Intelligence Definition and Measurement Essay

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.

If you had that one piece of the puzzle that would have prevented the bombings of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon on September 11 2001 would you know it? If you saw someone do something weird or suspicious before the attack on September 11 2001, would you have called the police? If someone had walked into a United States Embassy in a foreign country and said that they know someone was going to use a plane to destroy New York in two days, could this have stopped the attack? Intelligence Analysis puts the raw sources of information together, make predictions based on the data, and finally publish the results.

This paper discusses the pros and cons of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III). First, important definitional, theoretical issues, including the nature of intelligence, a brief history, and pros and cons are discussed. Next, the development, reliability, validity, and assets and limitations of the WAIS-III are examined. This is followed by discussion of the meaning of IQ scores, use of successive level interpretation and cautions and guidelines for administration. Last, subtests, assessing special population groups, short forms, profile forms, and what a

Verbal score: represented scores on subtests of vocabulary, comprehension, knowledge of general information and other verbal tasks

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

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

Intelligence tests are inaccurate to measures true ability of a person because genes affect how a person responds to their surroundings, the tests cannot measure the person biological makeup or his true potential for being “smart”.

There is a relationship between intelligence and culture because intelligence is culturally shaped and defined and some cultures support and identify it as very vital in the context of social and ecological aspects. In the early years, there was a bias towards intelligence tests because they used English language and culture. The formation of Wesler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fourth Addition (WAIS,IV) in 2008 by David Wesler was meant to minimise the bias. According to Westen, Burton and Kowalski (2006), intelligence assists human beings to take control of their lives and it varies cross culturally because the power dynamics differ in each society and this leads to differences in behaviour and line of thinking. These authors describe intelligence as multifaceted, functional and can be defined by culture because it is universal and studying intelligence using different culture as a sample that can be used to question Western ideas about intelligence with some emphasis on the assessment of skills and abilities using culturally appropriate methods (Benson, 2003)

The WISC is designed to measure human intelligence that is in both verbal and nonverbal performance abilities. The author of the test, David Wechsler, strongly believed that the intelligence has a global quality that reflects the variety measurable skills (Fahmy, A. 2009). WISC can be use as diagnostic purposes and can evaluate children with ADHD and other behavior disorders.

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 1949). This seminal intelligence scale assesses a child 's general intellectual ability across four domains, producing four corresponding index scores: (1) the Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI), (2) the Visual Spatial Index (VSI), (3) the Working Memory Index (WMI), and finally (4) the Processing Speed Index (PSI). The VCI measures verbal concept formation, specifically assessing children 's ability to listen to a question, draw upon learned information from both formal and informal education, reason through an answer, and express their thoughts aloud. An example item from this index is similarities, vocabulary, and comprehension. Next, the VSI measures non-verbal and fluid reasoning and assesses children 's ability to examine a problem, draw upon visual-motor and visual-spatial skills, organize their thoughts, create solutions, and then test them. An example item from this index is solving a 3D puzzle. The WMI measures working memory and assesses children 's ability to memorize new information, hold it in short-term memory, concentrate, and manipulate that information to produce some result or reasoning processes; an example item would be letter-number sequencing. This measure is particularly important for higher-order thinking, learning, and achievement. Finally, the PSI measures the speed of information processing and assesses children 's abilities to focus attention and quickly scan, discriminate between, and

which is a standardized test to measure intelligence. All of the students were given the same test

Intelligence is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as being the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. When knowledge is spoken of, it is generally used in terms of education. The extent of education a person has achieved is then what most often determines how much knowledge one has accumulated. Nevertheless, with this definition of intelligence in mind, one might possibly consider the average person to be intelligent. After all, even a person who has never gone to school a day in their life is capable of acquiring knowledge and applying it to some area of their life. Acquiring and applying knowledge could be something as simple as being shown how to mop a floor and then conducting the job using the newly gained know-how.

Over time, the tests were standardized to correspond to a priori conceptions of intelligence by including items that correlated well with school performance. Test items that differentiated between gender

In order to calculate the final IQ, the raw scores are converted into a standardized scale. Whitaker and Wood (2008) showed, through analysing the WISC-III, that the standardization of sub scores into one score (such as standardizing results to out of ten or one hundred) will systemically result in some participants’ IQ being higher than it would be without the conversion (Wechsler, 2004; Whitaker, 2010). So, the validity of the measure is compromised. This could be avoided through unifying the number of questions asked for each sub section. Yet the perhaps more misleading and unavoidable lack of accuracy in a specific IQ score is from having different levels of intelligence in the sub sections. For example, a person might do very well at the verbal IQ (vocabulary, arithmetic) and

DESCRIPTION. The Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) is an individually administered test consisting of tasks designed to measure the general intelligence and cognitive abilities (manual, p. 1). The test is designed to assess individuals from age 5 to 17 years. The test is entirely nonverbal, thus it is especially suitable for “children and adolescents who have speech, language, or hearing impairments; color-vision deficiencies; different cultural or language backgrounds, and those who are verbally uncommunicative” (manual, p. 1). The examiner uses relatively universal hand and body gestures to provide directions and indicate responses. The test includes demonstration items where the examiner indicates how to complete an item, sample items where examiner feedback is permitted, checkpoint items where the examiner can correct the incorrect responses, and scored items which do not allow for examiner feedback (manual, p. 2).