The intelligence tests and its validity in the 21st century

Lakewood NJ

27 August, 2021

1:21 PM

Description

We live in a culture that considers intelligence as a measure of a person's value. They are the intelligent those who enter the best schools, those who get the best jobs and the highest salaries, the leaders. If you are intelligent, the norm is that people listen to you, follow you and do doors. Intelligence is, without a doubt, considered as the key element of successful people but, do we really know how to measure it correctly? Intellectual coefficient tests are the main tool with which we measure people's intelligence, we see these tests as a resource of mathematical and scientific certainty but do not really? Or are we striving to ignore the cultural context that potentiates the bias of both the concept of the IQ as well as the evidence we use to assign a value? If you are living in USA you can get US State Capitals Quiz without any difficulties. The origin of the tests to measure intelligence The idea of ​​generating a mechanism that helps us understand the cognitive and potential capacity of people is as rooted in our culture that we can not think of an educational system without this mechanism. However, the tests of intellectual coefficient (CI) are just just over a century, its origin was much less praiseworthy than we imagine. Its purpose was not to improve the educational offer, but filter it. At the beginning of 1900, psychologists, academics and politicians looked for a way to hinder educational opportunities, to group the general population; Those who were in the highest strata will receive best quality education, those who were on lower steps would have access to more lean education. The intelligence test developed by Lewis Terman gave them just what they needed to specify this system. In 1916, Terman published a revision of the Binet-Simon scale, created by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon. The test classified children according to their cognitive abilities to resolve exercises in which mathematical and logical skills were required, as well as reading, reasoning and adaptation. Its success was such that this test continues to currently be used to measure the cognitive and potential capacity of children and adults, however, as all scientific discovery, this is linked to the perception and cultural dimensions of the academics that create and apply these criteria , so the scales to measure intelligence are not an exception and are also exposed to biases. The cultural bias and the measurement of intelligence as a political weapon To understand the Achilles heel of intelligence tests, it is necessary to take into account the context in which these were created. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the focus of science was highly evolutionary and this was permeated in the way we had knowledge on social and philosophical issues. When the first intelligence tests were developed, it was not in mind to use their results to innovate in the ways in which it was educated, or creating different educational currents that served various ways to learn. The objective was to ensure the survival of the more apt; The quietest was the smartest, the smartest thing was the one who passed the tests with the greatest score, but who were those who got the biggest score? In a cognitive science that was developed at the same time as evolutionary theories that resulted in eugenics, it is important to consider for the tests. If both Binet and Simon and Terman took into account only the criterion of other people who thought and conceived the world similar to that of them, discarding the rest of the people for the mapping of all human capacity, are we really talking about An impartial and accurate test? Can we ignore the historical record that justified racial discrimination and the gentrification of education? At that time, the idea that people had different mental abilities according to their race and gender was very popular, and this belief severely impacted the way in which these tests were generated and applied. These arguments have been proven as false and are completely inadmissible today, but at that time they dictated who would receive the opportunity to go to a better school and whom they would train to pass the intelligence tests. It was, without a doubt, a prophecy that was fulfilled alone and that he maintained