Stephen Ceci"s IQ To The Test

What is intelligence and how is it measured? We may never really know exactly what it is, but Stephen Ceci attempts to raise our awareness of what intelligence is in the article “IQ to the Test.”

The author of this article is Stephen Ceci. According to the American Psychological Society, Stephen Ceci has been referred to as being among the “most internationally influential and well-known developmental psychologists.” He is a psychology professor, specifically dealing with child development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The psychological field has honored Stephen with four prestigious awards, three of those being “Distinguished Contribution” awards. Ceci has given multiple speeches across the globe. He has authored books and articles that reach up to a count of about 350 and make appearances in leading journals.

The main debate is about what intelligence actually is, who possesses it, and how can it be calculated? There are two approaches to this dispute, nature versus nurture. According to Exploring Psychology in Modules, the nature-nurture issue is the controversy over the relative contributions of biology and experience (6). On the nature side of things, psychometricians evaluate what proportion of intelligence is instinctive by examining IQ statistics. Conversely, cultural ecologists back up the nurture idea by bringing to light that intelligence is always changing and never the same thanks to our everyday experiences, thus making tests of intelligence unfair. These two groups of scientists have diverse techniques, which leads to the research not being able to be collaborated.

The author takes the position that for the most part, the average layperson is not included in this debate. The average layperson has t...

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...he laboratory test used is actually sensitive, reliable, and accurate. Meaning that it finds the infection that is suspected, it does not have false positives, that would make us think that a child was abused who actually was not, and certain tests for gonorrhea can be positive, even though the bacteria that is found is not the sexually transmitted type of Neisseria, respectively.

I think that the introduction to this article makes a good point that the definitions of intelligence are not broad enough. If you are just talking IQ as measured by an IQ test, then it is missing out on a bunch of what intelligence actually consists of. I also like that he mentions that the debate generally ignores the research data that has actually been obtained. This article does a great job of raising “IQ awareness” and letting us know more about the mystery that is intelligence.