Chapter 8 - Intelligence and Academic Achievement

General intelligence (g)

General intelligence (g)

• Measures of g correlate positively with school grades and achievement test performance, information processing speed, speed of neural transmission, brain volume, and people’s general information about the world.

• Such omnipresent positive correlations have led to the hypothesis that each of us possesses a certain amount of general intelligence (g) and this influences our ability to think and learn on all intellectual tasks.

Fluid intelligence

• involves the ability to think on the spot. It is closely related to adaption to tasks, speed of info processing, working-memory functioning, and ability to control attention.

Crystallized intelligence

• factual intelligence. It reflects long-term memory for prior experiences and is closely related to verbal ability.

primary mental abilities

• word fluency, verbal meaning, reasoning, spatial visualization, numbering, rote memory, and perceptual speed.

three-stratum theory of intelligence

• a model that places g at the top of the intelligence hierarcy, 8 moderately general abilities in hte middle, and many specific processes at the bottom.

What did Binet say about measuring intelligence?

• Binet said that the best way to measure intelligence is by observing people’s actions on tasks that require varied types of intelligence: problem solving, memory, language comprehension, spatial reasoning…

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)

• proposes that intelligence includes g, several moderately general abilities, and a large number of specific processes.

  • The test measures abilities that reflect skills that are important within information-processing theories, correlate positively with other aspects of intelligence, and are related to important outcomes most notably scool grades and later occupational success.

standard deviation (SD)

• which is a measure of the variability of scores within a distribution.

• Studies have shown that IQ scores have impressive _____ from age 5.

continuity

• IQ scores are a ____ predictor of academic, economic, and occupational success.

strong

Self-discipline

• is more predictive of changes in report card grades than the IQ score between 5th and 9th grades.

Practical intellignence

____ like reading other people’s intentions and motivating others to work effectively as a team predicts sucess in career beyond the influence of IQ.

Children contribute greatly to their own intellectual development through _____

their genetics, the reactions they elicit from others and their choice of envrionment

One reason for increasing genetic influence is that some genetic processes ________ until late childhood or adolescent, and that children’s increasing independence with age allows them greater freedom to choose environments that are compatible with their own genetically based preferences.

do not show their effects

Gene-environment relations involve 3 types of processes:

passive, evocative, and active.

Passive effects

___ arise when children are raised by their biological parents because of the overlap between parent’s genes and their own (children with parents who like to read grow up with reading material).

Evocative effects

____ of the genotype emerge through children influencing other people’s behaviour (parents who don’t liek reading reading bedtime stories to children who like to read).

Active effects

_____ of the genotype involve children’s choosing environments that they enjoy.

• Relative influence of shared environments and genetics varies with _____ (socioeconomic cirumstances).

family income

The achievement test scores of low-SES children stay constant or ____ wheras scores of high-SES children tend to rise most likely because during the school year all children get relatively stimulating intellectual environmetns, but when there is no school (in the summer), fewer children from low-SES families have experiences that increase their academic achievment (showing that schooling has an influence on knowledge).

drop each year

Flynn effect

• One reflection of societal influences is that in many countries, average IQ scores have consistently risen over the past 80 years

• The source of this is controversial and some argue that the key factors are improvements in the lives of low-income families and others argue that this is because of increased societal emphasis on abstract problem solving and reasoning.

Chronic inadequate diet early in life can disrupt brain development, reduced access to health services can result in more absences from school and conflicts between adults can lead to ______ that interferes with learning as well to name a few of the challenges poverty poses.

emotional turmoil

High-quality ____ can help offset the risks imposed by poverty.

parenting

Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory

based on the view that people possess at least eight types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.

Sternberg’s theory of sucessful intelligence

• based on the view that intelligence is the ability to achieve success in life.

• He proposed that success in life depends on 3 types of abilities: analytic, practical and creative.

  • Analytic: linguistic, mathematical, spatial.

  • Practical: everyday reasoning and conflict resolution.

  • Creative: intellectual flexibility and innovation for adaption.

Phonemic awareness comes from…

nursery rhymes, growth of working memory, increasingly efficient processing of oral language and reading.

Visually based retrieval

• proceeding directly from visual form of a word to its meaning.

Phonological recoding

• converting visual form of word into speech-like form to determine meaning.

Dyslexia

• the inability to read and spell despite having normal intelligence. It stems from poor phonemic awareness, limited vocabulary for spoken words, and weak decoding skills. Dyslexic children have great difficulty mastering the letter-sound correspondences used in phonological recoding, which makes them poor readers.

the simple view of reading

• the perspective that comprehension depends only on decoding skills and understanding oral language, and it has proven very useful for understanding and reading ability.

Skillful decoding predicts ______ in early grades very well as does listening comprehension after 4th grade.

text comprehension

situation model

represents the situation/idea in the text and continously updating the model as the new info appears.

Basic processes like encoding (identifying key features of an object/event) and automatization (executing a process without straining cognitive resources) are crucial to _______ because children who identify key features of stores understand it better and those who do this have more cognitive resources available to comprehend the text.

reading comprehension

Comprehension monitoring

• the process of keeping track of one’s understanding of a verbal description of text. Focus on this has been shown to improve reading comprehension.

Why does content knowledge have the most powerful influence on the development of reading comprehension?

Content knowledge has the most powerful influence on the development of reading comprehension as it includes understanding vocabulary, possessing general info about the topic and grasping idioms which is truly understanding the language and not just what is being said.

Individual differences in reading proficiency tend to be _____ over time.

stable

Genetic and environmental influences are _____ (parents who read well and frequently produce genes and enviornments that make children who are good and frequent readers, which means they will get better at reading as they age).

mutually reinforcing

Automatizing low-level skills like spelling and punctuation aids writing because it frees _____ for pursuing higher-level communicative gaosl of writing.

cognitive resources

script

• a set of actions or events that occur repeatedly in writing helps (in a class news assignment, one child noted the date, described the weathr, and discussed events of the school day in that order every time, which made writing easier).

When children do arithmetic on a daily basis, they _____ strategies

add new

As children gain experience with answers to single-digit problems, their strategy choices shift towards ____. This learning process is the same as phonological recoding to visually based retrieval in reading, which speeds things up.

retrieval

Numerical magnitude representations

• mental models of the sizes of numbers, letting children understand which numbers indicate greater number of objects (4 shoes are less than 8 shoes)

Children of any given age differ considerably in their knowledge of numerical magnitudes due to their __________

overall mathematical knowledge.

mathematical equality

the idea that values on each side of equal sign must balance

gesture-speech mismatches

where their gesturing conveys more info than verbal statements learn more from instruction than those whose gesturing and speech were consistent.

matjhematics anxiety

• a negative emotional state that leads to fear and avoidance of math.

The process of learning math goes seriously awry with children who suffer from ___________

mathematics disabilities