Breaking with IQ test tradition, while looking for balance and equity in intelligence testing, psychological researchers develop new measures and tests so that students and workers enjoy fair opportunities to capitalize on their gifts.
“Sure, you have a high IQ, but are you really smart?” wonders Dr. Quinn Collins, Senior Fellow at Advanced Industrial Research. Building on groundbreaking studies from the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Collins and her colleagues are experimenting with reliable measures of “multiple intelligences.” Collins and company expect that their tests, inventories, performance exercises, and multi-modal measures will guide educators’ and employers’ judgments about how to make the most of people’s special talents and capacities. They do not intend to replace the standard IQ test; instead, they intend to supplement and complement it.
Dr. Collins repeats her favorite story: “Every American writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the twentieth century either failed freshman English in college or never bothered with college at all.” Extracting the moral of the story, Dr. Collins asserts, “Their failures reveal little about the writers and their exceptional gifts, but they say a whole lot about how we test people. Now, nearly a century after these artists did their best work, we are looking for trustworthy measures of giftedness, so that students and workers enjoy fair opportunities to capitalize on their gifts.”
Supplements to the traditional IQ test
Proven over four generations, the venerated Stanford-Binet IQ test has served psychologists and educators since the days of Dick and Jane readers. Traditional measures of a person’s “intelligence quotient” have proven reliable predictors of academic success, but they seldom give accurate indications of artists’ brilliance, inventors’ special vision, or mechanics’ almost magical insight and dexterity. Just as importantly, no traditional IQ test measures “emotional intelligence” or intuition. No trustworthy scientist ever would advocate abandoning Stanford-Binet, but just about all modern researchers fervently advocate supplementing the old IQ test with other measures of intelligence, because those other measures frequently give more accurate indications of a person’s true potential.
More than a little concern about bias in traditional tests
Dr. Collins and her devoted coterie of sophisticated psychological researchers derive their best work from well-regarded research about the complementary functions of the brain’s right and left hemispheres, politely remarking that traditional psychology’s focus on the brain’s left hemisphere has given academic and economic advantage to the boys. “The Stanford-Binet IQ test focuses on logic, sequence, and fundamentally mathematical operations,” Collins points out, “all of which are left-brained operations, and all of which are archetypally masculine.
“To diversify and balance the ways we test intellectual proficiency, we must develop valid, trustworthy measures of right-brained spatial and musical operations. We must complement logical testing with equally powerful testing of free association and symbolic suggestion,” Dr. Collins asserts. “We must start testing the archetypally feminine qualities in the human intellect,” she says.
Praise for online tests and quizzes
Thumbing her nose at the conventional wisdom and complaining against many psychologists’ academic elitism, Dr. Collins points to web surfers’ fascination with online intelligence tests as a telling indication of the need for diversified intelligence testing. “Especially women are discovering their latent capacities and repressed talents,” reports Dr. Collins, “because these unsophisticated internet tests open the windows to talents and skills traditional tests never illuminate.”
Collins appreciates the diversity she sees among informal online intelligence tests. “One popular website offers users eleven different ways to measure their intellectual capacities, and the site barely covers the tip of the cognitive and meta-cognitive iceberg.” Collins advises would-be test-takers to look for a valid IQ test: “Tests of factual knowledge do not measure native intelligence the way a real IQ test should. You will know a valid IQ test when you see one that challenges you to look for patterns and sequences.”
Collins likes the variety and value she sees at 2h.com. “2h.com is a very good place to start your search for a reliable IQ test,” she says.
