Testing: The Growing Unimportance of IQs

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Beehives & Birds' Nests. Most of the tests are designed to gauge four abilities: verbal ("Which word means the opposite of sad?"); numerical ("One number is wrong in the following series: 1 6 2 6 3 6 4 6 5 6 7 6. What should it be?"); space conceptualization ("Which of the five following designs is not like the other four?"); reasoning ("If Bill is taller than Bob and Bob is taller than Ed, then Bill is what to Ed?"). Some test experts rate students separately on these abilities. "A person is not smart or stupid in general," explains Harvard Psychologist Gerald S. Lesser. "He can be smart and stupid at the same time. Each of us is better at certain things than at others."

Similarly, the experts have tried to take the "cultural bias" out of much testing. The more a test depends on verbal ability, for example, the more it favors the kid whose parents speak well or who read to him. The Otis all-picture test includes sketches of beehives and birds' nests, which may be more familiar to a country child than to a kid from a metropolitan housing project. Still, the question of cultural bias can lead to equally difficult problems. It may be, as Theodore Stolarz, director of the Chicago Teachers College Graduate School, contends, that IQ tests mainly predict "how a kid with a good middle-class background will do in middle-class schools." But so far, nobody has devised a "culture free" test that is particularly useful. Besides, such a test might be pointless since the aim of testing is to help guide children toward success in a culture of broad middle-class values. "If a child does poorly on an aptitude test because he comes from the wrong side of the tracks," says the Educational Testing Service's vice president, Henry S. Dyer, "it isn't the test that is unfair; it is the hard facts of social circumstance that are unfair."

A comforting fact for parents is that few school systems any longer use IQ tests as the sole basis for placing children in various ability groups. Teachers are being urged to use common sense judgments based on observation and on the child's classroom performance. Testing, as a measurement of progress and aptitude, will always have its uses, but the old myth about the omnipotent IQ is finally fading.