Chapter 8 - Intelligence and Academic Achievement

What Is Intelligence?

Intelligence as a Single Trait

• Some researchers view intelligence as a single trait that influences all aspects of cognitive functioning, which makes sense as children who do well on one task usually do well on other tasks that are intellectually dissimilar from the original task.
• 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.
• 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.

Intelligence as a Few Basic Abilities

• 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 is factual intelligence. It reflects long-term memory for prior experiences and is closely related to verbal ability.
• The two types of intelligence have different developmental courses: crystallized increases steadily from early in life to old age wheras fluid peaks around age 20 and slowly declines from that. The brain areas most active are different as well, with the rpefrontal cortex highly active on measures of fluid intelligence but less on measures of crystallized intelligence.
• Human intellect is composed of seven primary mental abilities: word fluency, verbal meaning, reasoning, spatial visualization, numbering, rote memory, and perceptual speed.

Intelligence as Numerous Cognitive Processes

• Information-processing analyses of how people perform everyday intellectual tasks reveal many processes are involved like remembering, perceiving, attending, comprehending, encoding, asosciating, generalizing, planning, reasoning, forming concepts, solving problems…

A Proposed Resolution

• The three-stratum theory of intelligence is 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.

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…
• Intelligence testing is highly controversial with critics saying measuring intelligence requires assessing more abilities than assessed by current intelligent tests, current intelligence tests are culturally biased and reducing one’s intelligence to a number (IQ score) is ethically questionable and simplistic but others say intelligence tests are better than any alternatives for predicting important life outcomes and for making decisions on which children need special education.

The Contents of Intelligence Tests

• Items of tests developed to measure intelligence at different ages reflect the age of the subject and their abilities.
• Intelligence tests have their greatest success who are at least 5-6 years old.
• The most widely used intelligence test for children 6+ is the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) which 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.

The Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

• IQ is a quantitative measure of a child’s intelligence relative to that of other children of the same age.
• IQ scores reflect the mean for the test and its standard deviation (SD) which is a measure of the variability of scores within a distribution.
• On most IQ tests, standard deviation is about 15 points and a child scoring 1 SD above above or below the mean adds or lowers the score of the mean.
• An advantage of this scoring system is that IQ scores at different ages are easy to compare.

Continuity of IQ Scores

• If IQ is consistent, IQ scores that people obstain at different ages should be highly correlated.
  • Studies have shown that IQ scores have impressive continuity from age 5.
• Several variables influence the degree of stability of IQ scores over time, such as the closer in time IQ tests are given.
• A person’s IQ scores at different ages tend to be similar but rarely identical. Changes in the child’s environment can produce changes in IQ score and the greater similarity of children’s environments over shorter periods of time contributes to the greater similarity of scores over shorter periods.

IQ Scores as Predictors of Important Oucomes

• IQ scores are a strong predictor of academic, economic, and occupational success.
• The positive relation between IQ score and occupational and economic success stems from IQ scores determining which students gain access to the things they need to perform better, earn more money and receive better performations.
  • A child’s IQ score is more closely related to the child’s later occupational success than the socioeconomic status of the child’s family, the child’s school or any other variable.
• Empirical research indicates that the higher the test score, the higher that subsequent achievement is likely to be.

Other Predictors of Success

• A child’s characteristics, like a motivation to succeed, conscientiousness, intellectual curiousity, persistence in the face of obstacles, creativity, physical and mental health, and social skills are also very important.
• Self-discipline is more predictive of changes in report card grades than the IQ score between 5th and 9th grades.
• Practical intelligence like reading other people’s intentions and motivating others to work effectively as a team predicts sucess in career beyond the influence of IQ.

Genes Environment, and the Development of Intelligence

Qualities of the Child

• Children contribute greatly to their own intellectual development through their genetics, the reactions they elicit from others and their choice of envrionments.

Genetic Contributions to Intelligence

• The genome substantially influences intelligence and genetic influence varies with age, and essentially increases.
• One reason for increasing genetic influence is that some genetic processes do not show their effects 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.
• Findings suggest that genetic influences on intelligence reflect small contributions from many genes as well as interactions among them rather than a small number of master genes, showing that there is no “intelligence gene”.

Genotype-Environment Relations

• Environments children encounter are influenced by the children’s and their parent’s genotypes.
• 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.

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Influence of the Immediate Environment

Family Influences

• The HOME (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment ) samples various aspects of children’s home life including organization and safety of living space, intellectual stimulation offered by parents, whether children have books of hteir own, amoun of parent-child interaction, parent’s emotional support for the child and so on to assess the family environments of children from birth to age 3 years.

• Throughout childhood, children’s IQ scores as well as their math and reading achievement scores are positively correlated with scores on the HOME.

• It may mean that parent’s genes influence both the intellectual quality of the home environment and children’s IQ scores so the home intellectual environment may not cause the child to have a higher or lower IQ.

  Shared and non-shared family environments

• Each child within a given family encounters unique, non-shared environments (ex. given more attention by parents).

• The influence of the non-shared environment decrases with age as children become increasingly able to choose their own friends and activities.

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

Influences of Schooling

• Attending school makes children smarter.
• A study showed that children who had a year more schooling than others did better than the slightly younger children in the grade below them.
• A meta-analysis of studies on the relation between IQ and total number of yeras of formal education indicated that an extra year attending school increases IQ scores by 1-5 points.
• The achievement test scores of low-SES children stay constant or drop each year wheras scores of high-SES children tend to rise, most likely because during the school year all children get relatively stimulating intellectual environments, 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).

Influence of Society

• One reflection of societal influences is that in many countries, average IQ scores have consistently risen over the past 80 years and is called the Flynn effect.
  • 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.
• One source of these increases in fluid intelligence might be experience with new technologies like video games which actually improve a variety of cognitive processes.

Effects of Poverty

• The more years children spend in poverty, the lower their scores tend to be.
• 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 emotional turmoil that interferes with learning as well to name a few of the challenges poverty poses.
• Children from wealthier homes tend to score higher on IQ and achievement tests than children from poorer homes.
  • Large mean differences between children from less and more affluent are present in reading and math knowledge when children enter kindergarten and the differences grow even larger over the course of schooling.
• The difference between intellectual achievement of children from rich and poor homes is much larger than in countries where the income gap is smaller.

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Risk Factors and Intellectual Development

• Reports on how to help all children reach their intellectual potential often focuses on a single factor but many factors contribute to poor intellectual development.
• The average IQ of children whose environment did not include any risk factors was around 115 and those with environments with 6+ risk factors had an IQ around 85.
  • Study revealed there is just as much stability in the number of risk factors in children’s environments as their IQ scores.
• High-quality parenting can help offset the risks imposed by poverty.

Programs for Helping Poor Children

• Intervention programs were initiated to enhance the intellectual development.
• Participation in the programs increased IQ scores substantially but over the next 2-3 years they decreased and by the 4th year all improvement was erased.
• Other effects of these programs aimed at helped preschoolers from low-income backgrounds and these yielded better results with preschoolers less likely to be assigned to special ed classes, held back in school or arrested by 18.
• Why did one work and not the other? a likely reason is the long-term effects on children’s motivation and conduct.

Project Head Start

• Head Start is a large-scale intervention program that has provided a wide range of services to more than 36 million children and is racially and ethnically diverse.
• Particpation in this produces higher IQ and achievement test scores at the end of the program and briefly thereafter.
• It also produces greater likelihood of graduating from high school, enrolling in college, better health and social skills, lower frequency of later being held back in school, using drugs and delinquency.

Alternative Perspectives on Intelligence

Gardner’s Theory

• Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory is 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

• Sternberg’s theory of successful inteligence is 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.
• Success in life involves more capabilities than those measured by traditional IQ tests.

Acquisition of Academic Skills: Reading, Writing, and Mathematics

Reading

5 stages of reading development

1. Stage 0 (birth to 1st grade)

   1. Children get key prerequisites for reading ilke gaining phenomic awareness (recognizing individual sounds within words) and knowing the letters of the alphabets.

2. Stage 1 (1st and 2nd grades)

   1. Children get phonological recoding skills which means they can translate letters to sounds and “sound out” words.

3. Stage 2 (2nd and 3rd grades)

   1. Children gain fluency in reading.

4. Stage 3 (4th to 8th grades)

   1. Children can understand reasonably complex info from written text (read to learn instead of learning to read).

5. Stage 4 (8th to 12th grades)

   1. Adolescents understand information presented from multiple perspectives, which allows them to appreciate subtleties in novels and plays.

Pre-reading Skills

• Preschoolers get basic info from observing others reading to them.
• Parent’s interest in children’s reading stimulate early knwoledge of alphabet and later high reading achievement.
• Performance on phonemic awareness is the strongest predictor of their ability to sound out and spell words.
• Phonemic awareness comes from nursery rhymes, growth of working memory, increasingly efficient processing of oral language and reading.

Word Identification

• Words can be identified in two main ways: phonoglocial recoding and visually based retrieval.
  • Phonoglocial: converting visual form of word into speech-like form to determine meaning.
  • Visually based retrieval: proceeding directly from visual form of a word to its meaning.
• Most young children use both approaches and use a strategy-choice process to choose the fastest approach to figure out what the word means (easy words → visually based retrieval, hard words → phonological recoding).
  • The mechanisms underlying this involve a form of associative learning where children’s past behaviour shapes their future behaviour.
• Correct use of phonological recoding increases associations between word’s visual forms and sounds while leads to greater use of visually based retrieval.
• Dyslexia is 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.
  • Strategies that enhance their decoding appears to be a bit helpful, but there have been limited successes.
  • Reserachers argue the only way to substantially improve the reading comprehension of those with dyslexia is to improve their vocabulary and general view of the world.

Comprehension

• The simple view of reading is 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 text comprehension in early grades very well as does listening comprehension after 4th grade.
• Reading comprehension involves forming an initial situation model that 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 reading comprehension, 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 strategies develop reading comprehension (good readers read slowly when important material needs to be learned and speed up when they only need a rough sense of it).
  • Proficiency in making these adjustments comes surprisingly late, at around 14 years old but not at 10.
• Comprehension monitoring is 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.
• 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.
  • Possessing content knowledge frees cognitive resources to focus on complex material in the text and draw inferences.
• Hearing stories helps preschoolers learn how they go which helps them understand stories once htey start to read, and the amount parents read to children during early years partially accounts for differences between reading comprehension skills of children from middle- and low-income families.
• Reading skill is important because it motivates children to read more and become better readers.

Individual Differences

• Individual differences in reading proficiency tend to be stable over time.
• Genetic and environmental influences are mutually reinforcing (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).

Writing

Pre-writing Skills

• 3 1/2 year olds writing does not use conventional letters of an alphabet, but it shows understanding that words require seperate symbols.
• By 4 years, parents can tell writing from drawing.
• Preschoolers writing indicates they expect meaning to be reflected in print.

Generating Written Text

• Learning to write is harder than learning to read because writing requires focusing simultaneously on numerous low-level (basics like forming letters, punctuation, spelling…) and high-level goals (communication, making arguments comprehensible without verbal cues…).
  • The difficulty children having with the basics and content results in stories that are hard to understand.
• Automatizing low-level skills like spelling and punctuation aids writing because it frees cognitive resources for pursuing higher-level communicative gaosl of writing.
• Children’s proficiency at low-level skills like punctuation correlates positively with quality of their essays.
• A script where 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).
• Formulating outlines where you (a) figure out what to say, (b) the order of your points and (c) how you make each point, divides the task of writing into manageable parts.
• Metacognitive understanding plays important roles in writing.
  • One being recognizing readers may not know the same things as the writer and so the writing must reflect that. Good readers understand this by high school.
  • Another type is understanding the need to plan before writing as making notes and constructing outlines make your final piece much more organized and easy to understand.
  • The third key type is metacognitive knowledge, which is understanding the need for revision.
• Instruction aimed at instilling metacogntive understanding can enhance writing skills.
• Content knowledge plays a crucial role in writing as children write better when they are familiar with the topic than when they are not. Children gain content knowledge through reading which is one reason why children who read more tend to write better than those who don’t.

Mathematics

Arithmetic

Strategies

• The most common inital strategies for solving arithmetic are counting from 1, and recalling answers from memory.

• When children do arithmetic on a daily basis, they add new strategies.

  1. Counting from the larger number (3+9→ “9,10,11,12”).
  2. Decomposition (dividing a problem into two easier ones) (3+9 → 3+10=13, 13-1=12, so 3+9=12).

• Children use similarly varied strategies on addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication.

• Children choose which strategies to use in extremely adaptive and sensible ways.

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

Understanding numerical magnitudes

• Numerical magnitude representations are mental models of the sizes of numbers, letting children understand which numbers indicate greater number of objects (4 shoes are less than 8 shoes).
• Accuracy of magnitude representations of the numbers 1-10 increases greatly between ages 3-6, that of numbers 1-100 between ages 6-8, that of numbers 1-1000 between 8-12, etc… (the ages refect when children gain substantial experience with each numerical range).
• Children of any given age differ considerably in their knowledge of numerical magnitudes due to their overall mathematical knowledge.
• More accurate magnitude representations help children learn arithmetic (the more precisely a child understands numerical magnitudes, the greater the child’s proficiency with both whole numbers and fractions).
• Accurate magnitude representations may enhance arithmetic learning by suggesting plausible answers and eliminating implausible ones from consideration (12/13 + 7/8 is less than 2 and that is clear to someone who understands fraction magnitudes).

Conceptual understanding of arithmetic

• Understanding why some arithmetic procedures are appropriate and others aren’t poses a major challenge for many children.
• Some simple types of conceptual undestanding of arithmetic appear during the preschool period (b+a = a+b).
• Children master more advanced arithmetic concepts like mathematical equality (the idea that values on each side of equal sign must balance) much later.
• Children who initally show gesture-speech mismatches where their gesturing conveys more info than verbal statements learn more from instruction than those whose gesturing and speech were consistent (as this shows the child understands a little more than they are explaining).
• Children who gesture more than those while explaining answers to mathematical equality problems learn more than those who don’t.
  • This is because gesturing shows variability of thought and actions between gestures and speech and indicates heightened readiness to learn.

Cultural influences

• Those in East Asian countries acquire far greater proficiency than those in European and North American countries.
• The differences start even before children enter formal school and seem to be related to cultural emphasis, or lack thereof, on math, quality of resources, and time spent.

Mathematics Anxiety

• Many children experience mathematics anxiety which is a negative emotional state that leads to fear and avoidance of math.
• Math evokes more anxiety than other subjects because of the right/wrong status of answers, belief that proficiency in math is closely linked to intelligence, and frustrating periods with no apparent progress.
• Math anxiety is more prevalent in girls than boys even though mean achievement is almost identical.
• The dread that math can inspire contributes to the negative outcomes that are likely because the anxiety reduces the working memory resources needed to solve math problems.
• Views of adults who are important in children’s lives, like parents and teachers, influence children’s anxiety towards math.
• Students who write a brief description of their emotions before taking a test reduces anxiety and boosts performance in areas where negative feelings interfere with learning and performance.
• The process of learning math goes seriously awry with children who suffer from mathematics disabilities.

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