Intro
Over
the last few decades, the United States has developed a sort of fetish for
standardized testing. Academic, professional and political institutions alike
seek a way to measure qualifications and achievement across communities and
groups. At least in the realm of intellectual performance, standardized tests
have become the way to do this. Along with the advent of testing, though, comes
the advent of test result interpretation, and with a battery of demographic
information, there are many ways to see the data and quite a few conclusions
being drawn.
In
the aggregate, whites score higher on IQ tests than do African-Americans. On
the math section of the SAT, the mean score for boys is higher than it is for
girls. These differences in performance across race and gender show up again
and again, but what do they mean? Are whites smarter than African-Americans or
boys smarter than girls? Do these test scores reflect innate, fixed, biological
differences or are they a product of something else? These are the questions I
will seek to explore here.
What does IQ measure?
“IQ”
is a term familiar to most but perhaps not clearly understood by many. The
abbreviation stands for “Intelligence Quotient” and in casual conversation has
come to signify how “smart” a person is, with a score like a glass ceiling: if
you have a high IQ, it means you’re naturally smarter than most people; a low
IQ means you are just incapable of some higher thinking. This interpretation of
IQ can be very misleading and dangerous. What does IQ actually measure? The IQ
test was designed to indicate not static natural intelligence, but rather current aptitude for academics, relative to one’s peers. Let me explore further some of the key
ideas there.
First,
“current”: IQ is emphatically not static.
It does not claim to remark on what your mental abilities may have been in the
past or indicate what you may be capable of in the future. IQ scores can and do
change depending on family, school or work environments, and level or quality
of schooling (see Ceci for further reading).
Second,
“academics”: the most popular IQ test
currently is the fifth edition of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, or
SBIS-V. The categories in this test are Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge,
Quantitative Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory (Machek).
The flavor of the test is clear. It favors those who spent their childhoods
playing with Lego bricks, memory games, and logic puzzles. Childhoods of
writing fantasy stories, helping care for younger siblings, or hanging around
the neighborhood do little to prepare a student for the SBIS-V, even though our
culture highly esteems qualities like creativity, interpersonal relations, or
so-called common sense or street smarts in adults (Shenk “The Truth”).
Finally,
“relative”: the IQ test is not a
fixed scale. In order to provide a measure of how you rate compared to your
peers, scores are fitted to a bell curve with the average fixed at 100. Again,
the test was originally designed to measure school aptitude, so students would
be measured against others in their grade. While theoretically the range of
aptitudes does not change much from peer group to peer group, one specific
child’s placement on that range over time certainly might.
How do IQ scores compare by race?
As
with most standardized tests, IQ tests include some demographic information.
This has predictably led to an analysis of how self-reported races correlates
with score. In the past few decades, there has been a real and not
insubstantial difference in performance between races, reported as anywhere between
10 and 18 points (Rushton; Nisbett 86). Essentially, no one can argue that
there is no IQ test score gap between blacks and whites.
That
being said, consider a brief summary of the results from some more focused
studies (all from Nisbett 91-95):
-- in a study of children
born in post-WWII Germany fathered by American GIs, children of white GIs enjoy
only a 0.5 point average score increase over children of black GIs
-- in a study of biracial
children, those with white mothers and black fathers score 9 points better than
those with black mothers and white fathers
-- in a study of adopted
black and biracial children, the average score for those raised in white
families was 13 points higher than for those raised in black families, yet
within those two groups there was no notable difference between black and
biracial scores
-- in a study of black,
white, and biracial orphans raised in the same environment, blacks scored on
average 5 points higher than whites, with biracial children in between
On
the face of things the racial disparity in IQ scores is obvious, but when
studies set race against environment, they seem to show that the score gap is
much more a product of being raised and influenced by black parents than being
born by them.
IQ: Biological or Social?
No
one would argue that there is no biological component whatsoever to IQ. In
fact, the heritability of IQ within a given population has been commonly pegged
at around 70% (Nisbett 86). More recent studies, controlling for environment,
continue to support the idea that intelligence is heritable (see Thompson,
Motluk). What does heritability indicate? Not, notably, that 70% of displayed intelligence
comes directly from genetics, or that only 30% can be affected by other
factors. Instead, 70% heritability indicates that within a given population,
70% of the discrepancy in realized differences in intelligence can be traced
back to genetic influence (Shenk “A Heritable Muddle”). So, while intelligence
levels do seem to display an aspect of genetic origin, heritability only
applies when environment is relatively controlled for, and it says nothing
about potential for intellectual ability, just manifested variation.
And
as for that heritable aspect of IQ? As Harvard University faculty Stephen
Kosslyn points out, what they measure is “the kind of intelligence you need to
do well in school, not what you need to do well in life” (quoted in Motluk).
As
the studies above indicate, though, environment plays a key role in the
realization of intellectual capability. This should seem obvious.
Socio-economic status (SES) affects more than anyone might like to admit; in
one study where children were transferred from a low SES environment to a
higher one, their IQ test scores jumped by up to 16 points (Grasso). SES of
course affects a myriad of factors, from whether or not a child eats breakfast
every morning to whether the number of books in the house to the quality of
schools available to the priorities and activities of parents. Social
environment also plays a huge role. The atmosphere and values in the household,
the values of caretakers, what they prioritize in raising their children, and
socialization from peers will affect the child’s academic achievement vastly
more than any collection of genes. In their chapter on parenting in the book Freakonomics,
authors and economists Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt show that good
predictors of a child’s future scholastic achievement are things like the level
of education of the caretakers, the SES of the household, and the number of
books in the house (170-171, 175-176). “Good genes” did not make the list.
What do standardized tests such as the SAT measure?
Standardized
tests for specific academic content have become more and more widespread as a
measure of grade or education level in America. Especially with the advent of
political pushes such as the “No Child Left Behind” Act, schools are using
standardized testing more and more to try and assess on a wide scale how well
children are doing in school, and colleges use standardized testing as a way of
comparing students from different schools and backgrounds. The most popular of
these, the SAT, is taken by high school juniors and seniors across the country
as they apply for college admission. So what does it measure?
First
of all, it may be pertinent to note that the SAT is designed and administered
by an independent non-profit organization, The College Board, with no official
affiliations within any political or educational factions. The organization is
involved in many programs for testing, advocacy, and research in education from
middle school through college, but they do not coordinate the test with any specific
curriculum or test design in schools.
The
College Board website claims to test “the skills you’re learning in school:
reading, writing and math.” So the SAT is broken into three sections: critical
reading, which involves multiple choice questions testing short passage
comprehension and sentence completion; writing, which involves an
extemporaneous essay based on an open prompt and multiple choice questions
testing grammar and vocabulary; and mathematics, which involves multiple choice
questions on arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics, and probability (“About
The SAT”).
That
being said, as nearly any high school senior or college student will be able to
tell you, the SAT is not a test you can just walk into and ace. Everything from
wording of the questions to complicated scoring methods requires familiarizing
yourself with the test beforehand, and this is an industry in itself: classes,
test prep books, online materials, practice exams, and more are marketed (often
times by The College Board itself) to prepare students to take the test which
supposedly measures what they should already know.
It
is finally worth noting that, according to Stanford University professor Claude
Steele, the SAT measures only from 7 – 25% of what a student actually needs to
excel at college (Steele). As with the IQ tests, the SATs measure a specific
subsection of skills, and they do it in a very stylized way. This is not to say
that they do not serve a purpose in providing one of the few standardized
measures of scholastic capability, this is simply to caution that they overlook
a lot of what makes a student successful, and what they do test is done in a
way that heavily favors those with the resources to specifically prepare
beforehand.
How do SAT scores compare by gender?
As
with racial difference in IQ test results, gender difference in SAT test
results—particularly on the math portion of the test—are well established,
statistically significant, and enduring. In a study conducted by The College
Board of 1985 SAT-Math scores, controlling for “socioeducational status”, it
was found that females scored on average about 50 points (out of maximum 800)
lower than males (Burton). Fast forward twenty-five years and things have
improved, but not much. The data profile report released by The College Board
for 2010 SAT-Math scores lists the average female score as 34 points lower than
the average male score (“2010 College-Bound Seniors”). That data persists from
year to year: males maintain a steady 30+ point lead over females on math
scores.
Unfortunately,
unlike studies done on IQ trying to separate racial biology from environment,
it is very difficult to control for gender. While you can, crudely speaking,
take a black child and put him with a white family and retest him to see if his
scores seem to be affected by his environment or just by his race, gender
socialization is so ingrained that there are very few ways to take a girl out
of an environment where she is treated as female to see if it is biological or
social. One of the few ways to attempt to do this is to look at single-sex
education, which at least manages to remove gender bias from the classroom. In
a 2009 study done in UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, it was found that
among independent high school students, the average SAT-Math score for females
attending single-sex schools was 22 points higher than females attending
coeducational schools (Sax).
SAT: Biological or Social?
Gender
is hard to escape or ignore. A girl put among boys still gets treated like a
girl, and of those few people who do transition between genders and can
experience socialization from both angles, they cannot do so in such a way that
reflects on SAT scores. That being said, the UCLA study does seem to show that
removing gender difference from the classroom makes up for a substantial
portion of the test score gap, indicating that the disparity is not biological
but rather environmental in origin.
Another
possible non-biological reason for the gap is the disparate numbers of students
taking the SAT. In 2010 over 100,000 more girls took the SAT than boys (“2010
College-Bound Seniors”). Keep in mind that the SAT is not a random sampling of
students, but rather is a self-selecting test for students who want to go on to
college. We can therefore consider students taking the SAT to represent the
most academically motivated or excelling students from the peer group each
year. Theoretically, then, if significantly more females take the test, then,
as researcher Janet Hyde put it, “the female group dips farther down into the
performance distribution than does the male group”, thereby lowering the mean
score across the board for females (Hyde). In fact, a small 2002 study in
Colorado and Illinois which required every single high school senior to take a
similar test, the ACT, showed no significant gender gap at all, indicating that
female sample size may indeed play a role in manufacturing the SAT score gap
(Hyde).
Finally
it is worth noting that, although this is hard to research and harder to
quantify, gender bias undoubtedly exists. From childhood little girls are more
likely to be given dolls than building blocks. Parents expect their daughters
to have better verbal skills and their sons to have better analytical minds.
The extant gender disparity in math and science fields certainly also plays a
role in encouragement—girls are more likely to be comfortable in a field where
they see an abundance of female role models, something much more prevalent in
humanities and artistic fields than hard math or science. In January 2005,
Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, famously attributed
this dearth of women in such fields to an innate difference in ability, which
got both him and Harvard quite a bit of press (see Fogg for further reading). As
much as Summers was criticized for his comments, it also illustrates how
pervasive and entrenched such a bias is. Everyone in America grows up in this
climate. Even so, studies and researchers trying to control for the effects of
gender bias as best they can do continuously turn up indications that
performance on math tests is not linked to gender biology (to whatever extent
there even is such a thing) at all.
In IQ tests and the SAT-Math
alike, score gaps between races and genders do exist and do not seem to change.
To call this an innate biological difference, though, is to dangerously
oversimplify the effects of a plethora of factors. Studies delving deeper
continuously indicate that intelligence is much more a product of environment
than of innate fixed ability. The stereotypes remain, though, and are
perpetuated by popular science and media, and it becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy—one perhaps only broken by properly understanding the issues.
Written by Caroline Marsden.
Works Cited on IQ
Ceci, Stephen J. On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on
Intellectual Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Grasso, Fabian. “I.Q. –
Genetics or Environment.” AllPsych
Journal. AllPsych Online. 1 July 2002. Web. 29 April 2012. <http://allpsych.com/journal/iq.html>
Levitt, Steven D., and
Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue
Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: Harper
Perennial, 2009.
Machek, Greg. “Individually
Administered Intelligence Tests.” Human
Intelligence: Historical Influences, Current Controversies, Teaching Resources.
Indiana University. 2003. Web. 26 April 2012. <http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/intelligenceTests.shtml>
Motluk, Alison. “IQ is
Inherited, Suggests Twin Study.” NewScientist.
5 Nov. 2001. Web. 29 April 2012. <http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520-iq-is-inherited-suggests-twin-study.html>
Nisbett, Richard E. “Race,
Genetics, and IQ.” The Black-White Test
Score Gap. Eds. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips. Washington: The
Brookings Institution, 1998. 86-102.
Rushton, J. Phillipe, and
Arthur R. Jensen. “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive
Ability.” Psychology, Public Policy, and
Law 11.2 (2005): 235-294. Web. 27 April 2012. <http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf>
Shenk, David. “A Heritable
Muddle.” The Genius in All of Us. 15
June 2009. Web. 29 April 2012. <http://geniusblog.davidshenk.com/2009/06/a-heritable-muddle.html>
Shenk, David. “The Truth
About IQ.” The Atlantic. 28 July
2009. Web. 26 April 2012. <http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/07/the-truth-about-iq/22260/>
Thompson, Paul M., et al.
“Genetic Influences on Brain Structure.” Nature
Neuroscience 4 (2001): 1253-1258. Web. 27 April 2012. <http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n12/full/nn758.html>
Works Cited on the SAT
“2010 College-Bound Seniors:
Total Group Profile Report.” CollegeBoard.
The College Board. 2010. Web. 30 April 2012. <http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile-report-cbs.pdf>
“About the SAT.” CollegeBoard. The College Board. n.d.
Web. 30 April 2012. <http://sat.collegeboard.org/why-sat/topic/sat/sat-in-college-admissions>
Burton, Nancy W., et. al.
“Sex Differences in SAT Scores.” College
Board Report 1 Jan 1988. CollegeBoard.
Web. 30 April 2012. <http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/pdf/RR%2088-9.PDF>
Fogg, Piper. “Harvard’s President
Wonders Aloud About Women in Science and Math.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 28 Jan 2005. Web. 1 May 2012.
<http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-s-President-Wonders/21108>
Hyde, Janet S., et. al.
“Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance: Supporting Online
Material.” Science 320.494 (2008).
Web. 30 April 2012. <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2008/07/23/321.5888.494.DC1/Hyde.SOM.pdf>
Sax, Linda J., et. al.
“Women Graduates of Single-Sex and Coeducational High Schools: Differences in
their Characteristics and the Transition to College.” The Sudikoff Family Institute for Education & New Media. UCLA
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. March 2009. Web. 30
April 2012. <http://gseis.ucla.edu/sudikoff/archive/pdfs/genderstudies/Report_SingleSexEd_Sax.pdf>
Steele, Claude. “Secrets of
the SAT: Interviews – Claude Steele.” PBS
Frontline. PBS. n.d. Web. 30 April 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/steele.html>
