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AGING AND IQ: WHY THE EXPERTS STEERED US WRONG
Imagine you are a first-time tennis player and are competing against someone in regular training. Your opponent not only has been practicing almost daily for years, but also is a self-confident master of the rules. As your nightmare ends, you lose and then are blamed not for putting yourself in such a ridiculous situation but for being much worse than he is in your basic aptitude for the game.
This is exactly what used to happen to older people when they took intelligence tests. Totally unused to being tested (having been out of school for years) and anxious about their minds anyway, they were then compared with younger, more skilled test takers. When the older people did not measure up, their poorer showing was labeled intellectual decline owing to advancing age.
For close to a quarter of a century, since the standard test of adult intelligence (the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) was developed in the early 1940s, this error was made repeatedly. Psychologists believed that our mental capacities begin a general downslide starting as early as our twenties. Few people recognized that the basic logic was faulty, that older generations might test poorly in part because they were out of practice - not knowing how to take tests efficiently, being out of school too long, and having far fewer years of schooling than their children (or grandchildren). Everyone was compared as if they were equal. Few people noticed that the test-taking dice were heavily loaded in favor of the young.
Then in the early 1970s psychologist K. Walter Schaie and his colleagues published the results of a fourteen-year study.
These University of Washington researchers tested hundreds of adults three times, in 1956, 1963, and 1970. They had developed a way of roughly determining the contribution of \' \'experience and education\" to the so-called age loss in IQ. Using their formula, they conclusively demonstrated that much of the decline in IQ scores was indeed due to these extraneous factors.5 The idea that our intelligence goes steadily downhill after our twenties is just not true.
Actually, our logic is wrong when we label people intelligent based just on their scores on the standard intelligence test. Most experts now feel there are separate types of intelligence. (For instance, psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University feels there may be as many as twenty independent \"intelligences.\") IQ tests measure only a limited set - the intellectual skills needed for doing well in school. They test our ability to come up with the right answer, not our ability to understand or get along with people, our creativity or wisdom, our street smarts, or our artistic gifts. Because of this, a person who tests at the genius level on an IQ test is likely to be an A + student. But his friend who scores average may be the genius at life.
This misinterpretation of the meaning of intelligence tests mainly hurts children. They are most likely to be ranked and categorized as \"smart,\" \"average,\" or \"slow\" by an IQ score. But it also affects our understanding of older people who have to be tested. Because the test does not do a good job of measuring the qualities that make up intelligence in the real world, an adult\'s score is particularly likely to inadequately reflect true mental capacities. Realizing this, psychologists are beginning to develop better tests of life intelligence measures that will capture the wisdom, good sense, and balanced perspective on living that are the true signs of intelligence in the classroom of life.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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