Alternative Measures of Intelligence

Five reasons why IQ tests have no value in K-12 schooling … and never did

Back in the Stone Age (the late 1950s and early ’60s), when I was an elementary school student in New Jersey, our school district used to administer to all of its students an IQ test every couple of years. I’m not sure whether I was more scared of the test or of the psychologist who gave us the test, but whichever it was, I managed to blow the tests badly. I was so bad that, in 6th grade, I was sent back to the 5th grade to take a test the school hoped would be more appropriate for my ability level. Had I only been born today!

Today, no reason exists to subject elementary school pupils to IQ tests. All the reasons that once seemed so important have since proved to be invalid.

Here are the five main reasons they were given, why they are not valid for any of those reasons and some alternative measures.

 To identify a student’s native ability — what the student is capable of, independent of upbringing as well as social and cultural opportunities.

This was a noble goal and remains one. Unfortunately, research has proven it to be an impossible goal to reach with current technology. Because IQ tests measure achievement — for example, vocabulary, arithmetic, general information and puzzle solving — they automatically also measure past social and cultural opportunities. It once was thought that certain tests — those with geometric symbols like squares and circles — would bypass such opportunities, but research has shown the opposite: The abstract geometric tests that once were thought to be independent of Western schooling are more dependent on Western schooling than are the verbal tests.

In addition, there was a hope that tests of reaction time — that is, the time required to respond as quickly as possible to relatively simple stimuli — would be good intelligence measures, but they are not. Nor are there any existing direct measures of brain functioning. (Maybe some future day!) No existing IQ or other test can separate past opportunities from test performance.

One other thing: Did you know that during the 20th century, IQs around the world rose on average 3 points every 10 years, for a grand total of 30 points over just one century? Researcher James Flynn at the University of Otago in New Zealand discovered that, with respect to IQ, the gifted student of the year 1900 would have been just average in IQ in 2000. The average student in 1900 would have been at the border of showing serious intellectual challenges. The only reason the average IQ remained at 100 is that test publishers kept re-norming the tests, setting new expectations for what constituted a score at a certain level. So if you thought IQ measures native ability, forget about it. Flynn’s data show that better schooling, nutrition, medical care, technology and other factors all contribute to IQ.

Alternative: Instead of trying to measure cognitive performance in some rarefied sphere, measure it with tasks socially and culturally appropriate for the student. For example, when testing Eskimo children, we asked them about hunting, gathering and fishing because those are activities they actually did in their lives. When testing rural Kenyan schoolchildren, we assessed their knowledge of herbal medicines against malaria and related diseases.

What’s a student interested in? What does he or she need to know? What does he or she spend time on? Cars? Video games? Football? If you understand the child’s knowledge and cognitive skills in a domain that is really meaningful to the child, you will learn what the student is capable of doing in other domains, if only motivated to pursue those other domains.

 To predict school achievement.

IQ tests predict school achievement because they are achievement tests for the knowledge and skills students were supposed to have mastered a few years before. Alfred Binet in France purposely constructed the first tests to predict school achievement and correctly figured that the best predictor of future achievement would be past achievement.

If a student whose achievement has been high starts doing poorly, don’t look for explanations about ability. Ask what happened to her motivation (or her personal life). If a student who has been a low achiever starts becoming a high achiever, chances are there is an excellent teacher somewhere in the mix who has found a way to motivate the student.

Alternative: If your goal is to predict future achievement, you don’t need an IQ test. The best predictor will be past achievement — past course grades, past achievement test scores. They will predict future achievement better than will an IQ test. This is why college admissions officers increasingly rely on high school grades to predict college success.

 To identify students with learning disabilities.

Not so long ago, the best way to identify students with learning disabilities was thought to be to compute a difference between the student’s IQ and his or her achievement in a particular domain, such as reading or math. This procedure seemed to have a certain kind of intuitive sense, but research has shown that the procedure actually makes no sense at all.

Most of the reasons for this are technical, but one simple reason stands out: The intelligence test inevitably measures verbal skills, whether in listening, reading, writing or speaking — so you cannot cleanly separate out measurement of intelligence from measurement of reading (obviously, a verbal skill).

The same holds for other content domains. Moreover, the difference scores are a statistical nightmare. Furthermore, research shows that students with learning disabilities in the field in which they have the disability, function about the same as students who are simply weak in that area, because they are students who are weak in that area. The IQ doesn’t matter.

Alternative: If you want to know whether a student is a weak reader, give the student some diagnostic reading tests to figure out what skills need to be improved, then work with the student on improving them. Ditto for math or any other field. You don’t need the IQ test and never did. If you want to know whether the deficit is domain-specific, just compare performance in that domain to performance in other domains. That’s all you really need.

 To identify students for gifted programming.

Historically, IQ tests have seen some of their widest use in schools as a means of identification for gifted programming. The idea was to select students who were truly smart, not merely high achievers.

But IQ and achievement tests all measure about the same thing. For example, the SAT and ACT are alleged to be achievement tests, but they correlate about as highly with IQ tests as with each other. You don’t need an IQ test to identify students for gifted programming.

Alternative: First, you have to decide what your school district means by gifted. If all the district means is “high IQ,” it has not thought things out. Recent work in the field of giftedness by Joseph Renzulli, Howard Gardner, David Feldman and me, as well as others, shows there is much more to giftedness than a high IQ.

If what you care about is school achievement, the best measures are those of school achievement, not IQ. If you care about art, have students draw stuff and have art teachers evaluate it. If you care about music, have kids sing, play musical instruments or even compose songs. If you care about science, have kids do science projects.

Performance-based measures such as these will give you a much better sense of who is gifted and talented than will IQ tests.

 To draw comparisons of your students to students in other districts.

However you make comparisons across districts, don’t use IQ tests. They won’t tell you what you want to know.

Alternative: Achievement tests are more appropriate for this purpose.

The Bottom Line

School districts do not need IQ tests and never have. Someday soon, there may be better tests. Right now there aren’t. Education leaders can demonstrate their own intelligence by steering away from IQ tests.