Tom Nigreno commented that the book The Bell Curve has come up on some of the liberal blogs I read, with much denunciation … The stuff I’ve seen all seems to have a political axe to grind, on one side or the other. Then he asks questions about the relevance of the book.
I want to respond here beyond what I summarized on Tom’s blog.
You’ve asked, Tom, important questions about an important book. It describes as objectively as people knew how at the time for a general book buying audience the distribution of problem solving skills among a human population. Problem solving is used as an index of adapting to an environment. The Bell Curve was an attempt to describe the scientific literature about problem solving and its value for understanding how people seem to adapt to changing circumstances in the 20th century.
Your questions have technical answers. To start, smartness, intelligence and IQ are not synonyms. Dumbness is not necessarily just an opposite of smartness. A vast technical literature accumulating for more than 100 years informs scholarly discussions about differences and similarities between smartness, dumbness, intelligence and IQ, and about their relationships to each other as well as to ethnicity, gender, and other variables of interest at that moment. The word race has a political, but no agree upon scientific (technical) basis in that literature.
“The word Intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human. Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.” Herrnstein, R.J. & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. (p.1).
An IQ (intelligence quotient) is a score derived from answers people give to a standard set of questions sometimes called an intelligence test. Developers of different intelligence tests use different assumptions about the nature of observations they make and label intelligence.
In general, these tests consist of empirically derived and age graded sets of problems for people to solve. Each problem consists of vocabulary and logic. The level of vocabulary in a problem is lower than the level of the logic used to solve the problem. Correct answers consist of those given by two thirds of the population sampled to construct that part of the test.
Tests are refined so that distributions of sets of answers approximates as closely as developers can make it to a Gaussian Curve, also called a normal distribution, and sometimes called a Bell Curve.
Two thirds of scores (by definition) fall consistently within one standard deviation on both sides of the mean. Less than 15 percent of scores fall above one standard deviation. The highest scoring people are sometimes called smartest and most independently adaptable to circumstances that change around them. The lowest scoring people are sometimes labeled dumbest or slowest to adapt to changing circumstances.
A major Herrnstein and Murray description is that people appear to associate with those who exhibit similar levels of problem solving (intelligence, adaptation). By extrapolating this point, they address evolving gene pools and implications these associations and pools have for public policies. These points do not necessarily relate to the behavior of any particular person.
For many reasons, some people object to what these authors summarized from the scientific literature.
I’ve worked with people with scores higher than 99 out of every 100 people who take the test, and those who scored at levels so low their measures have no uses for habilitation. Interestingly, techniques exist so that people with IQ scores in the 30s can perform complex tasks, sometimes better than college students. Interestingly, most schools and habilitation programs do not offer ways for people with low IQ scores to perform these tasks or for people with average scores to score higher.
So, what does the discussion of intelligence mean for people interested in advanced technologies, including Tablet PCs?
Intelligence does not mean wisdom. Wisdom is based in judgments. Intelligent people may act wisely and foolishly.
Think of “intelligence” as the degree to which a person can solve a set of problems. Tablet PC software developers should consider how to help people who cannot solve a problem as conventionally presented, then write software that lets the person learn to solve it with prompts. For example, use backward chaining as a strategy to present a solution. (I despise the word solution, because of its historic political meaning from the 1930s and 40s, but don’t think of an alternative at the moment).
A Tablet PC is a tool for most people (and other primates; I still haven’t figured a way for AJ to respond except to familiar voices over Skype; but AJs fish attends to the monitor and TV when an image is there) to solve some problems more effectively and efficiently. For example, software developers can increase the learning rate and decrease the error rate by people using their programs. With the use of empirically based redundant cues, reinforcements, etc., “intelligence” (problem solving) as traditionally defined need not preclude almost all people from learning to read, calculate, write standard English, etc. in primary school grades or before.
Tablet PC software developers writing for education are teacher surrogates. So, as should every teacher, use the most powerful empirically based learning techniques available to address the broadest range of problem solvers possible. If you don’t know them, find someone who does and who will work with you.