Intelligence?

My favorite theorist is Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died in 1936.  He is a very interesting case, because his work was not translated widely into English until the 1980’s.  This is a very good lesson, because I believe that if everyone knew about him in the 1920’s when he wrote his works, people now would dismiss his theories as old and dated. When these theories were finally translated, they took the education world by storm!  Just google your discipline and add the name Vygotsky (e.g., English Language Teaching + Vygotsky) and you will get thousands of hits. This proves that good ideas never go out of date. I will be sharing a lot of his theories with you in the near future, but I want to talk about just one right now – the concept of testing intelligence!

The following diagram is very useful in understanding how we think we measure intelligence, and what intelligence actually is:

The area from the beginning of the line on the left to the X marked UP is the area we often think of as intelligence, especially when we are giving tests.  UP means “unassisted performance”, and that is how we test most students. They have to sit by themselves, often not allowed to use any tools or resources, and generally not allowed to collaborate with their peers. Imagine that the line is a continuum of some sort of ability, like math skills – we see how far the student can go and wherever she reaches, we assume as her ability or intelligence level.  Maybe she got a 75 out of 100 which would be a grade of C here in the USA.  So from nothing to where she can get to in a limited amount of time is what we measure her on, and then assume to be her ability or her intelligence level.

Vygotsky would have us consider something else though – what if at the end of the test, or even during it, we gave the student some tools, cues, simple resources?  If we did, she would go further (the distance between UP and AP above). The AP represents “assisted performance.” He would ask us a very simple but direct question: “What is a better indicator of her intelligence, that work she can do on her own without assistance, or the extra distance she can travel using assistance and tools?” This is a very good question – after all haven’t we said for a thousand years that one major difference between man and animals is man’s ability to use tools? Which area of "intelligence" will our students be judged on out in the real world?

We will talk about these kind of things in the academy, about testing, assessing, and evaluating. I just wanted to give you something to “chew on” while we get ready for our January adventure J