Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School

Floud, Jean; Simon, Brian

doi:10.2307/587678

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Test designers preferred tests with more questions of middling difficulty both for discrimination and because of a belief that traits tend to be normally distributed (Vernon, 1940;Simon, 1953).…”

Section: How Gender-biased Test Design Creates Greater Male Score Var...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…117-118) and it may be that those who anticipated continuing on to secondary education tended to perform better on questions on subjects taught in secondary education (which would include better male performance for male-specific questions). Additionally, access to formal education has long been considered to be an important cause of differences in intelligence test scores (Long, 1923;Bond, 1924a,b;Klineberg, 1934;Simon, 1953;Ceci, 1991;Nisbett, 1998;Richardson, 2002;Brinch and Galloway, 2012;Ritchie and Tucker-Drob, 2018) and children at the time of the SCRE test had different access to education based on gender. Specifically, early in their academic studies, boys tended to drop out of formal schooling earlier than girls to seek employment (Hadow, 1923).…”

Section: Evidence Of Gender-specific Knowledge In Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If these premises are true, males will be over-represented in the upper tail of the distribution of intelligence (as shown in Figure 1) and will be inevitably over-representation in elite positions. While there is little evidence for the first premise (Johnson et al, 2008;Antonakis et al, 2017) and the second premise is debatable (e.g., Hollingworth, 1914;Simon, 1953;Lewis, 1957;Burt, 1963;Lewontin, 1970;Johnson et al, 2008), this paper will focus on the third premise -do men have greater variability in intelligence than women?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Greater variance in male intelligence test scores can be explained by sex-biased test design

Zefferman

2023

Preprint

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The “Greater Male Variability Hypothesis” (GMVH) of mental ability is a century-old hypothesis that males have been overrepresented in elite academic, political, and economic roles because males are more variable in intellectual ability than females. Proponents of the GMVH argue that males and females have similar average intelligence, but males are over-represented at the extreme high end of the distribution because they are more variable in intelligence. The evidence for this hypothesis is mixed and consists of greater male variance in test scores on some intelligence tests - especially in test scores from the early 20th century. However, I show that greater male test score variability results when tests are designed primarily to test intelligence in males. For example, to evaluate exclusively male Army draftees in the First World War or mostly male secondary school applicants in the 1930s United Kingdom. I show that typical question selection procedures, when used to design a test for males, tend to increase the variance of male scores relative to female scores. It is often assumed that intelligence measures are independent of test design procedures, but I show that designing a test for one population leads to statistical irregularities when applied to another. This implies that males are not overrepresented in elite positions because they are more variable in baseline intelligence, but that this may be due to other factors.

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Section: How Gender-biased Test Design Creates Greater Male Score Var...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Evidence Of Gender-specific Knowledge In Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Greater variance in male intelligence test scores can be explained by sex-biased test design

Zefferman

2023

Preprint

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“…Above all he starts out with the conviction that all the children under his care are educable. (Simon, 1953) The opening sentence of this extract holds the key to Brian's humanism: 'The teacher who sets out to educate the children under his care, meets them as human beings'. The word 'educate' is italicized, to distinguish it from training or instruction.…”

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confidence: 99%

Humanism in Education

Armstrong¹

2015

forum

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A differential paradox: The controversy surrounding the Scottish mental surveys of intelligence and family size

Ramsden

2007

J History Behavioral Science

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In 1947, the Scottish Council for Research in Education and the Population Investigation Committee conducted a survey of Scottish schoolchildren, exploring the relations between tested intelligence and fertility. The survey was not only significant for its size, measuring the IQ of all 11-year-olds at school on the day of testing, some 80,805 children, but also because it was a repeat survey. Its purpose was to establish whether the intelligence of the population had declined because of the negative correlation between IQ and family size. The paper will explore how the impetus for the 1947 survey came from attempts to revive the fortunes of the eugenics movement, based upon the interdisciplinary study of population. While most expected the study to provide evidence of a decline in intelligence, it revealed an increase. This was in spite of a continuing process of differential fertility. This paper will explore the influence of these results, described as a "paradox," upon the future development of the eugenics movement and the sciences of population. While for many, the results were seen to have completely, and thankfully, undermined eugenic fears of degeneration, the supposed "resolution" of the paradox in 1962 provided the basis of a meritocratic and optimistic "new eugenics" that sought to reunite social and biological scientists concerned with human betterment in Britain and the United States.

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Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Greater variance in male intelligence test scores can be explained by sex-biased test design

Greater variance in male intelligence test scores can be explained by sex-biased test design

Humanism in Education

A differential paradox: The controversy surrounding the Scottish mental surveys of intelligence and family size

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