Persuasive Essay On Intelligence Testing

Since the first scientist man has been attempting to categorize, understand, define, and manipulate intelligence. What began as one man or woman being less intelligent than another slowly evolved with psychology under the efforts of Alfred Binet, Theodore Simons, Robert Yerkes, David Wechsler, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and countless others who studied and attempted to decipher the mysteries of intelligence or lack thereof behind the human mind and spawned the current beliefs, meanings, social ideologies, and definitions of intelligence. These beliefs and understandings has led to an ever evolving and changing was to test intelligence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with an intelligence test or an assessment of overall intelligence potential (IQ), but the problem comes in when these tests are applied to children and students around the world and then are revealed to
It can allow a child to grow and expand in ways they may not have thought of before, but adults have a tendency to hear a child is strong in a certain aspect or weak in a certain area and take that as gospel. It is a simple thing for one to forget that IQ test at best are semi-accurate predictions of potential. Teachers may end up harping on certain skills that a child has to reinforces their strengths and increase their weakness. They can also unintentionally get into the habit of assuming the IQ score is a cap on their student’s growth and make excuses that the child just can’t do something. Take for example if a child score highly in verbal intelligence and not in spatial understanding may have higher and unreasonable expectations (and may be consequentially graded harder on) exercises and assignments that are mostly verbally or linguistically related. On the flip side the teacher may expect less and grade the child easier on spatial assignments like geometry giving the child an inaccurate understanding of their