What would you suggest then? If we tried to devise a test based on every culture then we would very quickly get bogged down by minute cultural divides and practices. Surely there has to be baseline that we all share in common that we can utilize.
Thanks - I’ll be reading up on it. Do you have any cites that deal with IQ stability in immigrant populations, or deliberate training?
So’s the literature on instability - see Breslau et al, for instance, or Sameroff’s work. AFAICT, current thinking seems to be that it’s indeed stable for most people, and not so for situationally disadvantaged people of various stripes, whether developmentally or socially handicapped.
Raven’s Matrices (the Coloured Progressive Matrices mentioned is one subset) is a set of IQ tests. The paper reports an improvement in performance after teaching - this is the so-called Dynamic Assessment methodology.
I’m not in favour of standardized testing at all. It treats people like things.
ETA - I’m OK with using infant testing to distinguish developmental problems, like the Fagan test and others. Thereafter, I’d prefer skills-based testing rather than psychometric ones.
Not that I can think of off-hand. I could do some searching, but I probably won’t get to that soon. Let me know if you find anything.
Again, just off-hand, but I’d largely buy this. I’d want to see work done to discern whether the variation was true individual change or error assocaited with the measure.
There’s no report of the results of any repeated assessment using the Ravens. There are reports of the results from repeated measures of the Children’s Analogical Thinking Modifiability test and the Children’s Inferential Thinking Modifiability test, but these aren’t established for their relationship to IQ, as far as I know. If I’m missing it, please point me to the table or page with the results from the repeated assessments using the Raven’s Progressive Matrices in that paper.
There’s an interesting special report I just finished reading in The Economist, titled Biology 2.0. Included is a sidebar called “The dragon’s DNA” which mentions a study about to be carried out by Beijing Genomics Institute. They plan to look at a handful of genes (about 10% of the total, I think) of a couple thousand students who perform at various levels on standardized tests to see if they can identify any genes which seem to correlate with that skillset.
Worth reading if you are interested in the topic.
No idea about the others, but there are tons of black people playing rugby - some of the world’s best players are black.
Hell, even in the list you provide, last time I checked there was a disproportionate amount of black players on the top three teams.
Or Hawaiians/Easter Islanders/New Zealanders/people from Madagascar (much of its population arrived the long way around, through SE Asia). This much seems indisputable – does the OP still think the theory holds water?
[quote=“Chief_Pedant, post:84, topic:543753”]
ncluded is a sidebar called “The dragon’s DNA” which mentions a study about to be carried out by Beijing Genomics Institute. They plan to look at a handful of genes (about 10% of the total, I think) of a couple thousand students who perform at various levels on standardized tests to see if they can identify any genes which seem to correlate with that skillset./QUOTE]
I hope there is some peer review there. Politically motivated science and fabricated data is not unknown in China.
[quote=“even_sven, post:87, topic:543753”]
Or here, or anywhere else.
As we unravel the genome, you’ll see lots of anxiety over any study which unravels genetic differences at population levels, and particularly those studies which try to find out why some population (High-test-scorers) outperform other populations (low-test-scorers).
It will take a long time to undo the damage done to science by those who have promoted, by blind faith, this notion that all populations are genetically equal in potential and that only opportunity separates us. Most of that damage was done in good faith by sincere people who wanted it to be true, and who saw a non-egalitarian position as the road back to Nazi-ism. But information wants to be free and science somehow always stumbles through, so while any initial study finding genes linked to intelligence (more precisely, in this case, the ability to demonstrate a grasp of information by performing well on a quantifiable examination) will be severely criticized, it won’t be the last study.
Other genetic shibboleths will fall, too, I think, including the idea that genetic prevalence and adaption takes so long that human groups can’t possibly be that different from one another since they exited Africa so recently. See here for some discussion along those lines. The article reference is in the current Science and it talks about how different the Han and the Tibetan genome is, and how rapidly it may have diverged with respect tot he prevalence of HIF-2a.
the theory is simple:
Africa is a harsh environment, with frequent famines and droughts. To survive there takes great intelligence and skill. Anyone who lacks the required intelligence to survive the harsh environment quickly gets removed from the gene pool.
Some humans left Africa for the easier environments of Europe and Asia where food was easier to obtain, and famines and droughts are less frequent. Since in evolution if you don’t need something you eventually lose it, humans outside Europe became less intelligent.
This explains how the people in parts of Africa like Egypt were building great pyramids, irrigation systems and complex societies, while Europeans had barely stopped being hunter gatherers.
Maybe? =)
Of course you left out the people who migrated even further, native Americans. How do they do in SAT / IQ tests?
Honest question, I really don’t know.