ebook img

Maximizing Intelligence PDF

240 Pages·2003·14.01 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Maximizing Intelligence

MAXIMIZING INTELLIGENCE This page intentionally left blank MAXIMIZING INTELLIGENCE DAVID J. ARMOR WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SUSAN L. AUD TRANSACTION PUBLISHERS NEW BRUNSWICK (U.S.A.) AND LONDON (U.K.) Copyright © 2003 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven- tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854- 8042. This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Stan- dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002075087 ISBN: 0-7658-0185-X Printed in Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Armor, David J. Maximizing intelligence / David J. Armor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0185-X (cloth) 1. Intellect. 2. Intelligence levels. I. Title. BF431 .A5775 2003 153.9—dc21 2002075087 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi 1. Maximizing Intelligence 1 Four Propositions about Intelligence 2 The Ten Most Important Risk Factors 6 The Basis for the Book 8 Organization of the Book 10 2. The Nature and Importance of Intelligence 13 Definition and Measurement of Intelligence 13 The Nature and Malleability of Intelligence 22 The Timing of IQ Changes 3 7 Why IQ is Important 43 3. The Risk Factors for Intelligence 51 Evidence for the Risk Factors 51 The Role of Parent IQ 53 The Sequence of Risk Factors 56 Risk Factors after Birth or Conception 57 Environmental Risk Factors before Birth 70 Summary of the Risk Factors for Intelligence 92 4. Race, Family, and Intelligence 101 Racial Differences in IQ and Achievement 103 Racial Differences in Risk Factors 110 Racial Differences in Schooling 119 Reducing the IQ Gap 12 8 5. Agents of Change for Intelligence 13 5 The Timing of Changes 135 Schools and Preschools 136 Families and Early Intervention Strategies 162 Summary 177 6. The Outlook for Maximizing Intelligence 181 An Integrated Theory of Intelligence 181 Maximizing Whose Intelligence? 189 Policy Approaches for Maximizing Intelligence 190 Appendix A: Multivariate Analysis of the Risk Factors 197 Appendix B: Analysis of Risk Factors for African 203 American Children Appendix C: Regression Analysis of 1996 NAEP Data 207 Index 211 Preface I first became interested in the factors that influence intelligence and aca- demic achievement in 1965. That was the year I joined a large team doing a study required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The team was led by the late sociologist James Coleman, and it produced the now classic report, Equality of Educational Opportunity (EEO). Like Coleman and the rest of the team, I be- lieved we were going to explain why African American students had lower test scores than white students. I believed we were going to demonstrate that black students attended segregated schools with inadequate resources and programs, and that these school deficiencies would explain most of the achievement gap. I was as surprised as any team member when we could not document signifi- cant school resource differences between predominately black and predomi- nately white schools, at least when we divided schools by region (at that time Southern school districts generally had fewer resources than Northern districts). I was even more surprised when we found very small achievement effects for most school and teacher characteristics after controlling for family socioeco- nomic (SES) characteristics. Even without formal controls for SES, the simple correlations between achievement and school resources were much smaller than the correlations between achievement and family background. My first essay on this issue appeared in On the Equality of Educational Opportunity, edited by Harvard Professors Frederick Mosteller and Patrick Daniel Moynihan (1972). The EEO report had one set of findings that seemed to support the notion that desegregated schools benefited the academic achievement of African Ameri- can students. The seminal Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Educa- tion, had also implied this benefit, and therefore many civil rights advocates immediately concluded that the Coleman report supported the desegregation benefit thesis. I was not so sure, because in the EEO data most school character- istics had fared poorly as predictors of academic achievement. Moreover, at the time of the EEO study, most desegregated schools existed because of housing patterns, which meant that desegregated schools had higher SES black students than segregated schools. Given my concerns about how the Coleman report was being interpreted, I welcomed the opportunity to participate in a study of a voluntary busing pro- gram in the Boston area (called METCO). The METCO program bused Boston vii viii Maximizing Intelligence African American students to suburban school districts in order to experience integrated education in some of the finest school systems in the nation. Be- cause of my work with the Coleman data, I was not too surprised to find that desegregation did not improve the academic achievement of black students. Moreover, I discovered that other busing programs were also documenting the lack of educational benefits, and I published these findings in The Public Inter- est in 1972 ("The Evidence on Busing"). Over the next twenty-five years I served as an expert witness in dozens of school districts that were involved in some type of litigation, and I conducted special case studies as a basis for my testimony. In many of these cases a major question was whether the lower achievement of minority students (or minority school districts) was caused by policies of the school district or whether it was due to factors beyond control of school officials, such as the socioeconomic conditions of minority families. There were two consistent findings in these case studies that are relevant to the propositions advanced by this book. First, lower minority achievement could be explained by a combination of family socioeconomic factors (usually poverty) and low achievement scores at the beginning of schooling—before school policies and programs could have much effect. Second, the achieve- ment levels of minority students were generally not correlated (or correlated only weakly) with school characteristics such as expenditures, teacher experi- ence, teacher education levels, teacher certification, class size, and the racial composition of schools. In other words, like the original Coleman report, stu- dent achievement was strongly related to family characteristics but only weakly, if at all, to school resources and programs. A major limitation in all these case studies was that the number of family background measures was usually limited to poverty, limited English profi- ciency, and (sometimes) family structure (one versus two parent families). As important as these factors were, they did not comprise the totality of family characteristics that might be related to achievement. In an effort to expand my study of family factors that influence academic achievement, in 1994 I began analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), which was tracking the development of children born to women in the original study. This study had many more family measures than most national studies, includ- ing mother's IQ and parenting behaviors, and it also administered a full array of cognitive tests to children both before and after they started formal schooling. Just as I started analyzing this data, Herrnstein and Murray published The Bell Curve, in which they argued that parent IQ was the dominant cause of a child's intelligence through genetic transmission, and environmental factors played only a very small role. They relied heavily on data from the NLSY to support their conclusions. Although I was finding parent IQ to be the strongest single correlate of a child's IQ, I found that other family variables were also Preface ix correlated with children's IQ and achievement scores even after removing the effect of mother's IQ. Moreover, when these other factors were combined in a multivariate analysis, I found that family environment factors had a combined effect on a child's achievement greater than parent IQ. This led me to reject the Herrnstein and Murray thesis that a child's intelligence was largely determined by genetic factors at birth. There was still one vexing problem: if a child's intelligence is influenced by so many family environment factors, why do most special school and preschool programs (and school resources in general) fail to improve the achievement of low-achieving students? As I was pondering this question, the Zero to Three movement came to my attention with its controversial focus on brain develop- ment. While I do not base any of my propositions on theories of brain develop- ment, this new movement did lead me to investigate whether the malleability of intelligence might be time-dependent. Based on several different bodies of research (reviewed in chapters 2, 3, and 5), I concluded that intelligence was malleable but that malleability decreases over time. I believe this conclusion is the only reasonable explanation for two sets of well-documented results that appear inconsistent on their face. These are (1) the very strong correlations between a child's intelligence and family environmental factors (after control- ling for parent IQ), and (2) the very weak correlations between a child's aca- demic achievement and school resource or program variables. Finally, having concluded that family environment plays a key and possibly irreversible role in shaping a child's intelligence, I was not sure what the policy implications should be. It is one thing to know that parent behaviors influence a child's intelligence; it is quite another to try to change them. Parent behav- ior—such dropping out of school, deciding when to have children and whether to marry first, how many children to have, how to raise children—has many deep roots and causes imbedded in our modern culture. It is notoriously diffi- cult to change basic values about family and children. As I was pondering the policy implications of all this, I became aware of the major pro-family initiatives being undertaken as part of the welfare reform that began in 1996. Although the welfare reform movement is concerned about children's welfare in general, it is probably not motivated primarily by improv- ing children's intelligence levels. Yet, if the welfare reform movement succeeds in restoring the value of two-parent families and good parenting behavior to low income families, that might be its greatest legacy. It was not much of a leap to conclude, in chapter 6, that since the family has the greatest potential for maximizing the intelligence of all children, a whole family policy would be an excellent subject for a national campaign to improve the family risk factors that impact on a child's intelligence.

Description:
The ''nature versus nurture'' controversy dates back to at least the nineteenth century. How much of a role does genetics or environment play in accounting for reasoning skill and other intellectual aptitudes? At a time when the public school system in the United States is under attack, this debate
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.