Identification And Programming For Gifted Learner

When one speaks of intelligence or how bright another person is, the often quoted figure is the IQ or intelligence quotient. It is the most often used standard of how smart a person is. This paper shall look at what intelligence tests measure, how the IQ tests measure intelligence and interrogate their history. It shall then apply the tests to school policy and hence evaluate their validity.

     Since the development of the intelligence quotient, schools in every part of the world have been using the IQ test to categorize millions of students into three groups. These three groups, which are the gifted, the average, and the retarded, are falsifications that perpetuate in our world culture and cause many gifted students to be deemed retarded and vice a versa. Why then is the IQ test so heavily relied on in our school systems? For schools the answer is simple, an I.Q. test is a reliable predictor of a students later performance in academics. This answer is relatively true, but where the I.Q. test falls extremely short is with testing the multiple

Sir Francis Galton (1869, 1883) quantified traits that were assumed to be correlated, and developed the first comprehensive test of intelligence. By the end of the 19th century, the foundation was laid for modern day intelligence testing (Wicket, 1998). In 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet published the first modern intelligence test to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum (Neiser, et al. 1996). Shortly thereafter in 1908 and 1911, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon published revisions of the Binet intelligence test (Wicket). The mental age concept was adopted to express the results in adequate units. The concept is based on an individual’s performance in comparison to the average performance of individuals in a specific chronological age group (Kaplin, & Saccuzzo).

Similarly, many teachers, statewide, feel that these exams that no significant value towards a student’s overall intelligence. According to a survey by both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic, of more than ten-thousand public school teachers, this report has found that teachers

The main purpose of addressing the issue is to prove IQ scored is biased and spurious .Various articles and research papers prove that IQ scores fail to reflect a person’s intelligence. This top-ic is important because due to flawed IQ scores every year, many students are assigned to the wrong class, for example an intelligent student with a low IQ score is assigned to easier class and a student with a high IQ score who may not be intelligent in a particular field is assigned to a higher level class which can be difficult for that student. IQ Tests need to be redesigned to re-pair this major flaw in our academic system

In 1845 educational pioneer Horace Mann had an idea. Rather than administering annual oral exams, he suggested that Boston Public School students prove their knowledge through written exams (Gershon, 2015). According to Gallagher (2003), Mann's goal was to find and replicate the best teaching practices so that all students could receive an equal education. Unlike Mann's exam, many of the first widely adopted standardized school tests were designed to measure ability rather than achievement. Intelligence tests, and similar assessments that became popular in the early twentieth century, had a quality of scientific objectivity. The Army Alpha and Beta Tests, developed during World War I to group soldiers by their mental abilities, became a model for the schools (Gershon, 2015).

Testing has been used for centuries in many different ways, not just to test student intelligence levels. According to an article written in Time, the earliest form of a standardized test comes from China where government leaders would be tested on their knowledge of Confucius and poetry. The article continues with the inclusion of testing during the Industrial Revolution. The testing during this period took children who were not in school and measured their knowledge of subjects that students in schools learned. As time went on, more and more advances came to the testing scene. New products included a revised version of the test, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and professionals developed the test scanner by 1936. These inventions improved the time necessary to receive results from an IQ test. Today, tests, like the

Binet was involved in creating one of the more recent forms of intelligence test, referred to as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A similar test is that formulated by Wechsler (Neisser et al. 1996). These led to the measure of IQ (“intelligence quotient”) being founded, where an individual’s “mental age is divided by their chronological age and multiplied by 100” (Gardner 2006, p. 3). The tests measure intelligence through verbal and non-verbal tasks, assessing scholastic aptitude, school achievement and specific abilities (Neisser et al. 1996, p. 78).

In the society of today, there are various educators who believe in assessment as proper method to measure the performance of a child in school as well as the overall achievement of a specific school system. The assessment may be presented in the form of verbal, written, or multiple choice, and it usually pertains to certain academic subjects in the school curriculum. Recently, many educators began to issue standardized tests to measure the intelligence of a common student body. (Rudner, 1989) These standardized tests were initially created to reveal the success in institutional school programs, and exhibit the abilities of students today. The standardized tests can reveal the strengths and weaknesses

In the early 1900s, IQ test was originally developed by the French psychologist, Alfred Binet.

In 1904, a French psychologist (Alfred Binet) created the first intelligence test in order to help the French Ministry of Education segregate children that may have difficulty learning in a regular classroom. At that time, he did not know that his test would be the basis for IQ tests administered over 100 years later. He has a Stanford University psychologist, Lewis Terman, to thank for expanding his work and creating the Stanford-Binet intelligence test that took root in the United States in 1916 and is still popular today. However, along with its popularity came criticism. Critics see the current version of the Stanford - Binet test and other intelligence tests, despite attempts to make them culturally fair, as limiting to individuals who are not from the major social norm. They claim that cultural bias in test questions is why certain races do not perform as well as others on the test.

Psychologist Lewis Terman devoted his time studying gifted children. Lewis Terman created a test to measure the intelligence of individuals known as the Stanford-Binet. Terman tested 250,000 elementary and high

Alfred Binet was one of the most influential psychologists in history. He developed the first Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, which was to become used throughout the world. Whilst he pioneered intelligence testing, he also influenced other psychologists to explore and expand on the testing, such as Theodore Simone, Lewis Madison Terman, Henry Herbert Goddard and Jean Piaget.

His concept involved the idea that certain mental tasks are appropriate to certain ages, such as the ability to recite the names of the months: while expected of a ten year old, such ability would be rare in a three year old. Binet quantified intelligence as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ): the ratio of mental age to chronological age, multiplied by 100. Reasoning that low intelligence stemmed from improper development, Binet envisioned the test as a first step in treatment: a diagnostic instrument used to detect children with inadequate intelligence in order to treat them using "mental orthopedics."

Before the 1950s, most educators and school systems tended to follow Louis Terman’s example and based most decisions about gifted individuals on IQ and scholastic achievement scores. Standardized group intelligence tests, such as California Test of Mental Maturity, were often used to determine IQ. In these tests, educators were looking for exceptional ability in verbal or performance IQ, or a combination of the two. For the final identification, individual IQ tests such as the Wechsler scales and the Stanford Binet were used. Most school systems around this time considered an IQ of 130 or above to fall in the "gifted" range. This information comes from a book by Frederick B. Tuttle, Laurence A. Becker, and Joan A. Sousa (48).