A 5 Minute Intelligence Test for Kids

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/08/30/a-5-minute-intelligence-test-for-kids.aspx

by fogus • 17 years ago

71 62 17 years ago

blog.newsweek.com

skolor3• 17 years ago

A previous intelligence test, taken about a year-and-a-half previously, had won them entrance to gifted primary schools. So how many of the kids still classified as gifted just eighteen months later? Only half

Now, that's disappointing. Newsweek has a fascinating article there, but they missed the best part. Sure, a 5 minute test is interesting, and the correlations are too, but that is fascinating fact. Only 50% of the gifted students are gifted a year and a half later? That really makes you think. What about the other way around? How many students, not originally classified as gifted would be classified that way after a year or two? It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

This replicates the finding of Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize.

robg3• 17 years ago

Is that last bit in the book or elsewhere?

boredguy8• 17 years ago

Keep in mind, self control is a better indicator for real-world success than is IQ. searchyc for the article, it was linked here.

timwiseman2• 17 years ago

It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down.

I was with you and agreeing with you until this line. By itself this article provides no evidence of that.

Now, if something like "And of those who did not yet attend school or where home schooled 90% of those classified as gifted in initial testing retained that classification 18 months later..." But it did not do that.

As it stands, this is much better evidence of how much and how rapidly brains can change at that age, but nothing more without further facts.

I do agree with your other points though, and think that that portion is well worth following up on.

skolor3• 17 years ago

I was not trying to say the article had supporting evidence, simply that the study (showing a decrease in scores after having been in school for 18 months) helps the argument, rather than the argument simply being a anecdote. "School dumbs you down" is a sentiment that has been around for quite a while, but (as far as I have seen) hasn't been tested. This study, at least, shows that it may be worth testing (which was my point).

robg3• 17 years ago

These are great questions and ones we're beginning to explore. For instance, suppose the frontal cortex of a precious 8-year-old looks more like that of a ten-year-old. They could have simply developed faster but will regress to the mean by the end of maturation (early twenties). Or they could continue to be more advanced for their age.

Conversely, I'm more interested by the kids who are "delayed" in their cortical development. Those are the kids that get shunted into remedial programs and stigmatized throughout their schooling. It's perhaps an undeserved regressive cycle rather than the progressive one in the case of gifted kids.

One thought I can't shake: Imagine a day where kids are sorted into classrooms, and subjects, based on the state of their brain development. Of course, there's a simplifying assumption in there that it's a passive process of cortical development. Still, we can do so much better than sorting kids based on age and IQ.

SapphireSun• 17 years ago

The thing I have noticed as I watch my friends and family is just how much their personality and mental acuity changes with environmental factors and new interests. I think the vast majority of these tests are laughable because they provide a snapshot without measuring any derivatives (not that you could easily). It's like trying to play the stock market by only looking at current prices.

I can see how you might want to do that to pick out kids that are probably teachable, but the downside is that everyone else is penalized despite their current level. I know in college there were several times when I wasn't ready to be taught something, but a year or two later I was.

How could we do it better? The only option I can think of that would solve many problems adequately would be to fund all the students so they can seek out a teacher that is right for their level. Too bad that's a pipe dream.

oc• 17 years ago

> For instance, suppose the frontal cortex of a precious 8-year-old looks more like that of a ten-year-old.

Precocious.

gojomo• 17 years ago

Perhaps assigning them to the gifted group actually undermined their future performance. A couple of possible mechanisms: (1) they adopted the dreaded 'fixed mindset' and no longer challenged themselves as much; (2) they decided despite teacher and parental pressure, they'd rather be with the general population -- so threw the second test a little, as an assertion of personal sovereignty.

Alex39172• 17 years ago

"It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down."

The people who say that aren't talking about IQ.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

I think that turn of phrase "dumbing us down" was popularized through the title of the book by John Taylor Gatto, New York State teacher of the year in some year in 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down

MaysonL• 17 years ago

It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down.

School can dumb you down.

It seems that it can also smarten you up.

See:

hcz.org/our-results

And the book Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough.

Alex39172• 17 years ago

I read that book, and Paul Tough explicitly says that the HCZ school programs aren't designed based on research, and there is little evidence to suggest that their pedagogy is sound.

He does have more praise for the curriculum of Baby College, but that is completely different.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

Somehow, testing for above average intelligence in children all of 5 years old seems akin to trying to figure out the best wines by tasting them 3 weeks after you've picked the grapes.

I would hazard a guess that at 5, the kids who score high on these "IQ" tests correlates strongly to their environment at home. i.e., the ones with the most involved parents do best.

The child's mind is not properly developed yet, and the best way to continue to develop it is to challenge it at the fastest pace it can handle. That has nothing to do with intelligence. At all.

fburnaby• 17 years ago

<q>The child's mind is not properly developed yet, and the best way to continue to develop it is to challenge it at the fastest pace it can handle.</q>

But, to be fair, it should help to identify the ones who can handle more intellectual stimulus now and then give it to them, wouldn't it?

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

Yup, have no issue with that. My issue is that they're called gifted.

AGorilla• 17 years ago

But to do the tasks correctly, your brain is fundamentally making a series of comparisons, incorporating visual and haptic sensory information. The key here is that the white space of the cards prevents you from putting the two lines exactly next to each other.

What if you just hold the cars facing each other so the lines are just short of touching? Then you can see the lines pretty much side-by-side.

Yes, I am smarter than a fifth grader.

algorias• 17 years ago

If a five year old actually did that, wouldn't you think it's a clear indication of intelligence?

ektimo• 17 years ago

Or you could try using 2 other cards to draw a horizontal line across the 2 lines for comparison. One card is used to form the right angle and the other is used to slide up to see which line end it reaches first.

Or if you could get a good shadow you may be able to do it with just one other card with the 2 comparison cards aligned and the shadow card tilting down.

Edit: Or just use table corner. 2 cards along edge and line drawing card on other edge.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

"They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores."

I call baloney on this. I want to see the peer-reviewed publication that says so. This is the kind of mental test that Galton and James McKeen Cattell did a century ago, and those tests were found to have no valid correlation with intelligence.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

This further paragraph in the submitted article provides better information:

"The team wanted to evaluate several intelligence tests, including their own. So they recruited 77 gifted children through the Parents’ Association for Gifted Children in Switzerland. A previous intelligence test, taken about a year-and-a-half previously, had won them entrance to gifted primary schools. So how many of the kids still classified as gifted just eighteen months later? Only half, no matter what test was used. (And that was using a relaxed cut-off line, to account for standard deviations in testing.)"

This is in accord with many findings by many researchers in many places over decades: preschool IQ tests have remarkably poor reliability for predicting subsequent school-age IQ scores. By the way, the Newsweek blogger's terminology is incorrect. Where Po Bronson wrote, "to account for standard deviations in testing," he should have written, "to account for standard error in estimation," which is a different concept. A "standard error" is something different from a "standard deviation."

The later paragraphs somewhat rescued this casual blog post, but I fear that most news reporting on IQ testing is at the level of excessive credulity found in the earlier paragraphs. It takes time and effort to read and understand the better published literature on IQ testing

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

and alas many journalists don't bother to make that effort. Even less do most bloggers bother to check their facts on this contentious issue before posting.

jerf• 17 years ago

"They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores."

You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it. That's not the same statement. The statement as it was made is correct, and there's no need for a study to be cited; this is the study being cited.

Note how the authors go on to point out that if this simple test has a 99% correlation with the complicated test, then, logically, they are effectively the same test, and if you can't believe that line sorting is an adequate intelligence indicator, than neither are the conventional tests.

Slow down with the shooting-from-the-hip there; this entire article is all about how bad tests are for determining intelligence, if you actually read it. It's not just the "later paragraphs".

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it.

I agree with you that the overall tenor of the blog post is skepticism about early childhood IQ tests, but I am additionally skeptical of the Swiss test-giver's claim that his sensory perception test correlates well with IQ scores of children at the same age. That's just his claim so far. The blog post doesn't include anyone "showing the work" to show that that is replicable result. It would be a very strange result, actually, inconsistent with results that have been replicated many times (as mentioned in a scientific publication I linked to in another reply in this rapidly growing thread).

http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html

But, yes, even if the quick-and-dirty test correlates very well with preschool IQ tests, that doesn't mean much, because preschool IQ tests--all of them--correlate poorly with anything of interest, including subsequent IQ scores, that shows up at school age.

brk• 17 years ago

The problem with any of these tests is that over-competitive parents and schools simply start training their kids to pass these tests at an early age. You end up with kids who only are able to properly process a line-length test. Asking them perhaps to discern a series of squares of different sizes could potentially roadblock them.

IMO, the bigger issue is that we expect all children to be at the same learning development stage at any given point in their life and to respond equally to a given teaching approach. So, all 5 year olds get lumped into a particular curriculum, and then as 6 year olds move as a group to the next stage. Actually, I think the schools don't REALLY expect that,they just don't care to figure out a better approach.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

Schools used to use a better approach. They began using lock-step age grouping in the 1850s.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

gehant• 17 years ago

Why do we still defer to IQ? It's a 2D approach at measuring intelligence in a 3D world.

"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." -Alfred Binet, 1905

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

Thanks for sharing the quotation from Alfred Binet, developer of the first practical IQ test battery (for the unambitious purpose of efficient school placement of elementary pupils in schools with lock-step age grading). His view was correct then, and it is still correct today, but widely ignored.

More recent authors who criticize the mainstream psychometric concept of intelligence (operationalized as IQ scores) include Keith Stanovich.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

mikedouglas2• 17 years ago

Isn't IQ only one dimensional?

Confusion• 17 years ago

Neither. IQ tests are more like a 163 dimensional approach in a 882 dimensional world. They measure a subset of all human capacities.

fnid2• 17 years ago

I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items. I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence. If two people cannot understand how two things are different, then they cannot learn. Learning is about assimilating new information, but if the person doesn't believe or see that there is new information there, then no new neurons will be formed to store the new information.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items. I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence.

This was Francis Galton's theory of intelligence more than a century ago, but repeated studies have shown that sensory discrimination is very poorly correlated with anything that can properly be called "intelligence" among adult test-takers.

http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html

fnid2• 17 years ago

Interesting. Wouldn't this also reduce the validity of this 5 minute IQ test?

I suppose there could be physical issues, like poor vision or tactile sensitivity that would affect a test like this. So I wonder, perhaps people who can see better are more likely to be smarter simply because they can observe more items in the world.

mtkd• 17 years ago

Interesting that they use 'financial analyst' to represent an equivalently intelligent adult.

martincmartin• 17 years ago

> [The two tests] are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores.

Citation needed.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

Ugh, I hate it when science reporting makes you go on a massive hunt for primary sources. Does anyone have a reference to the original paper?

Something is definitely fishy about this article. Line testing has a R of 0.99 with intelligence tests but intelligence tests themselves have a poor correlation after 18 months. Does that mean line tests are still 0.99 correlated after 18 months? It's hard to see a plausible explanation that fits this data.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

jibiki kindly shared the link in another reply:

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&...

I see the abstract, but the full text is behind a pay wall for me. I'm very doubtful about the reported result being generalizable.

mrshoe• 17 years ago

Every five-year-old who can answer “paper” won’t turn into a financial analyst who puts a buy rating on Honda at $25, or have the mental skills to do so.

Slightly OT:

I had hoped that our current economic situation would help obliterate the myth that our best and brightest work on Wall St., but apparently we still have some convincing to do.

A good intelligence test will predict which children will grow up to be doctors and engineers. If you want to find the future financiers, you should put them all in a room and see which kids start bullying the others.

cema• 17 years ago

No, that's wrong. It may predict MBA types but not financiers.

pchristensen• 17 years ago

Makes sense - it's a measure of the resolution of your sensory input and ability to discern differences. I can see small differences there accruing into huge gains in learning, confidence, etc over years.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Cue the IQ-denialists.

pbhj2• 17 years ago

It's 99% correlated (in line with) the longer test method. OK. Then you learn that there were 77 in the study. So they got the result wrong 1% of the time, for 0.8 of a child?

Shenanigans.

"the two tests have a 99% correlation"

"they recruited 77 gifted children through"

[yes, it could be a rounding error]

req2• 17 years ago

That's not at all how correlation is measured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

pbhj2• 17 years ago

lol

btilly3• 17 years ago

Sounds like someone needs to re-read Piaget.

Piaget identified a number of intellectual stages that children go through at fairly predictable ages. Children transition between them during growth spurts. There is variance in when the growth spurts happen, and therefore when those mental leaps happen.

Most children transition from the "intuitive" to the "concrete operation" stages around age 7. Concrete operations include tasks like ordering objects in a logical sequence. This is EXACTLY what the "5 minute IQ test" is testing. The longer test is almost certainly testing a variety of different mental skills that are also enabled by the same transition. Hence the strong correlation.

Furthermore someone who is "gifted" at age 6 on a test like this almost certainly is gifted because he or she hit that growth spurt early. A year and a half later more kids have gone through the same transition, and having acquired those mental skills early hasn't necessarily translated into acquiring them better. That would explain why so many once-gifted kids aren't gifted 18 months later. (Of course the additional time with those skills does help, explaining the fact that many still are gifted relative to their peers.)

In short the results should be unsurprising to anyone who has studied child development.

tokenadult14• 17 years ago

Piaget didn't prove that no child can be genuinely gifted over the course of childhood compared to some "average" child--he didn't have a data set adequate to prove such a proposition at all. It's not clear yet that his proposed stages of development are as invariant as some readers of his books, think, either. MIT professor Seymour Papert actually studied with Piaget when Piaget was still alive, and this is what Papert says about how little Piaget's developmental hypothesis constrains profound giftedness: "The case [of Jean Piaget] has a mild irony in that this man, so often quoted as the authority on what children cannot do because they are not at appropriate stages of development, published his first scientific article at age eleven!" -- Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1993).

btilly3• 17 years ago

I'm not saying that this research is rendered obvious by Piaget's work. Nor did I say that the age at which children make certain transitions is fixed in stone. Nor would I try to imply that Piaget discovered everything about the subject. Nor did I try to indicate that there are not gifted children.

However I stand by my claim that Piaget's work provides a framework to understand why a young child's ability at one task (sorting lines by length and objects by weight) is indicative of a much broader range of cognitive skills. Furthermore the fact that cognitive abilities go through periods of rapid advance over a broad range of areas makes it less surprising to me that you see fairly large shifts in where children stand relative to each other in ability.

A 5 Minute Intelligence Test for Kids

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