What is intelligence?

By Themba Nyoni (Ph.D)

Is my child going into pre-school, primary school or secondary school going to cope with the demands of academia? As a student, am I going to cope with the amount of knowledge from the professors at a tertiary institute? Is my child intelligent enough to cope? All these are questions that parents and students ask themselves at some point in time. Going to school comes with loads of expectations and anxieties, not only for students, but for parents as well.

How many times have we heard people saying, “He’s intelligent, uyashaya isikolo.” For most of us, that is the definition of intelligence. Usually this would mean that the student is good in Maths and Science, particularly.

Twelve-year-old Loyiso in Tsholotsho is herding his father’s cattle. He is able to look at a day-old hoof print and be able to tell whether it belongs to his father’s bull or not. From the sound of the cow’s bell, he is able to tell, from over a kilometre away, that it is his father’s cow, Lentusi! The same Loyiso, given a picture of a roulette table at a casino and asked what that is and what its purpose is, he is not able to do so.

12-year-old Thabisile living in Sandton, knows what a roulette table at a casino is and its use, is able to speak English in a British accent that would make a mlungu blush with envy, manipulate a computer and assemble the home sound system without a manual, but cannot tell a Mopane tree from a guava tree. Of the two children, who is more intelligent than the other? Let us look at what other views are there about this overused word ‘intelligence’.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

The term ‘intelligence’ is a highly debated term in academia in general and in psychology in particular. It is also a term that has impinged on the lives of many people. It has had an effect on where we go to school, where we go to work and what kind of occupation one takes up.

The term is derived from Latin word ‘intellectus’ meaning ‘perception’ or ‘comprehension’ (Carlson 2004:421). Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) revived its usage in the English language in the late nineteenth century.

Over the years, different people have coined varied definitions of intelligence. Binet (1905) defined it as, “a fundamental faculty. This faculty is called judgement, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances. To judge well, to comprehend well to reason well…” (Gross 2005:590).

Terman (1921) says that, “an individual is intelligent in proportion as he is able to carry on abstract thinking.”

“The aggregate of the global capacity to act purposefully, think rationally, to deal effectively with the environment,” is Wechsler’s (1944) definition.

Burt (1955) defined it as an ‘innate general, cognitive ability’.

Vernon (1969) saw intelligence as “the effective all-round cognitive abilities to comprehend, to grasp relations and reason”.

Heim (1975:27) describes it as consisting of “grasping the essentials in a situation and responding appropriately to them.”

In contemporary literature, Gottfredson (1998) defines intelligence as the “ability to deal with cognitive complexity”.

The purely cognitive nature of intelligence is stressed in the definitions by Burt, Vernon and Terman. Wechsler’s and Binet’s are more on the everyday functional usage.

HOW IS IT MEASURED?

As early as 2200 BC, intelligence testing was employed by the Chinese administrators on civil servants to ensure compatibility between their abilities and jobs (Murphy and Hughes, 1999). In 1884, Galton, at his Anthropometric Laboratory, tested people on 17 variables such as weight, height, muscular strength and the ability to perform sensory discrimination. Nowadays, there are so many commercial tests in the assessment field. They are grouped mostly under three categories, namely: ability tests, attainment tests and aptitude tests.

Ability Tests

The ability tests are designed to measure, “underlying constructs that aren’t a direct result of training,” (Coolican et al 1996). These include measures of abstract reasoning and identify the ability to solve problems from first principles.

These general ability tests measure a candidate’s level of skill in communicating and ability to manipulate and understand words. They also measure the ability to manipulate figures and perceive relationships between them, and are a useful predictor of potential skill in mathematics and data handling, and also mechanical aptitude – to deal with ‘real’ objects rather than verbal or numerical concepts. It tests the ability to manipulate and perceive the relationships between two-dimensional figures.

The ability tests are usually timed between 15 and 40 minutes and are typically multiple-choice (for pen and paper usage, and they are also available in electronic format). The questions will consist of one right answer and a lot of wrong answers and they usually get difficult as one progresses with the test.

Some commonly used ability tests are the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test. Intelligent Quotient (IQ) tests represent one kind of ability tests.

Attainment Tests

The attainment (also known as achievement) tests mainly contrast with the ability tests. These are designed to assess specific school learning such as comprehension, numeracy and spelling. Unlike the ability tests, which are prospective and focusing on what the person is capable of in the future, the tests of attainment are retrospective and thus focusing on what has been learnt and what the person can do now.

The attainment tests are in different formats. These may include multiple-choice, completion questions and essay format. In school set-ups, the teacher can set up attainment test for his class, for example, a list of spellings that the students have covered. They can also be developed by external agencies and standardised against nationally representative samples of students, for example the National ‘A’ level exams.

They can be administered individually or in groups. A good example of tests of attainment is the Standard Attainment Tests (used in the United Kingdom), commonly known as the SATs. The Raven’s Vocabulary Scale is another example of an attainment test.

Aptitude Tests

The third group are the aptitude tests. These measure the potential performance pertaining to a specific area, for example a logic test aimed at predicting if the candidate is suitable for a computer programming training. The job market is increasingly using these tests in order to employ the most suitable candidate.

These tests are systematic and evaluate how people react to a situation and perform on a task. They are standardised and the results are quantified and compared with how others performed on the same test. A commonly used aptitude test is the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) used by most business schools for MBA admissions.

It would be of interest to note that a lot of our older generation had other ways of being assessed for school readiness. I remember my sister telling me that she went to school at an earlier age simply because she was able to touch her left ear using her right hand OVER HER HEAD! It was deemed she was intelligent enough to start school (I guess it worked because she coped well).