Intelligence in Early Childhood Flashcards
(16 cards)
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
First Standardised Test of Intelligence
Practical, convenient and rapid technique to identify children at primary age whose lack of success or ability might lead them to require special education
* 50 children, 3-10, 30 short tasks related to everyday life
Allowed the ability to determine ‘mental age’ and not just chronological age
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
Stanford-Binet Test
Adapted and revised version of the original
* 1000 children, 4-14
* Age appropriate tests to measure the same thing
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
What is IQ?
Mental Age ÷ Chronological Age X 100 = IQ
* Emphasised the need to get large and representative samples to develop age norms
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
General Intelligence (g)
Spearman (1904)
Fundamental mechanism allowing to see relationships between objects, events, and information and draw inferences from those relationships
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
Mullen Scale of Early Learning as a Measure of g
Measure of cognitive functioning, measured from birth to 68 months
* Provides a composite score that is referred to as an estimate of overall intelligence
5 Sub-Scales
* Gross motor
* Fine motor
* Visual reception
* Receptive language
* Expressive language
Standardised Tests of Intelligence
Bayley’s Scale of Infant Development
Longitudinal growth study (26 years)
* 1 month - 3.5 years
Five scales:
* Child cognitive, motor, and language interaction
* Parental report of the child’s socio-emotional and adaptive behaviour
Only 2 scales correlated with later IQ and not consistently
Standardised Measures of Intelligence in Older Children
Prenatal Maternal Stress and Child IQ
5 year olds exposed to in utero high levels of objective stress had lower IQ and language abilities compare to those exposed to low or moderate levels of maternal stress
Standardised Measures of Intelligence in Older Children
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
Verbal and non verbal measured
* Verbal fluency, picture completion, block design, etc.
Standardised Measures of Intelligence in Older Children
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
A measure of verbal ability, quickly evaluate receptive vocabulary without requiring reading or writing
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
Theoretical approached to intelligence
Piaget’s approach
* Emphasised differences in kinds of thinking children use to solve problems according to stages
Psychometric approach
* Focuses on analyses within and among specific standardised intelligence tests to predict future performance
Information-Processing approach
* Focuses on cognitive mechanism, emphasises information-processing abilities→ to take in, process, and store information
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
Speed of Habituation
Short-Lookers
* Baby who is quick to habituate might be relatively fast at processing information
* Capable of learning that something is familiar in only a few trials
Long-Lookers
* Baby who takes longer to habituate might require more trials to accurately and completely encode a stimulus in memory
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
Visual Novelty Preference
Visual recognition memory requires to encode a stimulus, recognise it as familiar, and recognise an alternative stimulus as novel
* 7 Months: Looking preference for a novel visual stimulus over a different face which was already familiar
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
Early Habituation Measures and Later IQ
- Preterm infants who continued to fixate an unchanging stimulus for protracted periods of time were less intellectually able in childhood
- Neonate measure of total fixation time on unchanging stimulus predicted IQ at 8 and 12 years old
- Measures at 4 months did not add to the associations
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
The Flynn Effect
IQ scores increase across time in developed counties at a startlingly consistent rate
* Approx. 0.33 points per year or 3.3 points per decade
* Confounding of generational effects with changes in test content
* Increased schooling, greater educational attainment of parents, better nutrition, and less childhood disease
Evidence of environmental factors on IQ
Infants’ Cognitive Development and Intelligence
Pros and Cons to Psychometric IQ Tests
Pros:
* Standardised, normed, valid, reliable
* Good predictive validity of later achievement
Cons:
* Underestimate children who are ill, tired, bored
* Timing is an issue as speed of processing is taken as measure of intelligence
* Do not directly measure ability
* Instead infer intelligence from what children already know
* Hard to design culture-free and culture-fair tests
Is Intelligence Malleable?
Genetic and environmental interactions
* Socio-economic status twin studies in the US: IQs of children from low SES families were primarily influenced by environment, while IQ of affluent families children largely determined by genetics
* Infants cognitive information-processing abilities do not seem to differ based on SES
