
A 5 Minute Intelligence Test for Kids - fogus
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/08/30/a-5-minute-intelligence-test-for-kids.aspx
======
skolor
_A previous intelligence test, taken about a year-and-a-half previously, had
won them entrance to gifted primary schools. So how many of the kids still
classified as gifted just eighteen months later? Only half_

Now, that's disappointing. Newsweek has a fascinating article there, but they
missed the best part. Sure, a 5 minute test is interesting, and the
correlations are too, but that is fascinating fact. Only 50% of the gifted
students are gifted a year and a half later? That really makes you think. What
about the other way around? How many students, not originally classified as
gifted would be classified that way after a year or two? It also seems to help
the claim that school dumbs you down.

~~~
tokenadult
This replicates the finding of Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ
elementary-age pupils that many of those young people did not qualify as
"gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he
kept them in the study group anyway.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the
Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and
rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below
his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who
co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children
included in the study ever won a Nobel prize.

~~~
boredguy8
Keep in mind, self control is a better indicator for real-world success than
is IQ. searchyc for the article, it was linked here.

~~~
mmt
I thought _that_ article was about indicating academic success, rather than
real-world success.

~~~
btilly
It was, but in the discussion I linked to the famous marshmallow test, which
tied a self-control test at age 4 to real world success decades later.

See
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer)
for an article on this test.

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run4yourlives
Somehow, testing for above average intelligence in children all of 5 years old
seems akin to trying to figure out the best wines by tasting them 3 weeks
after you've picked the grapes.

I would hazard a guess that at 5, the kids who score high on these "IQ" tests
correlates strongly to their environment at home. i.e., the ones with the most
involved parents do best.

The child's mind is not properly developed yet, and the best way to continue
to develop it is to challenge it at the fastest pace it can handle. That has
nothing to do with intelligence. At all.

~~~
fburnaby
<q>The child's mind is not properly developed yet, and the best way to
continue to develop it is to challenge it at the fastest pace it can
handle.</q>

But, to be fair, it should help to identify the ones who can handle more
intellectual stimulus now and then give it to them, wouldn't it?

~~~
run4yourlives
Yup, have no issue with that. My issue is that they're called gifted.

------
tokenadult
"They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores."

I call baloney on this. I want to see the peer-reviewed publication that says
so. This is the kind of mental test that Galton and James McKeen Cattell did a
century ago, and those tests were found to have no valid correlation with
intelligence.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

This further paragraph in the submitted article provides better information:

"The team wanted to evaluate several intelligence tests, including their own.
So they recruited 77 gifted children through the Parents’ Association for
Gifted Children in Switzerland. A previous intelligence test, taken about a
year-and-a-half previously, had won them entrance to gifted primary schools.
So how many of the kids still classified as gifted just eighteen months later?
Only half, no matter what test was used. (And that was using a relaxed cut-off
line, to account for standard deviations in testing.)"

This is in accord with many findings by many researchers in many places over
decades: preschool IQ tests have remarkably poor reliability for predicting
subsequent school-age IQ scores. By the way, the Newsweek blogger's
terminology is incorrect. Where Po Bronson wrote, "to account for standard
deviations in testing," he should have written, "to account for standard error
in estimation," which is a different concept. A "standard error" is something
different from a "standard deviation."

The later paragraphs somewhat rescued this casual blog post, but I fear that
most news reporting on IQ testing is at the level of excessive credulity found
in the earlier paragraphs. It takes time and effort to read and understand the
better published literature on IQ testing

<http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html>

and alas many journalists don't bother to make that effort. Even less do most
bloggers bother to check their facts on this contentious issue before posting.

~~~
jerf
"They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence
_scores_."

You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it. That's
not the same statement. The statement as it was made is correct, and there's
no need for a study to be cited; this _is_ the study being cited.

Note how the authors go on to point out that if this simple test has a 99%
correlation with the complicated test, then, logically, they are effectively
the same test, and if you can't believe that line sorting is an adequate
intelligence indicator, than neither are the conventional tests.

Slow down with the shooting-from-the-hip there; this entire article is all
about how bad tests are for determining intelligence, if you actually read it.
It's not just the "later paragraphs".

~~~
tokenadult
_You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it._

I agree with you that the overall tenor of the blog post is skepticism about
early childhood IQ tests, but I am additionally skeptical of the Swiss test-
giver's claim that his sensory perception test correlates well with IQ scores
of children at the same age. That's just his claim so far. The blog post
doesn't include anyone "showing the work" to show that that is replicable
result. It would be a very strange result, actually, inconsistent with results
that have been replicated many times (as mentioned in a scientific publication
I linked to in another reply in this rapidly growing thread).

<http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html>

But, yes, even if the quick-and-dirty test correlates very well with preschool
IQ tests, that doesn't mean much, because preschool IQ tests--all of them--
correlate poorly with anything of interest, including subsequent IQ scores,
that shows up at school age.

~~~
jibiki
I think this is the paper, unfortunately, it's behind a pay wall.

[http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2008-12082-007)

~~~
gwern
I have a copy. The .99 correlation seems to be coming from this:

> Paired sample t-tests showed that children diagnosed as gifted in this study
> (N = 44) achieved equal scores on the HAWIK-IV (M = 126.9, SD = 7.1) and the
> IDS (M = 128.9, SD = 8.2), t(43) = –1.30, p = .20. Average nongifted
> children (N = 69) scored equal as well on the HAWIK-IV (M = 101.2, SD = 8.5)
> and the IDS (M = 99.86, SD = 0.03), t(68) = 1.42, p = .16.

(IDS is this new line/weight-based test, the HAWIK-IV the usual IQ battery.)

~~~
tokenadult
Thanks for the reference and for the quotation (to the parent and grandparent
of this reply). Yes, the HAWIK would be the usual child IQ battery in a
German-speaking country. I'm not following the statistics shown there
completely, but I note the sample size. Did the same group of test-givers give
both tests? Were they "blind" as to the results of each test when giving the
other?

I appreciate the references. I'm still doubtful that the general finding would
be that the five-minute test would be strongly correlated with full scale
child IQ batteries, e.g. the WPPSI. The way to find out would be for other
groups of test-givers to attempt to replicate the result.

------
btilly
Sounds like someone needs to re-read Piaget.

Piaget identified a number of intellectual stages that children go through at
fairly predictable ages. Children transition between them during growth
spurts. There is variance in when the growth spurts happen, and therefore when
those mental leaps happen.

Most children transition from the "intuitive" to the "concrete operation"
stages around age 7. Concrete operations include tasks like ordering objects
in a logical sequence. This is EXACTLY what the "5 minute IQ test" is testing.
The longer test is almost certainly testing a variety of different mental
skills that are also enabled by the same transition. Hence the strong
correlation.

Furthermore someone who is "gifted" at age 6 on a test like this almost
certainly is gifted because he or she hit that growth spurt early. A year and
a half later more kids have gone through the same transition, and having
acquired those mental skills early hasn't necessarily translated into
acquiring them better. That would explain why so many once-gifted kids aren't
gifted 18 months later. (Of course the additional time with those skills does
help, explaining the fact that many still are gifted relative to their peers.)

In short the results should be unsurprising to anyone who has studied child
development.

~~~
tokenadult
Piaget didn't prove that no child can be genuinely gifted over the course of
childhood compared to some "average" child--he didn't have a data set adequate
to prove such a proposition at all. It's not clear yet that his proposed
stages of development are as invariant as some readers of his books, think,
either. MIT professor Seymour Papert actually studied with Piaget when Piaget
was still alive, and this is what Papert says about how little Piaget's
developmental hypothesis constrains profound giftedness: "The case [of Jean
Piaget] has a mild irony in that this man, so often quoted as the authority on
what children cannot do because they are not at appropriate stages of
development, published his first scientific article at age eleven!" -- Seymour
Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
(1993).

~~~
btilly
I'm not saying that this research is rendered obvious by Piaget's work. Nor
did I say that the age at which children make certain transitions is fixed in
stone. Nor would I try to imply that Piaget discovered everything about the
subject. Nor did I try to indicate that there are not gifted children.

However I stand by my claim that Piaget's work provides a framework to
understand why a young child's ability at one task (sorting lines by length
and objects by weight) is indicative of a much broader range of cognitive
skills. Furthermore the fact that cognitive abilities go through periods of
rapid advance over a broad range of areas makes it less surprising to me that
you see fairly large shifts in where children stand relative to each other in
ability.

------
mrshoe
_Every five-year-old who can answer “paper” won’t turn into a financial
analyst who puts a buy rating on Honda at $25, or have the mental skills to do
so._

Slightly OT:

I had hoped that our current economic situation would help obliterate the myth
that our best and brightest work on Wall St., but apparently we still have
some convincing to do.

A good intelligence test will predict which children will grow up to be
doctors and engineers. If you want to find the future financiers, you should
put them all in a room and see which kids start bullying the others.

~~~
cema
No, that's wrong. It may predict MBA types but not financiers.

------
brk
The problem with _any_ of these tests is that over-competitive parents and
schools simply start training their kids to pass these tests at an early age.
You end up with kids who only are able to properly process a line-length test.
Asking them perhaps to discern a series of squares of different sizes could
potentially roadblock them.

IMO, the bigger issue is that we expect all children to be at the same
learning development stage at any given point in their life and to respond
equally to a given teaching approach. So, all 5 year olds get lumped into a
particular curriculum, and then as 6 year olds move as a group to the next
stage. Actually, I think the schools don't REALLY expect that,they just don't
care to figure out a better approach.

~~~
tokenadult
Schools used to use a better approach. They began using lock-step age grouping
in the 1850s.

<http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html>

------
mtkd
Interesting that they use 'financial analyst' to represent an equivalently
intelligent adult.

------
shalmanese
Ugh, I hate it when science reporting makes you go on a massive hunt for
primary sources. Does anyone have a reference to the original paper?

Something is definitely fishy about this article. Line testing has a R of 0.99
with intelligence tests but intelligence tests themselves have a poor
correlation after 18 months. Does that mean line tests are still 0.99
correlated after 18 months? It's hard to see a plausible explanation that fits
this data.

~~~
tokenadult
jibiki kindly shared the link in another reply:

[http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2008-12082-007)

I see the abstract, but the full text is behind a pay wall for me. I'm very
doubtful about the reported result being generalizable.

------
fnid
I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items.
I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence. If two people cannot
understand how two things are different, then they cannot learn. Learning is
about assimilating new information, but if the person doesn't believe or see
that there is new information there, then no new neurons will be formed to
store the new information.

~~~
tokenadult
_I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items.
I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence._

This was Francis Galton's theory of intelligence more than a century ago, but
repeated studies have shown that sensory discrimination is very poorly
correlated with anything that can properly be called "intelligence" among
adult test-takers.

<http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html>

~~~
fnid
Interesting. Wouldn't this also reduce the validity of this 5 minute IQ test?

I suppose there could be physical issues, like poor vision or tactile
sensitivity that would affect a test like this. So I wonder, perhaps people
who can see better are more likely to be smarter simply because they can
observe more items in the world.

------
gehant
Why do we still defer to IQ? It's a 2D approach at measuring intelligence in a
3D world.

"The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence,
because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be
measured as linear surfaces are measured." -Alfred Binet, 1905

~~~
mikedouglas
Isn't IQ only one dimensional?

~~~
Confusion
Neither. IQ tests are more like a 163 dimensional approach in a 882
dimensional world. They measure a subset of all human capacities.

~~~
mikedouglas
Right, but those are all projected onto a scalar.

~~~
tokenadult
It's important to note that IQ test scores have only ordinal properties--one
cannot make interval inferences from them validly, for example the frequently
heard assertion that "A child with an IQ of 150 is as different in
intelligence from a normal child as a child with an IQ of 50." Such a
statement is very hard to verify in the first place, but in any event IQ
scores show ORDINAL relationships (subject to a lot of error of estimation)
but don't show interval relationships of how far (on the same scale) one score
is from another in any valid way.

------
martincmartin
> [The two tests] are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale
> intelligence scores.

Citation needed.

------
pchristensen
Makes sense - it's a measure of the resolution of your sensory input and
ability to discern differences. I can see small differences there accruing
into huge gains in learning, confidence, etc over years.

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AGorilla
_But to do the tasks correctly, your brain is fundamentally making a series of
comparisons, incorporating visual and haptic sensory information. The key here
is that the white space of the cards prevents you from putting the two lines
exactly next to each other._

What if you just hold the cars facing each other so the lines are just short
of touching? Then you can see the lines pretty much side-by-side.

Yes, I am smarter than a fifth grader.

~~~
algorias
If a five year old actually did that, wouldn't you think it's a clear
indication of intelligence?

------
asciilifeform
Cue the IQ-denialists.

------
pbhj
It's 99% correlated (in line with) the longer test method. OK. Then you learn
that there were 77 in the study. So they got the result wrong 1% of the time,
for 0.8 of a child?

Shenanigans.

"the two tests have a 99% correlation"

"they recruited 77 gifted children through"

[yes, it could be a rounding error]

~~~
req2
That's not at all how correlation is measured.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation>

~~~
pbhj
lol

