Intelligence Quotient

1
Intelligence Quotient

• I.Q. tests developed starting c.1906
• What does it measure?
• Well, what was it designed to measure?
• School achievement. It does do that rather well.

2
Scores do tend to be stable

• At least, after age 8
• Age 8, age 14 approximate correlation .85
• Age 10, age 14, approx. .90
• General intelligence no sex differences

3
What else does I.Q. correlate to?

• School achievement tests .70 to .90
• IQ tests grades .50 to .60
• Job success .33 for salesmen
• -.10 for sales clerks
• completing a job training program.38 to .53

4
Emotional adjustment?

• Longitudinal studies of high IQ individuals have
  difficulties as often as low to moderate IQ folk
• What about Happiness? Havent really been able to
  describe this, either.
• But it doesnt seem to correlate to IQ.

5
Intelligence

• Sometimes said to be what you do when you dont
  know what to do
• We do know it helps to be the dominant culture.
  IQ tests heavily verbally based.
• IQ tests tap several different abilities.

6
Quick Test of Verbal Ability

• What is a counterpane?
• What is a bonnet?
• What is a boot?
• What is a lorry?
• What is a lift?

7
Verbal Abilities

• Women are generally reported to have higher
  verbal performance
• Verbal vocabulary, analogies, reading
  comprehension, and essay writing
• Girls tend to spell better than boys by a large
  difference
• Differences in meta analysis are generally small

8
Was womens superiority well received?

• Some researchers linked the verbal abilities to
  lying
• Suggested that womens greater rapidity of
  perceptionaccompanies a trait for lying that is
  almost pathological. (circa late 1800s)

9
Also, some males fought back

• By labeling whatever verbal skills girls excelled
  at as lower level
• And the ones for boys higher level
• So a form of female superiority was transformed
  into yet another defect

10
In actual verbal tests

• 81 studies found there was NO difference
• 37 female superiority
• 13 male superiority
• Summary 1 of the difference in verbal ability
  is gender
• 99 other factors

11
What about Math?

• Before age 13, usually no differences
• May show advantages for girls in computation
• Problem solving? None early, advantage for males
  in high school
• Females tend to get better grades in math courses
  in college

12
People often live up to expectations

• Teachers expect boys to outperform girls
• Teachers spend more time instructing
  interacting with boys in math courses

13
Higher Level Math

• Advantage, male
• Seems fairly clear and large males better on
  PSAT, SAT, GRE and Advanced Placement
• Keep in mind, self selection is going on where
  men receive more training

14
Stereotype Threat

• Fear of verifying a negative stereotype
• First discovered in racial differences
• Blacks scored lower when told a test was about
  intellectual ability
• than when told it was not diagnostic of ability

15
Women and S.T.

• When told women did as well as men on a math
  test, did as well as men (18 vs. 16)
• Told women did poorly on the math test compared
  to men, did poorly (27 vs. 7)
• Note the information also raised mens scores

16
FYI, works well with other groups

• Older people, reminded of stereotypic memory
  failures, had poorer memories than young people
• Asian women-reminded of being women, did poorer
  on math tests
• Reminded of being Asian, did better on the test

17
Spatial Abilities

• 3 abilities spatial visualization, s
  perception, mental rotation
• Or he doesnt need to ask directions

18
Spatial Perception

• Ability to identify and locate the horizontal or
  vertical planes in the presence of distracting
  information.
• Boys and men over women/girls
• Seems to grow with age.

19
Mental Rotation

• Visualize objects as they would appear if rotated
  in space.
• Largest difference in spatial tasks, again
  favoring men.

20
Spatial visualization

• Process information to understand relationship
  between objects in space
• Ex. finding a figure embedded in another figure
• Exactly where is Waldo?
• Small differences, favoring men

21
Spatiotemporal ability

• Moving objects e.g. when and where will something
  land?
• Recent research suggests that training matters
  (think Little League, Mario brothers, and so on)
  
• Advantage Male, but they may not retain it

22
Creativity

• Whew, no gender differences found yet
• Unless you talk about achievement then its male

23
New Frontiers

• Computer use/fears are showing new sex
  differences
• None in elem education, but by high school, girls
  are anxious
• Computer games are stereotyped
• Early reading computer programs 63 leading
  males, 11 female central characters

24
When sex differences do appear

• Usually around adolescence
• Differences are frequently unreliable and in
  later testing it disappears
• Ex. Baughman Dahlstroms (1968) finding that
  males had superiority in spatial relations test
• Ignored that same study found that in 437 whites
  and DID NOT find it in 642 black children

25
What about the brain?

• A lot of research ongoing about m/f brains
• Most show some differences in areas of the brain
  utilized but do not show differences in
  behavioral outcome
• So, women used both hemispheres in a rhyming task
  but did not do better on the task

26
The S.A.T.

• Gatekeeper of admission to most selective
  colleges
• In 2005 males outscored females by a little on
  verbal (513 vs 505)
• And a lot on math (538 to 504)
• Female underprediction effect scores predict
  lower grades than they get