IQ tests: purpose, validity, and applications

IQ tests: The best of many bad alternatives to identify student's needs?

Intelligence testing remains one of the most controversial aspects of modern educational screening. On one hand, it can provide an invaluable asset to educators, if student's special needs or deficits are determined early on in the student's academic career. Once, they were seen as potentially democratic. "Achievement and IQ tests have the potential to identify talented students from all walks of life -- and thus to level the playing field of public education." ("Intelligence and Achievement Testing: Is the Half Full Glass Getting Fuller? APA Online: Monitor on Psychology, 2006) But the accuracy and usefulness of IQ testing has also been criticized as invalid, biased and potentially faulty. If abused, IQ tests can contribute to the culture of labeling, or creating self-fulfilling expectations for children, as the perception of a child as less intelligent than his or her peers becomes a sad reality, as the child learns to live up to lowered expectations about his or her ability.

IQ Tests are also prone to "unfairly stratifying test-takers by race, gender, class and culture; of minimizing the importance of creativity, character and practical know-how; and of propagating the idea that people are born with an unchangeable endowment of intellectual potential that determines their success in life." (Benson, 2003) Although the tests have improved since the early Stanford-Binet versions, educators remain torn between what types of intelligence to test and how to test intelligence. Some prefer tests of generalized intelligence, while others believe testing multiple intelligences, as favored by Harvard education professor Howard Gardener, or even including tests for Emotional Intelligence, is a more valid approach to take and reflective of student ability. (Benson, 2003)

Other educators wonder what the true purpose of educational testing should be in general, either to quantify intelligence or provide a tool to facilitate student learning. For example, the IQ discrepancy model does not distinguish between students with intellectually delayed development as the result of birth trauma, children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or children with dyslexia. All of these students will have different educational needs, even if they have the same numerical IQ. Thus, "the discrepancy," of a score below 100 or average, will not tell educators "anything about what kind of intervention might help the child learn" in a fashion that is useful to the educators. (Benson, 2003)

Binet, the originator of intelligence testing, evolved his test to identify if students had normal intelligence and could enter the French school system -- a child either passed or failed this early test. Later, he saw the tests as a way of identifying weaknesses or strengths, which the educational system could address. (Benson, 2003) But while some of the information gleaned from contemporary IQ tests can be useful, data from intelligence testing has been used to validate racial theories of innate, or genetically passed along intelligence. Early classification of students with low IQs can ignore what is called the Flynn effect, or the ability of IQ to rise, if children receive the correct exposure, as well as practical intelligence. ("Intelligence and Achievement Testing: Is the Half Full Glass Getting Fuller? APA Online: Monitor on Psychology, 2006)