chapter summary:

• Alfred Binet and his colleague Théophile Simon developed the first widely used intelligence test. Its purpose was to identify children who were unlikely to benefit from standard instruction in the classroom. Modern intelligence tests are descendants of the Binet-Simon test.
• One of Binet’s key insights was that intelligence includes diverse high-level capabilities that need to be assessed in order to measure intelligence accurately.

What Is Intelligence?

• Intelligence can be viewed as a single trait, such as g; as a few separate abilities, such as Thurstone’s primary mental abilities; or as a very large number of specific processes, such as those described in information-processing analyses.
• Intelligence is often measured through use of IQ tests, such as the Stanford-Binet and the WISC. These tests examine general information, vocabulary, arithmetic, language comprehension, spatial reasoning, and a variety of other intellectual abilities.

Measuring Intelligence

• A person’s overall score on an intelligence test, the IQ score, is a measure of general intelligence. It reflects the individual’s intellectual ability relative to age peers.
• Most children’s IQ scores are quite stable over periods of years, though scores do vary somewhat over time.

IQ Scores as Predictors of Important Outcomes

• IQ scores correlate positively with long-term educational and occupational success.
• Other factors, such as social understanding, creativity, and motivation also influence success in life.

Genes, Environment, and the Development of Intelligence

• Development of intelligence is influenced by the child’s own qualities, by the immediate environment, and by the broader societal context.
• Genetic inheritance is one important influence on IQ score. This influence tends to increase with age, in part due to some genes not expressing themselves until late childhood or adolescence, and in part due to genes influencing children’s choices of environments.
• A child’s family environment, as measured by the HOME, is related to the child’s IQ score. The relation reflects within-family influences, such as parents’ intellectual and emotional support for the particular child, as well as between-family influences, such as differences in parental wealth and education.
• Schooling positively influences IQ score and school achievement.
• Broader societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, also influence children’s IQ scores.
• To alleviate the harmful effects of poverty, the United States has undertaken both small-scale preschool intervention programs and the much larger Project Head Start. Both have initial positive effects on intelligence and school achievement, though the effects fade over time. On the other hand, the programs have enduring positive effects on the likelihood of not being held back in a grade and the likelihood of completing high school.
• Intensive intervention programs, such as the Carolina Abecedarian Project, that begin in the child’s first year and provide optimal child-care circumstances and structured academic curricula have produced increases in intelligence that continue into adolescence and adulthood.

Alternative Perspectives on Intelligence

• Novel approaches to intelligence, such as Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory and Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence, attempt to broaden traditional conceptions of intelligence.

Acquisition of Academic Skills: Reading, Writing, and Mathematics

• Many children learn letter names and gain phonemic awareness before they start school. Both skills correlate with later reading achievement, and phonemic awareness also is causally related to it.
• Word identification is achieved by two main strategies: phonological recoding and visually based retrieval.
• Reading comprehension benefits from automatization of word identification, because it frees cognitive resources for understanding the text. Use of strategies, metacognitive understanding, and content knowledge also influence reading comprehension, as does the amount that parents read to their children and the amount that children themselves read.
• Although many children begin to write during the preschool period, writing well remains difficult for many years. Much of the difficulty comes from the fact that writing well requires children to attend simultaneously to low-level processes, such as punctuation and spelling, and to high-level processes, such as anticipating what readers will and will not know.
• As with reading, automatization of basic processes, use of strategies, metacognitive understanding, and content knowledge influence development of writing.
• Most children use several strategies to learn arithmetic, such as adding by counting from 1, counting from the larger addend, and retrieving answers from memory. Children typically choose in adaptive ways, using more time-consuming and effortful strategies only on the more difficult problems where such approaches are needed to generate correct answers.
• Precise representations of numerical magnitudes are crucial for learning arithmetic and other mathematical skills.
• As children encounter more advanced math, conceptual understanding becomes increasingly important. Understanding mathematical equality, for example, is essential for grasping advanced arithmetic and algebra problems.