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(Published in the Mobile Register, March 20, 1996)
By JANET HARRISON ENGLISH
Living Reporter
We are all marked.
Judged by the measure of our verbal and mathematical skills, we are labeled early on according to a scale that runs from profoundly retarded to profoundly gifted.
These labels are applied as predictors of our success in school and on the job.
In truth, however, no one knows absolutely what intelligence is, much less how to measure it and whether it will parlay into accomplishment in life.
Research in the last two decades -- often in the study of gifted children -- has produced a number of new ways to view intelligence beyond the intelligence quotient or IQ. But in practice, how schools measure children's intelligence varies widely around the country, from the strict use of IQ tests to broader measures to pick out the gifted artist, the musician, the dancer. How schools foster those particular talents differs as well.
``It's like trying to measure love or beauty or justice,'' says Dr. Zemula Camphor Bjork, assistant professor of gifted and talented education at the University of South Alabama. As subjective as those topics may be, society still tries to dissect and understand them.
When we in the Mobile area think of genius, we're reminded of Michael Kearney, who in 1994 at age 10 graduated from the University of South Alabama with a degree in anthropology.
Michael scored ``200-plus'' on an IQ test when he was only 4, says his mother, Cassidy Kearney. Kearney briefly stole the national spotlight and went on to enroll at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.
But in other ways, Kearney was quite average. His motor skills were that of a typical child his age; so his mother often took notes for him in class because Michael could not write fast enough to keep up with the lecture. And his emotional development was also typical of a pre-teen, with a particular affinity for Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Body movement and emotional maturity. Those are just two categories that recent research would tag as areas of intelligence. And for those, Michael Kearney might be just plain average.
No discussion of intelligence would be complete without differentiating between intelligence as an ability and the ways we measure it.
``There's been a war going on since the beginning of the study of intelligence between those that believe intelligence is one thing and those that believe intelligence is another thing,'' says David Henry Feldman, a developmental psychologist in the department of child study at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.
``There's no scientific basis that it's one thing or another,'' says Feldman, who oversaw the doctoral dissertation of Martha J. Morelock on profoundly gifted children, including Michael Kearney.
``The question is what is useful. What is it that's meaningful?
``People are willing to live with getting one measure or estimate, and that's enough,'' he says.
That measure was first devised by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905 after the French Ministry of Public Instruction asked them to develop a way to select children who were too dull to be educated in ordinary schools. In an IQ test, the child's mental age is compared to his chronological age.
In 1916, educational psychologist Lewis Terman of Stanford University adapted the Binet intelligence test, calling it the Stanford-Binet and coining the term intelligence quotient or IQ. But Terman gave this warning: ``We must guard against defining intelligence solely in terms of ability to pass the test of a given intelligence scale.''
As the United States entered World War I, the Stanford-Binet test was put to use the very next year to find the brightest troops among the hayseeds.
And so began America's love affair with testing, a devotion that waxes and wanes depending upon shifts in political and economic winds.
One particularly ardent period came in response to the Soviets' series of Sputnik launches beginning Oct. 4, 1957. The space race was on and so was the search for minds to guide it.
In the intervening decades, researchers have taken divergent courses each with its own jargon to measure a person's aptitude for success with different yardsticks.
Among the more recent research is the work of Robert J. Sternberg of Yale University's Department of Psychology. Sternberg and his colleagues studied the distinction between academic and practical kinds of intelligences or to put it simply, between book learning and common sense.
In 1978, Joseph Renzulli, director for The Center for Talent Development at the University of Connecticut, wrote of his concept of giftedness. Three traits above-average (though not necessarily superior) ability, commitment to a task and creativity converge to make giftedness.
Five years later, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner introduced his theory of multiple intelligence to much acclaim. Gardner says there are seven different kinds of intelligence: logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal.
And the work of Yale psychologist Pete Salovey and John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire on ``emotional intelligence'' is explored in a book by the same name released a few months ago.
Its author, Daniel Goleman, a Harvard psychology Ph.D and New York Times science writer, says he wants to redefine what it means to be smart. Character, he theorizes, may matter more than IQ.
For example, self-awareness allows one to manage self-control, an ability that can have positive effects on one's personal and professional life.
While Tufts' Feldman says experts in the area are saying ``Emotional Intelligence'' is a ``very sound book,'' he doesn't like the notion.
``For me it tends to reinforce the IQ idea.''
Mary Frasier, professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens, says EQ ``adds a very important dimension to the whole discussion.
``The thing about motivation and the passion and the other kinds of sensitivity that people bring to this whole area of producing, we haven't paid as much attention to it as we should,'' says Ms. Frasier, founder and director of The Torrance Center for Creative Studies.
Renzulli, at the University of Connecticut, says it's hard to predict how EQ will play out in policy and school practices. ```The Bell Curve' book, it hits the streets with a great deal of fanfare ... then it's yesterday's news.''
``The Bell Curve'' by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, may have burned out quickly in the fires of political correctness for suggesting that on average whites are more intelligent that blacks.
The book, in fact, dealt with a number of issues on intelligence, including the stratification of the intellectual elite and the dumbing down of curriculum for college-bound students.
All the new research on measuring intelligence is slow to trickle down to the policy-making level and the classroom.
And the resistance comes from entrenched attitudes toward standardized tests and a lack of funding to perform the more involved alternative tests.
Feldman calls standardized testing the 800-pound gorilla.
``By this point it's become an instrument of public policy. It's become a bureaucracy, and it's become an industry of its own. That's not to say that it's evil.''
IQ tests restrict diversity and fail to ``encourage expression outside the narrow capability of what kids do in school,'' he says. And he warns that everyone who has taken a standardized test from the Stanford Achievement Test to the Graduate Record Exam has essentially taken an IQ test.
Researchers are inclined to open the definition of who's gifted far beyond a simple measure of mathematical and verbal skill.
``If we only look at one type of intelligence and academic talent, you're going to have half of the children failing and half succeeding. That's the nature of the Bell-curve,'' says South Alabama's Dr. Bjork.
``The more intelligences you address in the class, the more children are going to succeed.''
One example Feldman gives of finding talents outside the realm of traditional testing is the Spectrum project at Tuft University, which uncovered hidden talents, such as an aptitude for music.
Say, for example, these 4-year-olds were asked to report the news. ``Sure enough there were some kids who thought that was a terrific activity and loved it. The message would be, `This is something to pay attention to. This is something important. You might have yourself a journalist here.'''
``That's the liberating thing about the theory and the practice of assessment and going beyond tests,'' he says.
Still, there is a reluctance to heap more training and education on children who are already above the curve.
``Historically,'' says Ms. Bjork, ``gifted education has been looked at as an elitist type of thing because of its white, middle-class makeup.''
No one would hesitate to train a talented runner to slice a second off his race time or foster a budding musician, Ms. Frasier says. ``It's only when we get into the areas where we connect intelligence with academic achievement that we get a little distressed if we do something.''
Though testing for multiple intelligences is more time-consuming and, therefore, more costly, Ms. Frasier says it's worth it.
``So it costs money. So it costs time. Are we just going to be content taking the easy way out?''
No doubt it will take some time for classroom application of multiple intelligences to catch up with research, experts say.
And it may take a ground swell of support from parents, not unlike that of parents of disabled children.
Says Feldman: ``This is a very big topic, and there's a lot going on. We're in the middle of it, and I don't know what the outcome will be.''