Intelligence & Academic Achievement

Question 1

Intelligence

Answer 1

Ability to acquire, apply, and adapt one’s knowledge and skills to meet the demands of one’s environment

Question 2

General Intelligence (g)

Answer 2

Single broad mental capacity
Ability to think and learn in every context
Influences our ability to think and learn on all intellectual tasks
Measures of g (e.g. overall scores on intelligence tests) correlate with school grades
g correlates with info processing speech and people’s general info about the world

Question 3

Fluid Intelligence

Answer 3

Ability to think on the spot
E.g. drawing inferences and understanding relations between new concepts
New problems and content
Uses working memory
Doesn’t rely on experience
Peaks around 20 and slowly declines
Prefrontal cortex highly active

Question 4

Crystallized Intelligence

Answer 4

Factual knowledge
E.g. knowledge of word meanings, state capitals, answers to arithmetic problems, etc.
Experience dependent
Reflects long term memory for prior experiences
Closely related to verbal ability
Increases steadily from early life to old age
Prefrontal cortex less active

Question 5

Primary Mental Abilities

Answer 5

Word fluency, verbal meaning, reasoning, spatial visualization, numbering, rote memory, perceptual speed
Scores on various tests of a single ability correlate with each other

Question 6

Louis Thurstone (7 forms of intelligence)

Answer 6

Crystallized intelligence: word fluency, verbal meaning
Fluid intelligence: reasoning, spatial reasoning, numbering, rote memory, perceptual speed

Processes: remembering, perceiving, attending, comprehending, encoding, associating, generalizing, planning, reasoning, forming concepts, solving problems, generating and applying strategies, etc.

Question 7

Three-Stratum Theory - John Carroll

Answer 7

Top of hierarchy is g
Influences all moderately general abilities
Middle is several moderately general abilities (e.g. fluid and crystallized intelligence, seven primary mental abilities) (8 total domains)
Influences all specific processes
Bottom are specific processes

Question 8

IQ Verbal Comprehension

Answer 8

Ability to recall, understand, think about, and express stored verbal info (words, facts, concepts)
Crystallized intelligence
SImilarities: e.g. how are basketball and orange similar
Vocabulary: e.g. what is this thing? What is a __?

Question 9

IQ Visual-Spatial

Answer 9

Ability to visualize and reason about spatial relationships, to think about things in terms of parts and wholes and to coordinate your actions accordingly
Block design: give a design and a set of blocks, move and rotate the blocks to recreate the design
# of designs completed and time to complete
Visual puzzle: given a geometric shape, select pieces need to reconstruct it

Question 10

IQ Working Memory

Answer 10

Ability to encode, hold, and manipulate information in your conscious awareness (keep info in your head)
Digit span forwards: basic rehearsal in working memory
Digit span backwards: rehearsal + mental manipulation
Digit span sequencing: rehearsal + even harder manipulation

Question 11

IQ Fluid Reasoning

Answer 11

Identify underlying relationships and use reasoning to infer/apply rules
Picture concepts: group the items based on shared characteristics
Matrix reasoning: select the item that completes the pattern

Question 12

IQ Processing Speed

Answer 12

How quickly and accurately you can identify things, make decisions, implement actions
Measure accuracy and time it takes to complete
Coding
Children under 8: put a + under each triangle, a - under each square, and an x under each circle
Children over 8: translate letters to numbers with coding key
Symbol search: search for one or more targets a string in of symbols

Question 13

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Answer 13

Quantitative measure of a child’s intelligence reactive to other children of the same age (relates to g, single score)
Mean of 100
Standard deviation of 15
Falls in a normal distribution
Different ages easy to compare through normal distribution

Question 14

Continuity of IQ Scores

Answer 14

More stability for tests given closer together in time
Scores are rarely identical (only similar) across ages
Due to random variation in alertness and mood on test days
Changes in environment can produce changes in IQ

Question 15

IQ Predictors

Answer 15

Strong predictor of academic, economic, and occupational success
Partly because standardized test scores serve as gatekeepers

Question 16

Other Predictors of Success

Answer 16

Child’s characteristics
E.g. self discipline, practical intelligence, motivation

Question 17

Bioecological Model of Development

Answer 17

Children’s lives embedded in series of increasingly encompassing environments
Child with unique set of qualities and genes and experiences is surrounded by many environments

Question 18

Passive Effects

Answer 18

Arise when children raised by biological parents (parents and child have genotype in common)
Environment reflects parents’ genotypes
E.g. children with genes for liking reading more likely to grow up in homes with more books because parents also like reading

Question 19

Evocative Effects

Answer 19

Children’s genotype/phenotype influencing others’ behaviour towards them
E.g. if kid is interesting in bedtime stories parents read more to them

Question 20

Active Effects

Answer 20

Children choose environments they enjoy and engage with
E.g. student who likes to read will read more regardless of how much they were read to as a child

Question 21

HOME

Answer 21

Home observation for measurement of the environment
Samples various aspects of home life (e.g. organization or safety of living space, intellectual stimulation offered by parents, etc)
IQ and math and reading scores correlate with scores on the HOME
For low income families, shared environment accounts for more variance in IQ

Question 22

Influence of School

Answer 22

Average IQ and achievement scores rise during the school year but not during the summer vacation
Low socioeconomic status children drop or stay constant over summer
High socioeconomic status children continue to rise over the summer

Question 23

Flynn Effect

Answer 23

Average IQ scores rise within countries consistently
Gene pool hasn’t changed much, so increase in scores due to changes in society

Question 24

Sources of Flynn Effect

Answer 24

Improvements in lives of low income families (e.g. improved nutrition and health)
Increased societal emphasis on abstract problem solving and reasoning

Question 25

Multiple Intelligences Theory

Answer 25

People possess at least 8 kinds of intelligence
Three standard IQ tests
-Linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial
Five additional forms
-Musical, naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal

Less supporting evidence
Large influence on education

Question 26

Sternberg’s Theory

Answer 26

Theory of successful intelligence: intelligence as the ability to achieve success in life, given one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context
Analytic, practical, and creative abilities