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Intelligence

This entry provides a brief overview of the two most important perspectives on defining and explaining intelligence. After doing so, the entry considers intelligence through the lens of classroom management considerations, irrespective of which perspective one espouses.

The subject of intelligence is extremely complex; the literature is vast, and the contentious discussions about intelligence have been around for centuries, so this brief overview cannot possibly offer a full and comprehensive account of the subject of intelligence. Readers, then, should take this overview for what it is, a brief introduction offering a way to frame the discussion about intelligence and its relation to classroom management.

Significance of Intelligence

Irrespective of theoretical perspective, being intelligent is definitely advantageous for achieving significant goals or ends. It is difficult to consider any endeavor where being more intelligent is not beneficial to achieving a particular goal or end. Generally, the more intelligent the person, the better off that person is with regard to realizing important life outcomes, including academic achievement and educational attainment, job performance and occupational status, socioeconomic status and income, and physical health and longevity.

That said, history is replete with examples of highly intelligent individuals who achieve or support evil ends (e.g., engineers contributing their intelligence and expertise to help carry out the holocaust under Nazism), as it is also replete with examples of using particular measures of intelligence to support unjust causes that have done great harm (e.g., forced sterilization of individuals with low IQ). That is, the subject of intelligence is also significant for being tied to moral issues, issues having to do with justice and injustice.

Putting aside these moral issues and considering human problem solving mostly under ordinary circumstances, intelligence is a very good thing, a major factor in explaining academic achievement, socioeconomic status, physical health, even friendship building. That is, intelligence is central for overall well-being. As such, we need to understand how to define, explain, and support the development of intelligence when educating children and youth.

Defining and Explaining Intelligence: Two Points of View

There are many different definitions of intelligence and many different ways of explaining it. However, for the purposes of introducing readers to the problems of defining and explaining intelligence, the differences can be reasonably clustered into two main groups representing two main perspectives.

General Intelligence, IQ, and the Heritability of Intelligence

The first group defines intelligence in terms of very general abilities that coalesce to define intelligence as general intelligence and that are best measured by today’s intelligence tests because they meet rigorous scientific standards for defining and assessing intelligence (particularly the standards of reliability and validity), because they are (or are presumed to be) relatively free of cultural or other kinds of bias, and because they yield a single measure—IQ—that has proven to be useful for predicting individual and group differences in their achievements outside the context of testing.

As for explaining intelligence and its causes, members of this first group have often (not always) taken the stability in IQ across time and changing circumstances as evidence that there are powerful genetic factors at work and that intelligence is an inherited phenomenon. For example, Satoshi Kanazawa has pointed out that knowing the mean IQ of a nation’s population, with few exceptions, allows an accurate prediction of the nation’s gross national product and per capita income, and that ranking the wealth and poverty of nations, with very few exceptions, has not appreciably changed over the last 200 years. One implication that many (again, not all) have drawn from such observations is that there are enduring biological differences that cause and account for the differences noted.

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