Word: iq
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...flaws of any intelligence test is that it does not, and cannot, take into account the mood of the person whose intellect is being evaluated. Educational psychologists have long known that attitude can have a pronounced effect on the score. The same person, retested, may raise or lower his IQ by as many as 20 points depending on how he feels-challenged, anxious, bored. Even his feelings toward the person giving the test can be a factor. In the case of the black student, writes British Psychologist Peter Watson in New Society magazine, this variation is of great significance...
Watson cites a study he made of black West Indian students at an interracial secondary school in East Ham, a London working-class neighborhood. When the examination was correctly identified as an IQ test, the students scored an average of ten points lower than when the exercise was falsely described as an experiment to help plan curriculum. Watson, who is white, also found that scores typically climbed when the IQ test-identified as such-was given by his assistant, "a very black West Indian Negro...
...East Ham study got its inspiration from earlier work by an American psychologist, Irwin Katz, now at the Graduate Center of New York's City University. Katz devised a series of experiments to determine, among other things, the effect on IQ performance of being black in a white-dominated society. As in East Ham, Katz's black subjects did better when they were deceived into believing that their intelligence was not being tested-that is, when the test was described as a simple drill in eye-hand coordination. In fact, when they were freed of anxiety about intellectual...
Katz concluded that his subjects were thoroughly aware of the judgment of intellectual inferiority held by many white Americans. With little expectation of overruling this judgment, their motivation was low, and so were their scores. Hence when the IQ test was disguised as something else, the human ambition to do well-which has nothing to do with color-could take wing. And as long as their intelligence was not being evaluated, Psychologist Katz's subjects felt more challenged to succeed before a white examiner than before one of their own kind...
Substantial Refutation. The results have recently been released-and they look impressive. IQ scores for Kottmeyer's fourth graders rose an average of 7.2 points; those for fifth and sixth graders went up 3.5 and 6.0 points. Spelling and reading scores were two to four months ahead of the national norms, and overall school performances were above all expectations...