Sternberg defined intelligence as a skill in accomplishing whatever that is essential to realise in life within the social cultural setting (2003). Intelligence can be pointed out as a successful intelligence because it emphasises the employment of intelligence to achieve success in life.
Breaking down the definitions of intelligence from various dictionaries and definitions applied by psychologists, it can be concluded that there is not any precise definition for it, but all these definitions are related to mind or brain processes which are necessitated by humans in order to be linked to the universe. Another concern by many psychologists is how intelligence will be measured.
2.3 Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Intelligence quotient has formed a noticeable aspect of the psychological sciences for nearly a century and intelligence test is an assessment that determines the intelligence quotient or IQ of an individual, as an estimate of their relative cognitive abilities (Richardson, 2002). In the beginning of the 20th century, intelligence quotient (IQ) has been a vast issue discussed and researched. IQ is a measure which is inferred from several different standardised tests attempting to assess intelligence.
IQ was first highlighted during a symposium in 1921. In this symposium, 17 leading scholars were asked to articulate their understanding on intelligence and how it could be measured. Diverse answers were given and no specific consensus was reached (Richardson, 2002), but the origins of the intelligence testing thus far could be traced from two important paths that have little constructive relations between them in the early stages.
The first, which upsurge the term IQ, was introduced by Alfred Binet in 1905. Based on his observation, analysis and discussions with educators in schools, he identified that children
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were expected to learn different kinds of knowledge and skills and led him to build short questions on memory for specific facts: defining prevalent words; verbal and arithmetic reasoning; counting; sentence construction; arranging sets of blocks in order or incrementing and so on (Danziger, 1990), and then these constructs were related to the child’s age (mental age and reached its pinnacle with the presence of Lewis Terman’s, The Measurement of Intelligence published in 1916 (Bartholomew, 2004).
Binet and Simon (1916) defined intelligence as a set of judgment skills which could only be tested by examining higher levels of cognitive abilities, such as verbal skills and social comprehension. Their original test consisted of tasks designed to measure mental performance of childhood. After the immediate released of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, Terman revised and perfected the test and the test was renamed as Stanford-Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale and initiated its use in North America. Terman was the first to utilise the intelligence quotient score (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2004).
The second part has its roots from a factor analysis pioneered by British Psychologist, Charles Spearman in 1904. Binet revised Spearman’s paper critically and later, Spearman himself reviewed Binet’s work and was not impressed. Terman did relate his study to Spearman’s contribution, among others, but suggested that it integrated not much to his own study (Bartholomew, 2004)
A connection between the two branches seems to have sprung up out of the demand to extend Binet’s method for minors to adults in the 1930s. This was done by David Wechsler, who had studied briefly with Spearman (Bartholomew, 2004). Looking into Spearmen’s (1904) work, he suggested a two-factor model of intelligence, entailing a general ability (g) and specific ability (s). He described g as a generalised mental energy
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measured by all intelligence tests, which is available to the same individual to the same degree in all mental operations. He believed that g was a more important factor than s since one could easily predict the amount of g used on a task based on the amount of g used on all other tasks (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2004).
Spearmen’s work was criticised by Thurstone (1938) who claimed that g was a statistical item resulting from the mathematical measures used to analyse it. Using his new approach to factor analysis, Thurstone found that intelligent behaviour does not arise from a general factor, but rather emerges from seven independent factors that he called primary abilities: word fluency, verbal comprehension, spatial visualisation, number facility, associative memory, reasoning, and perceptual speed. Moreover, when Thurstone analysed a mental test data from samples encompassed of people with similar overall IQ scores, he found that they had different profiles of primary mental abilities, further supporting his model and suggesting that his work had more clinical utility than Spearman’s unitary theory (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2004).
Later, when Thurstone directed his tests to an intellectually diverse group of children, he was unsuccessful to discover that the seven main abilities were entirely separated; rather he found evidence of g. Thurstone managed a sophisticated mathematical solution that resolved these deceptively contradictory results, and the final version of his theory was a conciliation that accounted for the occurrence of both a general factor and the seven specific abilities. This concession helped lay the groundwork for future researchers who suggested hierarchical theories and theories of multiple intelligences (Ruzgis, 1994).
One of the individuals who involved tremendously in early intelligence testing was David Wechsler, who defined intelligence as the aggregate or global capacity of the
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individual to act intentionally, to think logically and to deal effectively with his environment (Carson, 1999). In 1939, Wechsler developed the first standardised adult intelligence test, the Bellevue-Wechsler Scale and later the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children which was considered as the best test available (published in 1949 and revised in 1974). One of Wechsler’s major contributions to psychology is the concept of intelligence that requires the abilities which are essential to be successful in life and later he developed the idea that personality traits and emotional states as well as mental abilities should be measured to assess intelligent behaviour in one’s environment (Carson, 1999).
In the 1960s, there are a few psychologists whose works and findings are being used till today. To name a few are Jean Piaget (1963) who proposed four stages of intellectual development and John Horn (1966) student of Raymond Cattell, who proposed that general intelligence is not simply a single construct, but rather a composition of up to 100 different mental abilities which divided them into 2 components and this work is known as the Theory of Fluid and Crystallised Intelligence (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2004).
Some critics of IQ specified that the concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone, disregard many important aspects of mental supremacy, but they did not challenge the stability of IQ test scores or the element that envisage certain patterns of achievement quite effectively (Neisser et al., 1996). The IQ tests were criticised by Sternberg. From his point of view, the IQ tests are ‘convenient partial operationalization of the construct of intelligence, and nothing more. They do not provide the kind of measurement of intelligence that the tape measures provide of height.’ He then categorised intelligence into three parts, namely the ‘Triarchic Theory of Intelligences’ consisting of componential intelligence, experiential intelligence and contextual intelligence (Sternberg, 1985).
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Sternberg failed to gain a lot of supports among mainstream intelligence researchers. Gottfredson (2003) for instance, reviewed Sternberg's Practical Intelligence.
Sternberg proposed that there “exists a general factor of practical intelligence that is distinct from academic intelligence and which predicts future success as well as g, if not better”. Gottfredson counter claimed that the evidence supporting the practical intelligence model, and its associated empirical claims, is illusionary and that the evidence opposing the claims was ignored.
In conclusion, IQ is a measurement or test of human intelligence in relation to mental/ cognitive process or ability. According to Bartholomew (2004) in his book Measuring Intelligence Facts & Fallacies:
Intelligence Quotient is an index calculated from the scores obtained with a set of test items which are judged by experts to encompass the abilities covered by the term ‘intelligence’. It is not a fixed characteristic of the individual tested, but will vary according to the particular set of items used, the circumstances under which the test is taken and so forth. Its scale of measurement has no natural origin or unit of measurement and the form of its distribution is a matter of convention. The main drawback of IQ is that it measures different kinds of ‘intelligence’. Different IQ tests may mix these kinds in varying proportions. This further undermines the possibility of valid comparisons, even within the same population, where different tests may have been used. This feature can be summarised by saying that IQ is trying to measure a multidimensional quantity (p. 143)