Intelligence

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Intelligence
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Craniometry

• Psychometric Testing
• Broca and his school wanted to show that brain
  size, through its link with intelligence, could
  resolve what they regarded as the primary
  question for a science of man - explaining why
  some individuals and groups are more successful
  than others. To do this, they separated people
  according to a priori convictions about their
  worth - men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, men of
  genius vs. ordinary folks - and tried to
  demonstrate differences in brain size.
• Stephen Jay Gould Wide Hats and Narrow Minds

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Alfred Binet

• The first intelligence test was designed in 1904
  by Alfred Binet. The test was designed to
  identify learning disabilities in order to help
  and improve school performance.

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Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

• The search for g - the single value to describe
  an individuals intelligence.
• Initial IQ tests were used in immigration and in
  the armed services.
• Hereditarian view of intelligence.
• Intelligence testing grows into big business
  (ETS).

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Biological Determinism

• Our human potential is determined by the
  immutable constitution of our biology.
• What craniometry was for the nineteenth century,
  intelligence testing has become for the
  twentieth, when it assumes that intelligence is a
  single, innate, heritable, and measurable thing
• Stephen Jay Gould The Mismeasure of Man

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Current Theories of Intelligence

• Multiple Intelligence Theory (Howard Gardner)
• Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (Robert
  Sternberg).
• Domains of Intelligence

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Questions to Consider

• Can intelligence be described by a number?
• Is there a need to measure intelligence?
• In what ways is measuring intelligence helpful?
  
• In what ways is measuring intelligence harmful?

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Limits or Opportunities?

• We pass through this world but once. Few
  tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting
  of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of
  an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a
  limit imposed from without, but falsely
  identified as lying within