IQ tests hurt kids, schools — and don’t measure intelligence
The research proves that IQ tests poorly predict learning disabilities. So why are schools still using them?
Skip to CommentsTopics: Books, Editor's Picks, Education, iq tests, Public Education, schools, Technology News, Life News
(Credit: RimDream via Shutterstock)1991: As I settle into my seat in the back of the classroom, I can’t take my eyes off the perfect girl. She is the lead in every play, the soloist in every choir performance, and the winner of every writing award. Quite simply, she is the pride and joy of every teacher at the school. She also happens to be beautiful, and I am infatuated. I decide I’m going to talk to her after class. It’s sixth grade and I’m back in the public school system. A fresh start. A new, improved— and I hope, suaver—me.
“Is Scott Kaufman here?” the teacher asks. My trance is interrupted. Without hesitation I raise my hand. “Can you come sit up front please?” she requests. Confused, I pick up my backpack and move down, inching closer and closer to the perfect girl, who is sitting in the front row. As I get closer, my heart starts beating faster. Why am I being asked to move to the front? What if I have to sit next to her? What would I say? Walk smooth, Scott. Smooth. I start to slow down. I put on a big, confident smile. Finally I reach my destination. The desk right next to hers.
She is writing in her notebook. Probably composing the next great sonata. I try to look cool. I nod my head a lot. I think that’s a cool thing to do. The teacher seems impressed with my coolness, as she is smiling. She kneels down beside me and within earshot of the perfect girl, whispers, “Scott, your Mom requested that you sit at the front of the classroom since you have a serious learning disability. Thanks for changing seats.”
The room starts to spin. Did the perfect girl hear? She must have heard. Humiliated, I sink down in my chair. I no longer feel cool. I feel trapped. It seems that no matter what I want to achieve, I am imprisoned by my label.
* * *
As early as the nineteenth century in Europe, case reports of children with learning disabilities in reading, writing, and arithmetic cropped up. Here’s a description in 1896 from the physician W. Pringle Morgan of a 14-year-old named Percy F.: “I might add that the boy is bright and of average intelligence in conversation. . . . The schoolmaster who has taught him for some years says that he would be the smartest lad in school if the instruction were entirely oral.”
The history of learning disabilities is a tale of multiple conceptualizations, spanning several continents. In the United States, physician Samuel Orton studied children with reading disabilities who had at least average IQ scores. Orton conceptualized language and motor disabilities as brain dysfunction in spite of normal or even above average intelligence. He believed that to adequately diagnose learning disabilities, it was important to combine a variety of sources of information, including IQ test scores, achievement test scores, family histories, and school histories. For those who then warranted the learning disability diagnosis, Orton believed the proper intervention consisted of directly targeting the specific area of weakness and using the child’s “spared” abilities to help remediate the disability.
In Germany, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein studied the deficits of soldiers who sustained head injuries. His focus was on their deficits in visual perception and attention. Goldstein’s student Alfred Strauss took this approach and studied adolescents with learning difficulties.Along with educator Laura Lehtinen, they developed remediation techniques that involved providing students with a distraction-free environment and training perceptual deficits. They merely inferred brain damage, though. They didn’t actually peer inside the head.
The Goldstein-Strauss approach was widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands of children were identified as having “minimal brain dysfunction” by the use of a checklist, which included things such as academic difficulty, aggression, and “acting-out.” If a student exhibited 9 out of 37 possible symptoms, they received treatment, which typically meant they spent hours a day doing perceptual tasks such as connecting dots and learning how to distinguish between a foreground and background. Although a systematic review of 81 studies concluded that these techniques were useless, many public schools in the United States continued to rely on perceptual training to remediate learning difficulties.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of psychologists and speech and language specialists, including William Cruickshank, Helmer Myklebust, and
Doris Johnson, began focusing more on the specific cognitive processes relating to academic difficulties. Their focus was much more targeted on specific areas of academic weakness. But this hodgepodge of different approaches created much confusion in the schools, because children with distinctly different areas of academic weakness were lumped together, and no one knew what to call them. Children who were having difficulties learning in school were given a number of different labels, including “dyslexia,” “learning disorder,” “perceptual disorder,” and “minimal brain dysfunction.”
On Saturday April 6, 1963, parents and professionals met in Chicago to explore the “problems” of the perceptually handicapped child. All were struggling to integrate all of these various approaches. At this historic conference Samuel Kirk, professor of special education at the University of Illinois, coined the term “learning disabilities,” noting, “I have used the term ‘learning disabilities’ to describe a group of children who have disorders in the development of language, speech, reading, and association communication skills needed for social interaction. In this group, I do not include children who have sensory handicaps, such as blindness, because we have methods of managing and training the deaf and blind. I also excluded from this group children who have generalized mental retardation.
Professionals, educators, and parents rejoiced. Finally they had a single, unified label.
* * *
Kirk’s speech was highly influential on the first federal definition of learning disabilities: the 1969 “Children with Specific Learning Disabilities Act.” Their definition was essentially Kirk’s definition:
The term “specific learning disability” means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The term does not include children who have learning disabilities, which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, or mental retardation, or emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.
Notice there’s no actual mention of “intelligence” in this definition. There’s the fuzzy term “basic psychological processes.” The core of the definition is that those with a specific learning disability (SLD) show “unexpected” low achievement in a specific academic area that cannot be explained by other factors. This definition of specific learning disability remains in place today, virtually unchanged from its 1969 formulation, so it’s important to understand its origins: It was literally a definition created by a committee.
But defining the term was only the first step. Educators needed to know how they should identify children with a specific learning disability. Beginning with the “Right to Education for All Handicapped Children Act” of 1975, the following guidelines were included for identification:
The child does not achieve commensurate with age and ability when provided with appropriate educational experiences.
The child has a severe discrepancy between levels of ability and achievement in one or more of seven areas that are specifically listed (basic reading skills, reading comprehension, mathematics calculation, mathematics reasoning, oral expression, listening comprehension, and written expression).
The first guideline was intended to make sure that low educational achievement was due to an intrinsic characteristic of the student, and not just a reflection of bad teaching. The second guideline was their attempt to measure “unexpected” low achievement. But they had a problem. There was no good way for educators to measure the “basic cognitive processes” mentioned in their definition. What were these mysterious processes? Theory-based IQ tests, grounded in neuropsychological processes, hadn’t yet arrived on the scene.
Their solution: use a “severe discrepancy” between IQ and achievement. This decision was largely based on the Isle of Wight studies conducted in the early 1970s. Michael Rutter and William Yule found tentative evidence that there are meaningful differences between two different groups of poor readers—those whose low reading was unexpected based on their IQ (“specific reading retardation”) and those whose low reading was “expected” based on their low IQ score (“general reading backwardness”). Rutter and Yule concluded their study with the following: “The next question clearly is: ‘do the two groups need different types of remedial help with their reading?’ No data are available on this point but the other findings suggest that the matter warrants investigation.”
But the U.S. government needed guidelines and couldn’t wait for more research. So they left their guidelines open-ended, leaving it up to each state to decide what constituted a “severe discrepancy” between IQ and achievement. Of course, states differed quite a bit, creating a situation in which parents who wanted to gain a specific learning disability diagnosis for their child could pack up and move to a state whose guidelines required a smaller discrepancy! States also disagreed on which IQ test should be used and whether a global IQ score or subscale should be used. As we’ll see, these aren’t trivial differences.
Thus was born one of the most unintelligent methods of identifying learning disabilities ever invented.
* * *
Despite the high reliability of IQ test scores across most of the lifespan, IQ testing is not an exact science. One of Binet’s key insights is that you can’t measure someone’s IQ—or any psychological trait, for that matter—to the same level of precision as you can measure a person’s height or weight. There are many reasons why a person’s test score can change from one testing session to the next. One major source of IQ fluctuation is measurement error. Sometimes a score can be seriously underestimated because the test taker zoned out or temporarily became distracted. For instance, perhaps just before one IQ testing session, the test taker had a traumatic breakup that affects his or her concentration. It’s also possible for a person’s IQ score to be artificially inflated, which can happen with lucky guessing or cheating. There are some cases on record of parents feeding their children the answers ahead of time.
But the source of measurement error isn’t always the test taker. There’s plenty of room for administration errors, such as two different test examiners scoring answers differently, or one examiner making a clerical mistake and accidentally omitting the third digit in a child’s IQ score. Just how prevalent are these errors? One study found that about 90 percent of examiners made at least one error, and two-thirds of the errors resulted in a different IQ score. Also, despite IQ test administrators reporting confidence in their scoring accuracy, average levels of agreement was only 42.1 percent. As Kevin McGrew notes, “This level of examiner error is alarming, particularly in the context of important decision-making.”
To account for measurement error, most modern IQ tests provide an examiner with a confidence interval—the range of IQ scores that are likely to contain a person’s “true” IQ. Of course, there is no such thing as a true IQ score. The only way we’d actually be able to find that out would be to give a person the same IQ test an infinite number of times. But it’s clearly not feasible to give the same person the same test even a handful of times, so most IQ test manuals provide a range of IQ scores, leaving it up to the examiner to choose his or her confidence levels.