Determining giftedness: the meaning of tests.

Yesterday someone arrived on my blog with an interesting search. They had written: "Child referred for giftedness, but average IQ result: why?" I have an answer.

IQ tests usually measure verbal and mathematical/logical skills. Some measure spatial skills as well. Therefore the test subject has to be good in all areas in order to score well. The problem with this, of course, is that some subjects are not. Many children are what I call "spikey". They have high skill in one area accompanied by more modest, or sometimes even low skill in another. A great artist, for instance, may have good spatial skills, but be lacking in the other areas. The same applies to a mathematician: their maths skills may be stunning, but they may be poor in verbal or spatial tasks. So too, a young writer, may shine in verbal areas but be unremarkable in the other domains. This presents us with a problem.

A child may be referred for giftedness because they are showing clear strengths in some observable domain. Everyone may be convinced they are "gifted" - but on a measure of IQ they may not achieve the 130 threshold traditionally regarded as defining of gifted. The question is: are these children still gifted? By the definition traditionally used, they are not. However, in a very real sense they are. To have a talent in any one area is enough to have a real world effect on their ability to do something special. Thus, one could definitely consider them gifted.

There are examples of one sided minds in history: Picasso, for one. He showed great spatial gifts, but apparently was unremarkable in other areas. A modern psychologist might say he wasn't gifted - but this is clearly absurd. He was a genius of art.

So, if your child seems to be gifted, is very strong at something, but the IQ tests show otherwise I would suggest looking more closely at the test results. Is there a spike in one area? Is the spike high enough to reach into the gifted territory? If so, your child could very well be gifted, in the true sense of the word.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and four months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and nine months, and Tiarnan, twenty-six months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind, niño, gênio criança, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Adult IQ Tests and Children.

Recently, a searcher arrived on my site with the terms: "If a child takes an adult IQ test." I didn't have the time to respond, then, but I shall now.

Many - in fact, most - of the tests available online are for adults. They are for adults in a very special way. If they are proper tests, they will have been normed for adults. This means that a body of adults will have been tested using the IQ test, and a distribution of performances plotted. This will have verified the test against a standard population. It is what gives the test validity and allows us to interpret what its results mean. For instance, that a person of a particular IQ result was better than 1 in 100, or 1 in 1000 of the test population. We are, in effect, comparing anyone new who takes the test, with those who originally took the test. This is what all official IQ tests have had done. (Well, deviation IQ tests anyway.)

Now, there is a big problem if a child takes such a test. The problem comes when the adult (usually a parent), doesn't understand how tests are constructed and verified. If they don't understand that a test has been normed against an adult population, they may be very, very upset with the result their "bright" child gets. By taking the test, the parent is, unwittingly, comparing the child against an ADULT POPULATION. The result is not compared against a population of the child's agemates. As a result the outcome is not what it seems. If, for instance a six year old takes an adult IQ test and scores at an IQ of 70, the parent might be rather shocked. But it doesn't mean that at all. It means that the child of six was performing as an adult with an IQ of 70 would perform. For a six year old, that would, in fact, be a pretty good result - not a bad result, as the parent might have thought.

What if another six year old scored above a 100 on an adult IQ test? That would be phenomenal. For it would indicate that the six year old was performing on a par with adults...or above average adults. It would be a very good result indeed. However, the parent might think "Oh...100, (or 108 or whatever) is pretty average, little Johnny can't be that bright after all..." and be disappointed. So, again, the parent would get an unfortunate impression of their gifted child.

Thus, it is misleading to use an adult IQ test for a child. The IQ result only tells us how your child compares to an adult population. It does not tell us the child's true IQ, in the way the term is meant these days: comparison for rarity with children of their own age.

The child who scores 100 in an adult IQ test, at the age of 6, might actually score in the region of 200 to 300 on a child's test, normed for 6 year olds. That is just a ballpark estimate of the situation. So, one can see how misleading adult IQ tests can be for the assessment of the intellectual performance of children.

If you want to know your child's real IQ, there is only solution: an IQ test that has been normed on a relevant population - children of their own age. Any other test, is going to give you an incorrect assessment.

So, for all those parents who have given an adult IQ test to their children...I would suggest finding a proper test, and trying again - if you really want to know the truth.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and no months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and five months, and Tiarnan, twenty-two months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

The mysterious white box on the left hand side.

At present, as I write, there is an empty white box on the left hand side of my blog, beneath the introductory text. There is a reason for this.

You see, noting the interest in IQ of my many visitors, I thought to include a link to an IQ test program offered to me by Google. I thought it was a good idea. The test would allow a quick assessment of the testee's strengths in verbal, spatial and mathematical areas and provide a full report as to the meaning of these diverse strengths and abilities.

However, it seems that the program is not immediately active. I shall wait. So, if you see an empty box on my page, know it is there for a reason. One day it might even be filled with a very interesting link, which would allow anyone to gain some insight into their own mental abilities.

As I write, I am still waiting for the mysterious ways of Google to fill their empty box.

If it is full, you might like to take the test. Have fun.

Taking several IQ tests.

From some of the comments I see all over the internet, it is clear that some parents of gifted children - or non-gifted children - get their children to take several IQ tests. I even hear of children being tested every six months or so. Is this a useful practice and what are the dangers?

Well, IQ is supposed to be quite stable throughout life, that is, it shouldn't change much. So, it does seem unnecessary to keep on taking tests. In some cases the parents appear to have children who are less than official cut-offs for gifted programmes - perhaps they are hoping that a "good" test, will take them over the threshold. In others, there seems to be a perception that the child's progress needs to be tracked in this way.

Whatever the motivation for this repeated testing, there is a common danger, which posts also reveal. There is a tendency among some school systems and a large number of professionals to judge the child on the LOWEST test result. I find this absurd, for it has no sound reasoning behind it. They seem to think that the child's "true" ability is measured by their least performance. This doesn't make sense. There are many reasons why a child could under-perform on a particular day: tired, bored, unmotivated, resistant to the test, ill - etc. There are any number of reasons why under-performance could occur - but what reasons could there be for OVER-performance? What is going to make a child perform above the level of their intelligence? Nothing at all - unless they have done a particular test before, quite recently, in which case there will be an increase from familiarity with the test. (Which is why frequent testing on a particular instrument is frowned upon - and often discounted.) Apart from this possible influence, there is nothing that can make a child do better than they should have done - but there are many things that could make a child under-perform.

Given this background, it is clear that those practitioners and school systems that insist on judging a child on the lowest test result are guilty of an injustice. Their reasoning does not make sense. A child's true ability will be closer to the HIGHEST test result obtained - unless that test result was obtained from multiple testing of the same instrument in quick succession (which could raise it a little, but not much).

So, if you have more than one IQ test result and a school system is judging your child - point out the logic above. A child can easily under-perform - but there is just no way they can over-perform.

Then again, if they don't listen to you and you continue to test multiply it is clear that you will decrease the lowest test result obtained - because you will have more chance of catching your child on an off day. Thus the more frequently you test, the more results you will get - and the more chance you will have that one of them will be unusually low, for whatever reason. Ironically, therefore, those who test their child multiply are exposing their child to the risk of being underestimated.

IQ testing without IQ testing

Are there ways to discover an IQ, without an IQ test?

Yes. Many. In fact ANY test, that involves thought, can be found to correlate with IQ.

So, what does this mean for those of you who, perhaps, find traditional IQ testing too expensive (as it is in Singapore...)? Well, if you have taken other tests in the course of your education, they can certainly be used to estimate IQ. For instance, the SATs. There are conversion tools available that allow you to convert a SAT result into an IQ. They do this by relating the SAT result to the IQ typical of someone who gets that result. In this manner, an IQ may be derived, without actually taking a conventional IQ test.

The same, of course, applies to any test that involves g, the general intelligence factor. That means that any test which invokes higher thought will have a correlation with IQ. That basically means any rigorous academic test whatsoever. The only problem is knowing what the correlation is - but in principle it could be done for any rigorous academic examination. There will always be a correlation and there will always be a typical IQ of a particular result. For some tests these relationships will have been calculated. I don't know of any apart from the SAT for which this has been done - but it is not difficult to do.

In a very real sense, I did a similar sort of calculation for my son's Chemistry O Level - I calculated the mental age that is required to pass an O level. I then used this to derive my son's minimum ratio IQ required to achieve this milestone by dividing the mental age required for an O level, by his actual age. You, too, could do similar calculations for any rigorous test your child has taken. It is a valid, logical, reasonable procedure that is scientifically sound.

This means that ANY "achievement test", with a true thinking component, will be able to act as an indirect, surrogate method for estimating IQ. The Physical Sciences - with their very strong g component - would prove to be a very effective surrogate for an IQ test, if the relationship between score and IQ and age, has been worked out.

So, perhaps you won't have to spend a fortune on an IQ test to, at the very least, determine whether you are gifted - or your child is - and into what band they fall: MG, HG, EG or PG...or even PG+, as may be the case.

Good luck.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and four months, and his gifted brothers, Fintan, three, and Tiarnan, fourteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of child prodigy, IQ, intelligence, gifted education, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Ratio IQ estimation versus IQ tests

It occurs to me that ratio IQ estimation has a great advantage over IQ tests. All IQ tests have ceiling effects: a gifted child can easily bump against these ceilings or have their test score lowered without even bumping against them. The simple presence of a ceiling has a depressant effect on scoring.

So what can we do about this? Well, I would advise an older method of estimating IQ, used for assessing the IQs of people who were not able to be tested in any other ways: ratio IQ estimation.

Why is there an advantage to ratio IQ estimation, as detailed in the previous post? Well, there are NO ceiling effects and you are getting a true grasp of how gifted a child is. The estimate of IQ obtained by looking at ratio IQs may seem a rough guide - but it could prove far more accurate than measuring the more gifted children with a test that has a ceiling of some kind - even a high ceiling. The estimate you get will not have been capped by the ceiling of a test. In this way, we can be sure that the estimates of historic personages like William James Sidis - estimated at 250 to 300 - are accurate, in the sense that they are likely to be at least a threshold below which he could not have been, to have achieved what he did.

So, are we to throw away IQ tests? Well, perhaps for our most gifted, we should - because ALL IQ tests have natural ceilings and all will depress scores for the most gifted. This problem is now much more serious than it used to be, since, for reasons that are quite unfathomable, all modern tests are designed to lower the scores of gifted students. All of these tests will give an inaccurate assessment of any gifted child.

So, if you want a truer handle on your child's giftedness, calculate a ratio IQ: it will give a better insight into the true state of affairs, if your child is one of those who hits ceilings.

The Flynn Effect: are we all getting smarter?

For decades now, the average IQ of people has been on the rise, at mean rate of one third of a point per year. That is 3 points per decade. So, are we all getting smarter, then?

The short answer is no. You see the question is, for whom is the tally rising?

Research indicates that the mean IQ is rising because the IQ of those who are in the lower segment of the population is increasing. The higher up you go on the IQ scale, the less the IQ is improving. For very high IQ types, it is isn't budging, decade on decade.

Now, this presents us with a very real problem. You see, IQ tests are regularly "re-normed" to take account of this average rise...and these rising scores are reset to 100. Thus IQ points vanish, in this adjustment. This would not matter were the change in IQ the same across all IQs - but it isn't. High IQs are not really changing - but do the norms take account of this? From what I have read, and understand, the test takers are adjusting the test results, assuming that the Flynn Effect is a universal phenomenon. Since it isn't...what effect does "re-norming" have. Well, as you might have guessed, it artificially depresses the IQs of people in the upper ranges.

So, again, we have identified a source of IQ score depression for the most gifted, introduced into modern tests.

With all of these score depressing effects, (see my previous post The Great IQ Con) preferentially exerted on the most gifted, it seems that, ultimately, modern IQ tests are being designed by people who either have an agenda, or are themselves pretty stupid. Perhaps it is both, since you would have to be pretty stupid to have an agenda against the brightest among us.

What can we conclude from all of this? Well, it seems sure that whatever uses are intended for modern IQ tests, getting a true measure of the intelligence of the most intelligent is not one of them. The tests are quite useless for that - in fact, the typical modern test will give a very distorted picture of anyone who roves into the highly gifted territory and beyond. This obviously can have significant impacts on whether or not these children receive appropriate education, or not. In all, it is quite a serious issue.

The Great IQ Con

Perhaps you have taken an IQ test. Perhaps you scored well. Perhaps you think you know your IQ, then. It is probable that you don't, however.

You see IQ tests don't behave in the way that people expect. They don't actually measure the upper ranges of humanity very well, at all. In fact, they are a source of much mismeasure. The modern IQ test isn't equipped to ascertain the most gifted among us at all - in fact, it is almost as if they are designed to hide them. Perhaps that is exactly what is happening.

I should explain. Everyone has heard the phrase "ceiling effects" - but there is much more to it than this. Firstly, when do ceiling effects invalidate the test result? One researcher put it that if you have answered 90% of the test items then that test cannot measure your IQ. The result is invalid. Indeed, an IQ test can only give an accurate result if you are able only to answer HALF the questions. The higher your point of failure to answer is above that, the less accurate the result will be.

When else might we see ceiling effects? If you scored in the 99th percentile on ANY subtest, then that test is, more than likely, underestimating your score. It cannot determine how much beyond that score you would have scored in a test with a higher ceiling. This is important to note. Just because this has happened, does not mean your score - or your child's score would have been astronomically beyond the ceiling - it might be in the right place after all - but it is more than likely that it is an underestimate - and it could be a very great discrepancy indeed. There is no way of knowing.

That seems bad enough. But wait until you hear about what they do to the "norming". Did you know that the number of extremely gifted individuals is higher than expected for a normal distribution of intelligence? Did you also know that the number of extremely intellectually impaired individuals is much higher than expected too? In a rational profession, given to promoting truth, above convenience or dogma, you would have thought that psychologists would acknowledge this...but no. What do IQ tests do? They eliminate the phenomenon by cheating the test.

What I mean by this is that the norms of the test impose an artificial correction of the results to eliminate the unexpectedly high number of extremely gifted scorers. They "compress" the upper scoring range to fit a normal curve, artificially "re-norming" or depressing high scores. Basically, modern psychometric tests steal IQ points from you, by pretending those points don't exist: they are simply squashed out of existence.

How many points are lost in this fashion? I have seen one estimate, by a psychologist not happy about the situation, placing the discrepancy at 25 points, for high scorers. This means someone who would have scored 180 - and been labelled "profoundly gifted" - may be renormed to score 155 - a much more common seeming score.

In practice, how much discrepancy do all these effects add up to? Prepare to be shocked - but first place an estimate on it yourself and see just how honest and fair to the gifted population modern psychometric testing is.

Got a number?

Well, the measured difference on real life test cases between some extremely gifted children measured on old style tests, with higher ceilings - and modern tests with much lower ceilings is - an unbelievable 85 to 107 IQ points.

That means something very clear. The most gifted segment of the population will not now be identifiable - but will score similarly to those who are moderately or slightly more gifted.

One real life example scored 120 points on a WISC test. The same person scored 220 on an old Stanford Binet LM. Now, that is disturbing. For the child would not have been admitted to a gifted program on the basis of the first score - yet was clearly very profoundly gifted when measured on a test with a higher ceiling.

Remember this: you DON'T have to score at the top of a test, to be affected by the ceiling. Ceiling effects get stronger the closer you get to the end of the test - but make the test totally invalid by the time 90 per cent of the test items are answered. Yet, long before that point, they could be making a significant difference to the results.

IQ is not what it was - and it never was what we thought it was, anyway. What a con.