Does The Iq Test Is Only Requirement To Determine Learning Disability

Should We Abandon the IQ Examination in the Analysis of the LD Kid?

IQ, Intelligence and Encephalon Ability

Susan du Plessis
April 24, 2002

An important criterion in diagnosing a child as learning disabled is the IQ test. The aim of an IQ exam is to measure the intelligence of a child, which supposedly is an indication of the child's potential. Simply where does the test come from and does it actually measure potential?

Intelligence testing began in earnest in France, when in 1904 psychologist Alfred Binet was commissioned by the French government to find a method to differentiate between children who were intellectually normal and those who were junior. The purpose was to put the latter into special schools where they would receive more individual attention. In this way the disruption they caused in the education of intellectually normal children could exist avoided.ⁱ

This led to the development of theBinet Scale,besides known as theSimon-Binet Scale in recognition of Theophile Simon's assist in its development. It constituted a revolutionary approach to the assessment of individual mental power. However, Binet himself cautioned against misuse of the calibration or misunderstanding of its implications. According to Binet, the calibration was designed with a unmarried purpose in mind; it was to serve equally a guide to place children in the schools who required special educational activity. Its intention was non to be used as "a full general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth." Binet as well noted that "the scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured."²

Since, co-ordinate to Binet, intelligence could not be described as a single score, the use of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as a definite statement of a child'due south intellectual capability would be a serious mistake. In improver, Binet feared that IQ measurement would be used to condemn a kid to a permanent "condition" of stupidity, thereby negatively affecting his or her teaching and livelihood:

Some recent thinkers…[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react confronting this brutal cynicism; we must try to demonstrate that information technology is founded on nothing.ⁱⁱⁱ

Binet'southward scale had a profound affect on educational development in the United States — and elsewhere. Notwithstanding, the American educators and psychologists who championed and utilized the calibration and its revisions failed to mind Binet'due south caveats concerning its limitations. Presently intelligence testing assumed an importance and respectability out of proportion to its bodily value.

H. H. Goddard, director of enquiry at Vineland Training Schoolhouse in New Jersey, translated Binet'south work into English and advocated a more general awarding of the Simon-Binet Calibration.⁴ Unlike Binet, Goddard considered intelligence a solitary, stock-still and inborn entity that could be measured.^five

While Goddard extolled the value and uses of the single IQ score, Lewis 1000. Terman, who also believed that intelligence was hereditary and stock-still, worked on revising theSimon-Binet Scale. His final product, published in 1916 as theStanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Calibration of Intelligence (likewise known every bit theStanford-Binet), became the standard intelligence test in the U.s.a. for the next several decades.⁶ In one case American educators had been convinced of the need for universal intelligence testing, and the efficiency it could contribute to school programming, within a few years,

theSimon-Binet Scale, originally designed for identification of children requiring special instructional attention, was transformed into an integral, far-reaching component of the American educational structure. Through Goddard's and Terman'south efforts the notion that intelligence tests were accurate, scientific, and valuable tools for bringing efficiency to the schools resulted in assigning the IQ score an almost exalted position as a master, definitive, and permanent representation of the quality of an private. Hence, intelligence testing became entrenched in the schools over the next several decades.⁷

Few people realize that the tests being used today — of which the IQ test continues to be the nigh popular — represent the end outcome of a historical process that has its origins in racial and cultural bigotry. Many of the founding fathers of the modern testing industry — including Goddard, Terman and Carl Brighan (the developer of theScholastic Aptitude Exam) — advocated eugenics.⁸ Eugenics is a move concerned with the selective breeding of human beings. Selected human beings would be mated with each other in an attempt to obtain certain traits in their offspring, much the aforementioned way that animal breeders work with champion stock. The eventual goal of eugenics is to create a better human race. The Nazis took this idea to the extreme. All "inferior" humans, especially Jews, retarded children or adults, and any individuals with genetic defects, were to be destroyed; and so many ill and retarded people, and many Jews, were killed during World State of war 2.^ix

The founding fathers of the testing industry saw testing every bit one style of achieving the eugenicist aims. Goddard's belief in the innateness and inalterabilityof intelligence levels, for instance, was so firm that he argued for the reconstruction of society forth the lines dictated by IQ scores:

If mental level plays anything like the role it seems to, and if in each human being information technology is the fixed quantity that many believe it is, so it is no useless speculation that tries to run into what would happen if society were organized and then every bit to recognize and brand apply of the doctrine of mental levels… It is quite possible to recapitulate practically all of our social problems in terms of mental level… Testing intelligence is no longer an experiment or of doubted value. Information technology is fast becoming an exact science… Greater efficiency, we are e'er working for. Can these new facts be used to increase our efficiency? No question! Nosotros only wait the Human being Engineer who volition undertake the work.^ten

As a result of his views on intelligence and society, Goddard lobbied for restrictive immigration laws. Upon his "discovery" that all immigrants, except those from Northern Europe, were of "surprisingly depression intelligence;" such tight immigration laws were enacted in the 1920s.¹¹ According to Harvard professor Steven Jay Gould in his acclaimed bookThe Mismeasure of Man, these tests were likewise influential in legitimizing forced sterilization of allegedly "defective" individuals in some states.¹²

By the 1920s mass apply of the Stanford-Binet Scale and other tests had created a multimillion-dollar testing industry.¹³ By 1974, according to theMental Measurements Yearbook, 2,467 tests measuring some grade of intellectual power were in print, 76 of which were identified as strict intelligence tests.¹⁴ In one year in the 1980s, teachers gave over 500 meg standardized tests to children and adults across the United states.¹⁵ In 1989 the American Academy for the Advancement of Science listed the IQ test among the 20 most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century along with nuclear fission, Deoxyribonucleic acid, the transistor and flight.¹⁶ Patricia Broadfoot's dictum that "cess, far more than faith, has go the opiate of the people,"¹⁷ has come of age.

So what are we actually measuring?

If an IQ examination is supposed to measure a person's intelligence, the question is: What is intelligence? Is information technology the ability to do well in schoolhouse? Is it the power to read well and spell correctly? Or are the post-obit people intelligent?

The physician who smokes three packets of cigarettes a day?
The Nobel Prize winner whose union and personal life are in ruins?
The corporate executive who has ingeniously worked his mode to the acme and also earned a heart attack for his efforts?
The bright and successful music composer who handled his money so poorly that he was always running from his creditors (incidentally, his name was Mozart)?¹⁸

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The problem is that the term intelligence has never been defined adequately and therefore nobody knows what an IQ examination is supposed to measure. In spite of this the futures of thousands of children are determined by the results of this test.

Already in the early 1920s the journalist Walter Lippmann maintained that IQ tests were zero but a serial of stunts. "We cannot measure intelligence when we have non divers information technology," he said.¹⁹

In 1962 Banesh Hoffman told a shocked America virtually the "tyranny of testing" in his archetype book of the same name. His book and others that followed stirred up much controversy, leading the National Education Clan in 1976 to recommend the elimination of group standardized intelligence, aptitude, and achievement tests.^twentySarason quotes an advertisement that was placed pastPsychologyToday in theNew York Times in August 1979, part of which appears below:

In the anarchy of controversy, the standard IQ exam is flunking the test. Many educational psychologists feel that IQ testers have failed to answer 2 all-of import questions: What is intelligence? What have IQ tests actually measured?

The National Education Association, with membership of almost two million teachers, has called for the abolition of standardized intelligence tests because they are "at best wasteful, and at worst, destructive."

Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg says in P.T. that psychologists know "almost nothing about what it is that they have been measuring. The tests take proved overall to have simply low to moderate power to predict such things every bit future job operation, income and status, or overall happiness and adjustment."²¹ .

Withal, the dust shortly settled after this insurgence and the testing industry became more than powerful than ever. The National Education Association has completely inverse its stand and now "recognizes the need for periodic comprehensive testing for evaluation and diagnosis of student progress."²² This is no wonder, says Dr. Thomas Armstrong, since it would have taken a major phenomenon to eliminate testing.²³

Today, voices for the elimination of standardized tests are few. One is Linda Southward. Siegel, professor in the Section of Educational Psychology and Special Education at the Academy of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She proposes that we abandon the IQ test in the assay of the LD child. According to most definitions — although they are not conclusive — intelligence is made up of the skills of logical reasoning, problem solving, disquisitional thinking, and accommodation.²⁴

This scenario seems reasonable, until one examines the content of IQ tests. The definition of intelligence, every bit is operationalized in all IQ tests, includes about no skills that can be identified in terms of the definitions of intelligence. To back up her statement, Siegel gives a detailed analysis of the subtests of theWechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). This IQ test is composed of Verbal and Functioning sections, and is nearly always used in LD diagnosis. In each subtest of the Verbal scale, operation is in varying degrees dependent on specific knowledge, vocabulary, expressive language and retentivity skills, while in the Operation scale, visual-spatial abilities, fine motor coordination, perceptual skills, and in some subtests speed, are essential for scoring.²⁵ Every bit Siegel rightly points out, IQ tests measure, for the most part, what a person has learned , not what he or she is capable of doing in the futurity (his potential).²⁶

At that place is an additional problem in the use of IQ tests with individuals with learning disabilities. According to Siegel it is a paradox that IQscores are required of people with LD because about of these persons accept deficiencies in ane or more of the component skills that are part of these IQ tests — retentiveness, language, fine motor skills, et cetera. The upshot is that they may stop up having a lower IQ score than a person who does non have such problems, even though they may both have identical reasoning and problem-solving skills. The lower IQ score, therefore, may be a outcome of the learning disability, and IQ scores may underestimate the existent intelligence of the private with a learning disability.²⁷

Some other assumption of the discrepancy definition is that the IQ score should predict reading, so that if you accept a low IQ score you should be a poor reader and that poor reading is anexpected event of low IQ. Yet, there are individuals who have low IQ scores and are good readers.²⁸

The unreliability of IQ tests has been proved by numerous researchers. The scores may vary past as much as 15 points from one test to another,²⁹ while emotional tension, anxiety, and unfamiliarity with the testing process tin greatly affect test performance.³⁰ In addition, Gould described the biasing effect that tester attitudes, qualifications, and instructions can have on testing.³¹ In one report, for example, 90-nine school psychologists independently scored an IQ test from identical records, and came up with IQs ranging from 63 to 117 for the same person.³²

In another study, Ysseldyke et al. examined the extent to which professionals were able to differentiate learning-disabled students from ordinary low achievers by examining patterns of scores on psychometric measures. Subjects were 65 school psychologists, 38 special-instruction teachers, and a "naive" group of 21 university students enrolled in programs unrelated to education or psychology. Provided with forms containing data on 41 test or subtest scores (including the WISC-R IQ test) of ix schoolhouse-identified LD students and nine non-LD students, judges were instructed to betoken which students they believed were learning disabled and which were non-learning disabled.³³

The school psychologists and special-education teachers were able to differentiate between LD students and low achievers with only l percent accurateness. The naive judges, who had never had more than an introductory course in educational activity or psychology, evidenced a 75 percent hit rate.³⁴ When Ysseldyke and Algozzine cite Scriven, they conspicuously testify their belief that the current organization is in trouble:

The pessimist says that a 12 ounce glass containing vi ounces of drink is one-half empty — the optimist calls it half full. I can't say what I recall the pessimist could say well-nigh research and exercise in special teaching at this point, just I retrieve the optimist could say that we have a wonderful opportunity to start all over!^{35
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Notes:

Swiegers, D. J., & Louw, D. A., "Intelligensie," in D. A. Louw (ed.),Inleiding tot die Psigologie (2nd ed.), (Johannesburg: McGraw Hill, 1982), 145.
Gould, S. J.,The Mismeasure of Man(New York: Due west. Due west. Norton, 1981), 151-152, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing and the field of learning disabilities: A historical and disquisitional perspective,"Learning Disability Quarterly, 1984, vol. seven, 343-348.
Gould,The Mismeasure of Human, 153-154, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Gould, The Mismeasure of Human, 159, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Goddard, H. H.,Man Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1920), ane, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Linden, K. West., & Linden, J. D.,Modern Mental Measurement: A Historical Perspective(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Armstrong, T.,In Their Own Way:Discovering and Encouraging Your Child's Personal Learning Style (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1987), 27.
Dworetzky, J. P.,Introduction to Kid Development (St. Paul: Westward Publishing Company, 1981), 82-83.
Goddard,Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence, v-seven, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Gould,The Mismeasure of Man, 167, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Gould,The Mismeasure of Homo, cited in Armstrong,In Their Own Style, 28.
Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Buros, O. K. (ed.),Mental Measurements Yearbook (Highland Park, NJ: Gryphon Press), cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Armstrong,In Their Own Way, 27.
Bjorklund, D. F.,Children'southward Thinking: Development Role and Individual Differences(Pacific Grove, CA: Brookes/Cole, 1989), cited in P. Engelbrecht, S. Kriegler & Yard. Booysen (eds.),Perspectives on Learning Difficulties (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1996), 109.
Broadfoot, P., cited in Engelbrecht et al. (eds.),Perspectives on Learning Difficulties, 109.
Dworetzky,Introduction to Child Development, 348.
Lippman, cited in N. J Block & G. Dworkin (eds.),The IQ Controversy: Critical Readings(New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).
Armstrong,In Their Own Way, 26.
New York Times, August 1979, cited in S. B. Sarason,Psychology Misdirected (New York: The Gratuitous Press, 1981).
National Teaching Clan Handbook, 1984-85 (Washington, DC: National Educational activity Association of the United states of america, 1984, 240), cited in Armstrong,In Their Ain Way, 27.
Armstrong,In Their Own Fashion, 27.
Siegel, Fifty. S., "Issues in the definition and diagnosis of learning disabilities: A perspective on Guckenberger v. Boston University,"Journal of LearningDisabilities, 1 July 1999, vol. 32.
Siegel, L. S., "IQ is irrelevant to the definition of learning disabilities,"Journal of Learning Disabilities, 1989, vol. 22(viii), 469-478.
Siegel, "Issues in the definition and diagnosis of learning disabilities."
Ibid; Siegel, "IQ is irrelevant to the definition of learning disabilities."
Siegel, L. S., & Metsala, East., "An alternative to the food processor arroyo to subtypes of learning disabilities," in Due north. Due north. Singh & I. 50. Beale (eds.),Learning Disabilities: Nature, Theory, and Handling (New York: Springler-Verlag, 1992), 45.
Smith, C. R.,Learning Disabilities: The Interaction of Learner, Task, and Setting(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991),63.
Tyler, cited in A. Anastasi, (ed.),Testing Bug in Perspective (Washington DC: American Council on Education, 1966).
Gould,The Mismeasure of Man, 199-212, cited in Osgood, "Intelligence testing."
Cited in J. Sattler,Cess of Children's Intelligences and Special Abilities (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1982), 60.
Epps, Due south., Ysseldyke, J. E., & McGue, Thousand., "'I know one when I see one'—Differentiating LD and non-LD students,"Learning Disability Quarterly, 1984,vol. vii, 89-101.
Ysseldyke, J. E., & Algozzine, B., "LD or not LD: That's non the question!"Journal of Learning Disabilities, 1983, vol. 16(1), 26-27.
Scriven, M., "Comments on Gene Glass," Paper presented at the Wingspread National Invitational Conference on Public Policy and the Special Pedagogy Job of the 1980s, cited in Ysseldyke & Algozzine, "LD or not LD."