to teach people how to learn by themselves? Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Send a man to school, and they will give him fish, and hope that he will pick up how to fish, but not too well, so he will always be dependent on school.
The book is a survey of some major ideas in cognitive psychology that aren’t very well-known to non-specialists, and some discussion of how to apply them in a classroom setting. There’s some stuff in chapter 8 on IQ and its malleability (with the usual disclaimer that IQ is not the same thing as intelligence).
Well that’s an indication that the author is intelligent.
What kind of “stuff”?
I’ve read the book.
If you’re familiar with the recent “nature vs nurture” type of books with a bias towards the “nurture” side such as:
Outliers: The Story of Success
… Chapter 8 mentioned by ultrafilter is very much like them. It doesn’t uncover any new techniques that show how to train for an IQ score of 150 or 200.
Instead, the author emphasizes on page 139 that “Intelligence is maleable. It can be improved.”
As an example: instead of praising a child saying “you’re smart”, you say, *“that work was good.” * You emphasize the hard work that was done and de-emphasize that the child has any ability. The idea is to de-program any notion that what the child did came naturally. His success came from actual practice. You can see where this is going… if children are convinced that “intelligence” comes from practice, their mind is open to becoming more intelligent.
This is exactly the same type of message as the other two books I mentioned.
That sounds pretty woo-ish to me.
Whatever it is that an IQ test measured (not attaching a name to it), the argument that it does not change over time is a statistical one. So I’d think any counter argument would present statistical evidence, not jus thtat a score changed, but that it changed as a result of whatever it is they are saying did it, and that the change is statistically significant, across a population.
That’s the kind of thing I was hoping folks here would be prepared with. Is that in any of the books mentioned?
If not, how do they explain away the existing statistical argument, if they do at all?
I don’t know about woo-ish, its just the other side redefining terms like the IQists do. Intelligence is supposed to be an innate ability. But it’s measured with abilities that can be practised and developed. The description in the prior post is just pointing out that results may matter more than IQ or intelligence. I don’t know if harder working students will raise their IQ scores, or perceived intelligence by much. I don’t think practice, or any other technique will turn someone who scores 100 on an IQ test into a 150. But IQ has a huge standard deviation, so they discount anything that doesn’t change the result within that range. Just more playing with statistics to justify the predetermined result. But if you want to improve your mind, the book at least advertises that knowledge and practice are important components that woo-ish techniques can’t replace. But as I mentioned previously, the skill of learning is mostly ignored.
“IQist”? I don’t have a horse in this race, but I am half a breath from being certain you are pitching woo with terms like that.
Such as whar specific ablilities? And your refutation of the statistical argment that such things don’t change for people over a lifetime (except maybe at the lower end of the scale) is what again? Can you at least summarize it for us instead of just asserting it?
This may or may not be in some context, but the question was not about that, it was about IQ tests as I understood it. If the OP was referring to multiple intelligences a la Garder, that surely wasn’t what I was asking about, and it is not clear anyone else meant it even if they did so far.
Why not? didn’t the book(s) explain it?
I don’t think we can even define "intelligence. I shudder to ask what “perceived intelligence” is if it isn’t woo-speak.
good!
This sentence has so many holes it is hard to know where to begin.
First “standard deviation” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
2nd, IIRC IQ tests are normed so that the standard deviation is 15, with a mean of 100. That is not “huge”.
So what exactly do you mean here, and who is “they” and what are you talking about when yo say “discount” or “change”?
Do you have any formal or even informal training in statistics?
Oh really? So you are preapred to argue your point statistically then, to show some other statistical claimed are wrongly derived? Please share!
[QUOTE]
But if you want to improve your mind, the book at least advertises that knowledge and practice are important components that woo-ish techniques can’t replace.
[/QUOTE
What does “improve your mind” mean exactly? Is it related to the statistics you jsut hinted at?
I think people who study IQ tests will be quick to say they don’t know what it is measuring, only that it measures something.
And they would also never say anything as imprecise and subjective as “improve your mind”. That is not even the business they are in, they are not making value judgments about people’s minds, only measuring something about them.
Ignored by whom? I think I completely lost you in the fog of pseudo-science.
Hi not_alice,
I think you may have a misimpression of some of my comments, undoubtedly due to my lack of clarity.
I do not hold IQ in high regard, but there have been other threads that have discussed that. I merely believe that intelligence is something that is not measured accurately by IQ, or even well defined. The lack of solid definition makes it impossible to defend my opinions. I also believe it limits any conclusions that oppose mine.
My use of standard deviation is incorrect. I was inartfully alluding to the intentional mapping of IQ score results to a bell curve, which is the type of statistical game I referred. I’m not going to get into the IQ argument though. The last thread I saw here was way too long and uninteresting. I do not, however, claim that IQ proponents have been dishonest in any way, I just disagree with the inherent claim that IQ is an accurate measure of the a poorly defined concept of intelligence. I take no umbrance if you hold a different view.
I did not read the book, I used the term ‘advertised’ to refer to the reviews I found, and what they discussed, and am not defending or attacking a book I have not read. The book seems to have addressed learning methods. ‘Improve your mind’ was simply a reference to the concept of developing or improving intelligence, not a value judgement. I can see that phrase was ambiguous and could be read as referring to the reader. Not my intention. I was trying avoid an implication that I could provide a solid definition of intelligence. I believe that intelligence, an ability of the human mind, whatever it might be, can be developed by strengthening innate abilities through use, combined with enhancement of the underlying processes used by the mind. The way that ‘teaching methods’ like Whole Language, New Math, and multiple intelligence have been implemented seems woo-ish to me in that they do not tend to enhance ‘use’. I don’t see any reason to dissuade a person from believing that they have innate ability though. I think perhaps our uses of woo-ish are basically the same, that simplistic techniques are not very helpful in the process of learning.
My earlier post mentioned the great problem I perceive in traditional education that does not combine any methodologies with study of the learning process itself. I was unclear in the use of the pronoun ‘they’. I was referring to the education community. I think that people should learn to learn. Schools tend to provide lesson plans that concentrate on accumulation of knowledge, and understanding of complex concepts in a ‘canned’ method, that does not really exercise the mind well. This has extended to even the best and most intelligent students who have to conform to a framework of specific knowledge for standardized testing in order to progress in higher education. I think this does nothing to include reflection of the minds underlying functionality that would be necessary to develop the most complex components used to measure intelligence, or those which it may be defined by. People can improve their measured memory abilities through simple methods, but improving the abilities for abstract thought, problem solving, and other more dynamic processes require the mind to improve its ‘programming’, something that I don’t think will happen without reflection of those processes.
I’m afraid that the late hour, and too many of those this week, is diminishing my desire to go into more detail, but I would like to discuss this further with you, if we can stay away from IQ, and concentrate on a more general concept of intelligence. And I apologize for my lack of clarity in my previous post. This is an important subject that I should approach in a more intelligent manner.
<nevermind> Tripolar covered it.
I would like to request that Tripolar use two linefeeds to separate paragraphs–it’s much easier to read.
So because you don’t understand the statistics involved, and are hing up on the word “intelligence”, no one else’s position could be right?
Hmm.
You do know that the statistics don’t measure any quality that actually has a name, don’t you? At best, Intelligence is jsut a proxy, a place holder, but it is not something really. Just accept that something is measured, just like any other science. It is observational, that’s all.
Just like when you look at a thermometer, you don’t really know what is being measured, but we all agree something is being measured, we agree on the scale, the tool, and then we use it to suit our needs. Same thing, the test is an instrument, no more, no less.
Really? What do you suggest is the true distribution if not a normal curve?
Just summarize your statistics to the best of your ability. So far, you admit you were wrong on the first claim, which I find odd because it seems like you have been through this before.
Now I am especially curious why you would dismiss a set of test scores as not having a normal distribution? Maybe there is a case to be made that they have some other distribution, I am curious what that case would be.
Otherwise, why suggest it?
Gee thanks!
Let me know if you can separate your claims from pseudo-science please.
How so? I still haven’t seen you offer any statistical evidence that “intelligence”, or more likely any measure of abstract innate ability that doesn’t have a name, and in fact even that is stretching it, can be changed over time.
Since you have been in this at length before, is there nothing you can present and defend that is a citation for your claim?
On what scientific basis do you base this? What is the difference between this use of the word intelligence, and the more pedestrian term “learning”?
Multiple Intelligence is not a teaching method.
I don’t even have a clue what that means.
Sure, if you are sentient, you have innate ability. who is trying to dissuade people of that?
Ah - so was I right? you are conflating “intelligence” with learning ability?
Maybe, but that has nothing to do with IQ tests.
Again, they have nothing to do with measuring intelligence, and if you claim that they can affect the measurements of those who do the measurements, I await the evidence.
Uh OK, not sure what that has to do with the OP though. OP was not talking about achievement tests, or mastery of topical subjects or skills in discussiong assessment though.
Same, what does this have to do with the OP, or IQ or other assessment tests?
What components would those be?
E.g. my gf assesses developmentally delayed adults, some but not all profoundly so. Her claim is that if she assesses them at age 18, 25, 35 and 55, the scores will be essentially the same, the differences arising from teh difficulty at that level of each individaul understanding instructions differently (and similar matters), but not from any skills or other education they have had during the intervening years.
The same is said to be true of children and adults who not developmentally delayed, with even more precision, and less dependence on training. The score at age 10 say, is very predictive of the score at age 45. Do you dispute that?
Not interested in a general understanding of intelligence unless you are prepared to back it up with peer reviewed science, and then relate it to IQ science with more peer reviewed literature.
Otherwise you can make up anything and it will be a phantom in the wind.
If you can state all these hypotheses, then (or others)you should be able to design and execute proper scientific experiments to test them, I don’t see anything you have said as being untestable if you really wanted to, so I expect you would be able to point to those experiments so we can review them for proper scientific methods.
Yes, it is late, and I am genuinely curious if there is any science to back up what you say, because I am not aware of it. But it is not my field of specialization either. Maybe it is out there, I am open to seeing it. Holiday weekend is coming up, so if you or others want to come back to it next week, I am cool with that.
Yes, you can develop intelligence, but you need a stupid light in your darkroom.