Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [155]
Yerkes also lent support to Goddard’s Ellis Island data by reporting that the Alpha and Beta showed the peoples of southern Europe and the Slavs of eastern Europe to be less intelligent than the peoples of northern and western Europe; these “findings” helped bring about the 1924 immigration law.
As the IQ controversy grew more heated, however, intelligence testing began to lose favor among psychologists during the 1930s and still more in the 1940s. By then, too, the belief in general intelligence had waned; new research using advanced statistical methods had found all sorts of “factors” or clusters of special correlations among the traits and cast doubts on the meaningfulness or usefulness of Spearman’s g. Still, tests measuring a number of mental abilities and yielding a composite score, called intelligence, continued to be used by educators, business heads, and others.
By the 1960s, however, with protest movements of the disenfranchised and the discriminated-against gaining power, a protracted IQ war got under way. According to a study the author of this book made in 1999:
Militant minority groups and their white sympathizers [in the civil rights movement] succeeded in getting the boards of education in several major cities to stop IQ testing in the public schools. Public demonstrations and mass protests by activist groups died down by the late 1970s, but efforts to stop IQ testing continued by means of court cases and pressures on state legislators.
And with considerable success. By the 1990s, in schools throughout California, and in many school systems in other states, laws had been passed that forbade giving standardized tests of intelligence and academic aptitude to minority black and Hispanic children who had scholastic problems. In other cases school administrators who were not legally forbidden to do such testing avoided it in response to the wishes of parents… Nationally, between a third and a half of all public school districts administered no group intelligence or aptitude tests K to 12, and of those that did, according to a survey of eastern states, about half made little or no use of the results to tailor programs to students’ abilities.59
Some psychologists went so far as to deny that there was such a thing as intelligence. Professor Martin Deutsch of New York University asserted, “It’s a convenient label for certain kinds of behavior, but I suspect that, in actual fact, the thing itself doesn’t really exist.” Other psychologists and educators preferred to state, as Boring had done earlier, that one cannot say what intelligence is but only that it is what intelligence tests measure.
To meet the criticisms of existing IQ tests, in 1958 the psychologist David Wechsler developed two new ones, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (known as WISC) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). WISC and WAIS have two major parts: a verbal subtest assesses vocabulary, comprehension, and other aspects of verbal ability, and a performance subtest is made up of nonverbal tasks such as arranging pictures in an order that tells a story, or spotting the missing elements in a picture. Over the years intelligence researchers have modified and improved them as well as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale to better measure the abilities of test takers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and have developed more sophisticated and fairer ways of administering and interpreting the tests.60
Accordingly, despite the long history of opposition to intelligence tests, WISC and WAIS have continued to be widely used in their latest versions (WISC III and WAIS III), and for good reason.
For one thing, in those school systems that use them they predict rather well how children will perform in school and which children should be given special attention or be enrolled in enrichment programs.