Pedagogical Possibilities for ICT

Intelligence and intelligence quotient

Dictionaries define intelligence as the power of seeing, learning, understanding and knowing. It is a mental ability. For example, we say, “He shows little intelligence” when we mean that boy is slow in understanding.

For a long time in the West, intelligence has been equated with the ability to think rationally and objectively, and to express one’s thoughts and judgments in scientifically based, quantitatively measurable, logically provable propositions and assertions. Individuals were called intelligent if they were astute, shrewd, eloquent and quick in using words and numbers, especially in written form. In the Orient, by contrast, a man or woman who was well behaved and obedient to the supreme forces, respectful to the elders, deferential to traditions, or endowed with clairvoyance, was often referred to in terms that have been translated as intelligent.

Consequently, teaching and learning in Western schools were more concerned with transmitting and getting detachable and distant knowledge coded symbolically in oral and written speech, rather than with immediate interaction and participatory hands-on activities, experience and wisdom.

It was quite natural to establish a system of checking and testing both interim results and the quality of the end-products of this almost industrial-like manufacturing process.

At the turn of the 20th century, the French psychologists Binet and Simon were commissioned to research the possibility for measuring intelligence. From the start, the goal was to measure the sub-skills necessary for classroom success. Binet actually sat in a classroom, taking notes of students’ answers to teachers’ questions, and tried to construct rules for predicting who would fulfill the demands of the teacher best.

Sampling school children’s abilities to utter correct answers in many schools across France, Binet created the first intelligence test, later developed and corroborated by other researchers. With these tests, it became possible to estimate an individual’s intelligence by processing the data of one’s performance on a deliberately heterogeneous set of items, ranging from sensory discrimination of colours to vocabulary knowledge, and to calculate a so-called Intelligence Quotient or IQ.

What a magnificent epitome of the era of mass-produced education: now you could quantify how bright and stupid everyone is!

In pre-industrial epochs, people perceived each other as much more complex entities. Someone could be clever enough with words while incompetent in numbers; shrewd in business but poor in writing; incapable in abstract reasoning but masterful in crafts or apt in sports. It was only after the development of intelligence tests and what the statistician Spearman did with them that the construct of intelligence nested so firmly in the consciousness of educators and heads of Human Resource departments.

Spearman found that all IQ tests that appeared after Binet and Simon’s correlated highly with each other. He reasoned that they must have been measuring the same thing. Further, this cross-correlation could be explained by a construct the called g, for general intelligence. Some eminent critics disagreed, maintaining that human beings had multiple abilities, or factors of intelligence, but they were forced to admit that even these multiple factors had a high cross-correlation. Hence IQ tests became highly useful in the hands of busy school administrators eager to predict student scores and channel students according to their abilities. After all, that was how the administrators’ own abilities would be measured and rewarded (or punished).

Eventually, all these tests, rather than measuring potential for achievement became the measure of achievement. More to the point, the tests that had been designed to sample education now came to determine what was taught. Large publishing houses began selling textbooks and other consumables to elementary schools with drill units that carried a remarkable resemblance to IQ subtests. Thus began a self-feeding, circular relationship.

There is, however, a more promising alternative view of intelligence.

Division of Higher Education: ©UNESCO 2005