2012년 11월 27일 화요일

What is an IQ?

The intelligence quotient (IQ) measures the ratio of a person's intellectual age to his/her chronological age. Most adult intelligence tests are designed for people who are at least 16 years old. For this reason, if you are younger than 16, your Tickle IQ score might be slightly lower than your "true" IQ.

History of IQ Testing
One   of the first scientific investigations into the concept of intelligence, came from nineteenth-century British scientist, Sir Francis Galton. Galton believed that mental traits, like physical traits, could be inherited. He published his ideas on hereditary intelligence in his book, Hereditary Genius.

Meanwhile in France, psychologist Alfred Binet was exploring ways of measuring children's' intelligence. Like Galton, Binet was passionate about testing and measuring human capabilities. Binet worked with two groups of children - those who were average students, and those who were less mentally capable. He discovered that average students could complete certain tasks that less mentally capable students could not. Based on those findings, Binet calculated the "normal" abilities for students within different age groups. From there he could estimate how many years above or below the norm a student's mental age was.

Just before WWI, German psychologist Wilhelm Stern came up with an alternative to mental age for measuring people's intelligence. He suggested that a more accurate method for assessing someone's intelligence was to measure their capabilities given their chronological age. He proposed that for a true estimate of someone's intelligence, researchers needed to calculate a ratio between the subject's mental age and their chronological age. Since the resulting numbers were represented by decimals, scientists decided to multiply this "quotient" by 100 to get rid of the decimal places. Thus, the formula for an IQ is: IQ = Mental Age/Chronological Age x 100.

Based on the ratio that Stern created, Lewis Terman, an American psychologist at Stanford University, coined the term Intelligence Quotient for Stern's Binet test scoring system.

How People Might Eval  uate You Based on IQ Score
IQ tests serve as a useful tool for institutions such as public schools and the military, where great numbers of people must be processed quickly and efficiently, and placed in appropriated classes or positions.

In the United States, kindergarten-aged children are often given IQ tests to eval  uate whether they need special attention or services. For example, children scoring 130 or over are often considered "gifted" and placed in programs accordingly. However, in most institutional uses of the test nowadays, the importance placed on the actual IQ score has changed.
The military tends to use IQ test results to assess which field a recruit might be best suited to. Instead of relying solely on the intelligence rating, the IQ score, the military will now look at the kinds of questions a recruit answered correctly. Onc  e they know that, they have a better idea of what innate skills the recruit can bring to specific assignments and duties.

And as far as the business world goes, uses of such tests for employment purposes was declared illegal except in rare circumstances by the Supreme Court in 1971.

In social life, the IQ test is onl  y really applicable if you're specifically joining an organization based on IQ scores like Mensa, a society founded in 1964 for people who score in the top 2% of the IQ test. But, in general, there are still some misconceptions about the importance of test results. Chances are, people you know are more likely to be judgmental about a high or low score than most institutions are. Luckily, this is usually just a case of misinformation and is easily remedied.

Tickle's IQ Test Development
Over the last two years, Tickle's psychologists developed this IQ test using proven, high-quality IQ test questions such as those in the Mensa Workout tests and the Shipley Institute of Living Scale an intelligence test that focuses on both vocabulary and verbal abstract reasoning. Those are the skills that are associated with problem-solving ability and social comprehension/judgement.

Reliability of the IQ Score
Onc  e we built the Tickle IQ test, Tickle performed a large-scale study to compare the results of people who had taken both the Tickle IQ test and the established Shipley Institute of Living Scale (by Walter C. Shipley). The Shipley test has been used for more than 50 years to assess facets of intelligence. We did this to ensure that the way we constructed our test would yield reliable and valid IQ results.

We used scores calculated by the Shipley test as a basis for calibrating Tickle's IQ test. That ensured a high association between the two tests and, because of that, the validity of our IQ scores. In fact, the Tickle IQ test is highly reliable the Chronbach's alpha is .81. In other words, the questions on Tickle's IQ test are internally consistent and they all measure intelligence accurately.

How Tickle Calculates Intellectual Types
In the past, researchers who have constructed IQ tests have discovered additional patterns that relate to the categories of questions a particular test-taker answered correctly categories such as mathematical, visual, verbal and logical. When these researchers analyzed peoples' results, they found that, for instance, a test-taker might have answered the math-oriented and verbal questions correctly, yet tended to answer the logical questions incorrectly. From such patterns, experts were able to define some internal scales of intelligence to the overall IQ test. Thus, using those internal scales, they could offer an actual IQ score, such as 105, as well as a measurement of how well the test-taker did within each question category.

After 1 million people took the Tickle IQ test, we ran what is called a "factor analysis" on the answers those people gave. This statistical analysis identified the similarity between groups of questions in our test. The analysis demonstrated that this particular IQ test accurately measured four underlying dimensions of intelligence: mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic and logical.

Each of the questions in the Tickle IQ test relates to one   dimension of intelligence. How reliable are these dimensions? Well, for the scientists and statisticians out there, their reliability coefficients were .85, .84, .81 and .50, respectively. The gist of all of that is that Tickle's scales of intelligence are highly valid and we can accurately tell you how high you scored on each of those scales relative to the other test-takers thus yielding an accurate intellectual type.


Additional Reading:
Armstrong, T. (1993). 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences. NY: Plume (The Penguin Group).

Bonthous, J. (1995). "Understanding intelligence across cultures." Competitive Intelligence Review, Summer/Fall: 12-19.

Gardner, H. (1993). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (10th Anniversary Edition). NY: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (1992). Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. NY: Basic Books.

Gardner, H.. (1985). The Mind's New Science. NY: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. and Hatch, T. (1989). "Multiple Intelligences Go to School: Educational Implications of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences." Educational Researcher 18(8): 4-9.

Gardner, H., Kornhaber, M.L., and Wake, W.K. (1996). Intelligence: Multiple Perspectives. NY: Harcourt, Brace.

Horn, J.L. (1989). "Cognitive diversity: A framework for learning." Pp. 61-116 in P.L.

Ackerman, R.J. Sternberg, and R. Glaser (Eds.), Learning and Individual differences: Advances in theory and research. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Co.

Jensen, A. R. (1969). "How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement?" Harvard Educational Review 39:1-123.

Lohman, D.F. (1989). "Human intelligence: An introduction to advances in theory and research." Review of Educational Research 59(4):333-374.

Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., Halpern, D. F., Loehlin, J. C., Perloff, R., Sternberg, R. J., & Urbina, S. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51, 77-101.

Ree, M. J., & Earles, J. A. (1992). "Intelligence is the best predictor of job performance." Current Directions in Psychological Science 1:86-89.

Robbins, D. (1996). The Philosophy of Intelligence: An Outline of Theories. Psychology Department, University of Calgary.

Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, J. C. (1998). "Human abilities." Annual Review of Psychology 49:479-502.

Sternberg, R. J., Wagner, R. K., Williams, W. M., & Horvath, J. A. (1995). "Testing common sense." American Psychologist 50:912-927.

Sternberg, R.J. (1991). "Death, taxes, and bad intelligence tests." Intelligence 15(3):257-269.

Sternberg, R.J. (1992). "Ability tests, measurements, and markets." Journal of Educational Psychology 84(2):134-140.

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