It's an interesting read mostly about the history of Alabama, politics, racism, classism, and the social implications and negative motives that can underly infrastructure decisions and policies.
It's also the story of a gifted child failed by the world in ways gifted kids are frequently failed.
When Henson was 6, he tested off the charts on an IQ test
We routinely take our best and brightest, tell them a high IQ is good for making money and essentially try to break them in childhood. We could do better, if we really wanted to.
> When Henson was 6, he tested off the charts on an IQ test
I find it very hard to believe an IQ test on a six year old is going to be much of a indicator of anything. I guess it would at least indicate that the child belongs to a group whose parents’ would give a six year old an IQ test.
> We routinely take our best and brightest, tell them a high IQ is good for making money and essentially try to break them in childhood. We could do better, if we really wanted to.
We could start by not trying to abuse IQ on an individual level.
I used to do pro bono professional work for a gifted organization. It was generally understood that a child with an extremely high IQ should be assessed at a young age to get the most accurate results.
Though there is a difference between testing and assessment and lots of pitfalls with such and TFA doesn't give enough info to determine which he got.
Some people assess kids young for all the right reasons. This case being mishandled isn't proof kids should never be tested or assessed at an early age.
> I used to do pro Bono professional work for a gifted organization. It was generally understood that a child with an extremely high IQ should be assessed at a young age to get the most accurate results.
What a “gifted organization” has to say about IQ is not very convincing. There’s quite a big conflict of interest and bias in play.
Afaik 6yo brains are literally missing mass and have a different structure than adults/teens. Of course this is just on average too because everyone develops at different rates. Not sure how a unitless number used in population level studies is going to help here.
> This case being mishandled isn't proof kids should never be tested or assessed at an early age.
Not what I’m talking about. Of course childhood education is important and assessment is part of that. IQ from what I’ve seen is not a useful tool for individual assessment/education.
Apropos of nothing, but I've been IQ tested with various tests at multiple stages of my life. Earliest I remember was age 9, then a couple others at various stages, including late teens and again in mid thirties.
Instruments were sometimes repeated, but may have been slightly different for age level. But the 'score', such as it is, was always in the same percentile. Being over 50 now, I'm slightly curious if I took another set of tests if the numbers would be similar. I feel slower, cognitively, but unsure how accurate that feeling is.
The oldest set of email lists in existence for providing free support for the gifted community. At the time, they were trying to transition from a voluntary health and welfare organization to a tax deductible charity. I was invited to be lead moderator and a member of the board.
The parent does raise an interesting point though, how are we sure childhood IQ testing is not an indicator of early-bloomers instead of a genuine delta?
According to the Emory School of Medicine, IQ stabilizes around age 4 for most children (later for those who were born premature or had other significant health issues).[1]
Because they have been doing such testing and assessing for longer than muliple entire human life times, and have had time to see the full and complete eventual results of past procedures and conjectures, good and bad.
Either early bloomers are not a thing, or they are accounted for and the tests and assessment are not as simple as you aparently imagine.
The question already granted "assume the testing and assessing is all done correctly" and only asks how they know something doesn't simply look misleading because some kids might just reach their final plateau earlier than others.
That is very simply answered by simple time and numbers, once enough time has passed to see a large number of entire human lives while under any sort of methodical recording. That has happened by now. We have data on a large number of entire human lives.
It's only an appeal to authority in so far as I do assume that the people whos job is to collect and reason about that data have done even the most cursory job of it.
Saying that a certain property doesn't change much for most people after a certain age is not something that is likely to be hidden or hidable in the data. It sounds quite basic to me, and sounds like something anyone would see and no one could probably argue with. It sounds like the kind of fundamental and obvious thing that I assume if anyone did try to misrepresent it, too many other people would speak up.
I am only trusting that there isn't some kind of massive conspiracy that every nurse and med student have somehow all agreed to keep this ond wierd thing a secret for some reason.
I guess I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to propose instead.
“IQ tests are ineffective.” Okay. How do you propose we determine what children are smarter (because there will always be those who are more advanced than their peers) and get them the help they need to thrive?
I’m not proposing anything except that we don’t pretend certain tools are more powerful than they are.
> “IQ tests are ineffective.” Okay. How do you propose we determine what children are smarter (because there will always be those who are more advanced than their peers) and get them the help they need to thrive?
Education isn’t inherently a zero sum game. Last I heard, we were winding down “gifted and talented” programs because there wasn’t much evidence they worked.
What the elementary school teacher I know says (besides that we have bigger problems in the US system) is that the high achieving students aren’t held back by low achieving students. The quicker students are often found to teach the slower students and gain an even stronger mastery of the material by doing so.
My understanding regarding winding down those gifted classes was that it had little to do with them not working and everything to do with them being full of children that are statistically more advantaged than their peers.
Aka full of white and Asian children which made people angry claiming that the other children were being ignored and left behind.
high achieving students aren’t held back by low achieving students
I'd love to see a source for this claim, as it runs counter to my lived experience (both my own education, and my son's). Obviously, my experience isn't scientific proof, but neither is "a friend who's a teacher says..."
It's a fact. It's the reason gifted classes were created.
From my own mixed-age classroom experience, and stories I've heard about one-room schools, it's not the mixing of skill levels that holds the advanced class back but the structure of the class.
If you're all doing the work at the same speed it has to be the speed of the slowest student so by definition everyone else is held back. This is so obvious that I can't take people seriously when they deny it. It's literally how "the manual" says to teach.
But in a multi-path environment where everyone is working at their own speed, this isn't a problem. Even if the advanced students are tasked with some teaching of the slower kids the dynamic changes and they're not being kept down. The maximal form of this is a one-room school where the older and gifted kids are working on their high-level tasks right next to younger and lower-achieving people. This encourages personal accomplishment by creating an environment full of learning opportunities and decoupling your advancement from your age-group.
My experience outside of gifted courses was the exact opposite of what you describe as "multi-path". My 7th grade math was the worst example of this...
The class was supposed to be some sort of experimental multi-path, and even had an extra teaching aid assigned. However, the end result was the 5-6 gifted kids sitting in the back, bored out of our minds for an entire school year, while the 2 teachers struggled to get the rest of the class to learn. Unfortunately for those of us who were ahead of grade level, this effectively put us behind peers in GT math classes right at the time we were all starting more advanced math topics. I felt like it took me most of high school to get caught up. My parents are still peeved that this class ever existed and it's been nearly 30 years.
My son didn't have anything quite so obviously awful. He just tended to perform at the level of his classmates. In gifted classes, he excelled. In mainstream classes, he was mediocre and extremely bored.
My take-away - multi-path teaching doesn't work in the typical American classroom (25+ students per class, all the same age, but vastly different skills).
It might work in a more controlled environment, where the classes are smaller and the range of skill isn't quite to broad. But, that's atypical in the US.
> My take-away - multi-path teaching doesn't work in the typical American classroom (25+ students per class, all the same age, but vastly different skills).
Well yeah, do something badly and it won't work. Each student deserves teacher time even if they get further on that time. Instead they generally try to teach the slowest students more as if they'll ever catch up.
> My son didn't have anything quite so obviously awful. [...] In gifted classes, he excelled.
Well yes, that's small-class tutoring and we know it's almost the ideal. The trick is to replicate that in normal classes, by teaching to the people who will benefit while the others work on exercises, etc.
> It might work in a more controlled environment, where the classes are smaller and the range of skill isn't quite to broad.
My contention is the opposite, that you want a range of skills from newb to expert, and ideally across ages.
You were surely closer to the 6th grade advanced students than the bulk of the 7th grade students who were just getting by. And you may not have been far enough ahead of the 7ths in age and bearing as well as math, and thus not as helpful in teaching as older students would be. Student teachers are a very big part of one-room schools and I think the teaching itself provides invaluable skills in childcare and providing instruction to near peers.
I poked around a bit and only really found [0] and [1]. It looks like there are a bunch of contradictory results and the effect sizes are small. That’s just education research though, it’s very hard to control for anything or get good data.
I think a high IQ at a young age is indicative of raw processing power. They can keep things like shapes and numbers in their head and manipulate them correctly to pass the kind of spatial and mathematical questions you'll find on an IQ test.
It won't tell you much about motivation and grit, though a 6 year old focusing on a test and trying to get it right gives you hints as well.
Of course, from there, parenting, education, and especially the intrinsic processes of the individual themself will all influence what is done with that raw ability.
You'd be wrong. IQ assessments at the very least distinguish between verbal, reasoning, and short term memory (and often have more components)
They're incredibly fraught when they're used well (there's reasonable criticism they mostly assess test taking ability), and it gets worse when you apply a simplified explanation like "raw processing power".
I think it would be useful for tailoring education to interests and capabilities.
In my country and state all children have some sort capabilities test, so I think the test says nothing much about the parents other than they participated in some system level testing and didn’t protest or remove their child from the test.
There’s lots of study showing correlation of IQ with income [0] and other positive life outcomes. But I think it’s generally not a good idea to tell six year olds all this.
In my own experience, the standardized tests included guidance about how not to reveal the information to children and why that wasn’t helpful. A few years later one of my children had a psychological evaluation that included IQ and it also included language about not revealing scores to the subject.
This is not true afaik. IQ has been shown to not be constant through development [0,1].
So while adult/college IQ scores have been correlated with success (equivalents are used university admissions after all). I am not aware of any studies/data sets that show a strong correlation of IQ as measured in six year olds and adult success. Also any study tracking IQ over time is going to have significant problems with goodhart's law.
My understanding is that there is something like a Goldilocks part of the curve (e.g. 115-125) where you get above average intelligence and high motivation (‘hard working’).
My grandparents continually compared me to their friend's kids and were set on making me feel worthless unless I was a billionaire by 25 through the magical, cargo cult transformation that only can occur with good grades, a good university, and excessive debt.
It's also the story of a gifted child failed by the world in ways gifted kids are frequently failed.
When Henson was 6, he tested off the charts on an IQ test
We routinely take our best and brightest, tell them a high IQ is good for making money and essentially try to break them in childhood. We could do better, if we really wanted to.