The best single book mentioned here is Mackintosh, N. J. (1998)
IQ and Human Intelligence
because it includes a masterful review of the primary research literature and is very clear and accurate. Good for reading after Mackintosh (1998) is Sternberg (2000)
Handbook of Intelligence,
a collection of articles by many of the leading scholars of the field, which also includes a superb set of references to the primary literature.
Another good choice for reading sooner rather than later is
The International Handbook of Giftedness and Talent,
which includes articles from several different countries and includes many authors well-known in the gifted child literature.
The books listed below are listed in order of newest to oldest, and important journal articles are sometimes mentioned in the annotations for related books.
Enjoy your reading.
Please let me know if you have suggestions for other good books on these subjects.
Sternberg, Robert J. and Grigorenko, Elena L. (Eds.) (2003)
The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
xi and 280 pages; references, index.
Collection of articles abilities, competencies, and expertise and their relationships with one another.
Authors include
Philip Ackerman,
Stephen J. Ceci,
K. Anders Ericsson,
the late Michael J. A. Howe,
Dean Keith Simonton,
and
Robert J. Sternberg.
Includes some surprising data about the development of competency in adult life.
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Sternberg, Robert J. and Grigorenko, Elena L. (Eds.) (2002)
The General Factor of Intelligence: How General Is It?
Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
xi and 505 pages; references, indexes.
Collection of articles for and against the view that there is a general factor of human intelligence that explains most human intelligent behavior.
Authors include
Arthur R. Jensen,
Jack A. Naglieri,
J. P. Das,
Lloyd G. Humphries,
Ian J. Deary,
Douglas K. Detterman,
Linda S. Gottfredson, and
Robert J. Sternberg.
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Marks, Jonathan (2002)
What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes
Berkeley: U. of California Press.
Marks is one of the leading scholars in the new field of "molecular anthropology,"
and exquisitely aware of what scientists on the one hand, and humanists on the other, miss by staying mired in narrow specialties.
Includes an excellent brief discussion of heritability and behavioral genetics in the context of group IQ differences.
Marks's book is at once deeply thoughtful about many subjects we all read about in the news, and extremely funny.
Probably the best book about similarities and differences between great apes and human beings.
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Sternberg, Robert J. (Ed.) (2002)
Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid
New Haven: Yale University Press
(0-300-09033-1).
ix and 254 pages; references, index.
Another collection of articles edited by Robert Sternberg,
this one on the puzzling and little examined phenomenon of stupid behavior by smart people.
The sex scandal and impeachment trial surrounding President Bill Clinton is taken as a paradigmatic case by authors of several of the articles in this volume.
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Collection of articles by gifted child researchers, with some surprising gaps in the references for some of articles.
(The references were neither as recent, nor as authoritative, nor as comprehensive as they should have been if the authors of the articles had access to a really good research library and skill in using it.)
Not the last word on its subject, and not even as good a guide to the literature as I had hoped, but worth a look to find out what issues are in play.
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Rimm, Sylvia B. (2001)
Keys to Parenting the Gifted Child.
Hauppauge, NY: Barron's.
Popular guidebook for parents about parenting gifted children, referring mostly to school contexts.
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Valencia, Richard R. and Suzuki, Lisa A. (2001)
Intelligence Testing and Minority Students: Foundations, Performance Factors, and Assessment Issues.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Broad overview and specialized studies of recent research on IQ testing of minority students in the United States. Recommended in an article by a board member of SENG.
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Sternberg, Robert J. and Kaufman, James C. (Eds.) (2001).
The Evolution of Intelligence.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Collection of articles with speculation about the origin of human intelligence through evolution, from the point of view of various animal models and human cognitive models.
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(ISBN 0-08043796-6 [Pergamon reprint 2002]).
xvi and 934 pages; references, indexes.
Thorough review of the recent literature on giftedness and talent, by many prominent authors.
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Arrow, Kenneth, Bowles, Samuel, and Durlauf, Steven (Eds.) (2000)
Meritocracy and Economic Inequality
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
(ISBN 0-691-00468-4 [pbk.]).
Collection of essays by various authors on education and socioeconomic class issues in the United States.
Includes on pages 35-60 the important article Flynn, James R. (2000b) "IQ Trends over Time: Intelligence, Race, and Meritocracy" updating Flynn's provocative findings on IQ.
Flynn describes the data sets used to show IQ trends over time and the implications those trends have for interpreting IQ score differences.
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Deary, Ian J. (2000)
Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain.
Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
Recent survey and critique by a prolific experimental researcher of attempts to link "psychometric intelligence"
(Deary's preferred term for whatever underlies IQ) to simpler, measurable human attributes such as reaction time, brain characteristics, etc.
Deary is very much a mainstream psychometrician who is fully convinced that IQ tests have a lot of predictive validity for several purposes, including but not limited to educational placement.
He is also a spicy, provocative writer, who decries the "cargo cult science" that underlies so much research on simple correlates of IQ.
An interesting guide to current thought in the mainstream psychometric community.
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Bock, Gregory R., Goode, Jamie A. & Webb, Kate (Eds.) (2000).
The Nature of Intelligence.
Chichester: Wiley. Novartis Foundation Symposium 233.
Superb collection of recent articles from two perspectives, evolutionary psychology and mainstream psychometrics, on the nature of human intelligence.
Includes recent articles by Michael Rutter, Arthur Jensen, Ian Deary, Nathan Brody, Douglas Detterman, James R. Flynn, and others.
Each article is followed by fascinating verbatim discussion transcripts in which the authors draw out the implications of one another's ideas.
Includes, on pages 202-227, the article Flynn, James R. (2000a) "IQ Gains, WISC Subtests and Fluid g: g Theory and the Relevance of Spearman's Hypothesis to Race" Flynn further refines his tentative theoretical understanding of what might have caused the undoubted gain in Gf scores over time in many nations, suggesting an experimental design that might help clear up the issue of causation. Symposium discussion transcribed and printed after the article helps clarify Flynn's current conception of the meaningfulness of IQ tests and of the nature of human intelligence. Hard to find but not to be missed, particularly for the symposium discussion and other articles in the same volume.
I have photocopies of several of the original articles in this book.
An earlier article of Flynn's from a major journal,
Flynn, James R. (1999) "Searching for Justice: The Discovery of IQ Gains over Time" American Psychologist volume 54, No. 1, pages 5-20
provides further data about IQ score trends over time and further discussion of their implications for the theory of intelligence testing.
Flynn's chart of raw scores on the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, one of the most "g-loaded" IQ tests ever devised,
comparing age cohorts born from the 1870s to the 1960s, is not to be missed.
It makes untenable the suggestion of some gifted education consultants that item content score labels ("mental age 11") in IQ test manuals can be taken as fixed for all time without periodic renorming.
Flynn also has a very good discussion of "achievement beyond IQ" among certain ethnic populations in the United States.
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(ISBN 0-521-59648-3 [pbk.]).
xiii and 677 pages; references, indexes.
One of the best of Sternberg's many edited collections of articles, second only to Mackintosh (1998) in general usefulness as a reference book about current theory and practice in IQ testing.
Includes articles by
Nathan Brody,
Douglas K. Detterman,
John C. Loehlin,
Philip A. Vernon,
Ian J. Deary,
David F. Lohman,
Roger C. Schank,
Susan E. Embretson,
Alan S. Kaufman,
David N. Perkins,
Craig T. Ramey, and
Robert J. Sternberg.
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Richardson, Ken (2000)
The Making of Intelligence
New York: Columbia U. Press.
Ken Richardson is honorary senior research fellow in the Centre for Human Development and Learning at the Open University in Britain.
He is a former researcher in the National Child Development Study and the author of several books about psychology and IQ testing.
His latest book has a good historical overview of the development of IQ testing as an enterprise, and one of the best explanations I have seen in print of how item content for IQ tests is developed and validated.
His bibliographies usefully draw attention to particularly ground-breaking studies that aren't as well pointed out in other books about IQ testing.
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Khatena, Joe (2000)
Enhancing Creativity of Gifted Children
Hampton Press.
Khatena is a former president of the National Association of Gifted Children and a professor emeritus of educational psychology.
The only part of this book I have looked at so far is the part where Khatena attempts to express the modern consensus on diverse mental abilities in addition to "g" in common language for his readers.
This reflects a paradigm shift that is ongoing in the psychological community, prompted by results from cognitive science.
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Simonton, Dean Keith (1999)
Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity
New York: Oxford University Press
(ISBN 0-19-512879-6).
x and 308 pages; notes, references, index.
Thought-provoking book by an author whose articles in edited collections of articles are almost always some of the best in the volume.
Full of interesting citations to the primary research literature, especially historical studies of eminent creative geniuses and their development.
Much of "Darwinian perspective" of this book can only be speculation in the absence of hard data from the early period of human origins,
but the book takes a thoughtful look at much current scholarly speculation on issues for which better data exist,
and challenges entrenched ideas about the nature of giftedness.
Valuable information for parents of creative children.
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Howe, Michael J. A. (1999)
Genius Explained.
Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
(ISBN 0-521-64018-0).
ix and 221 pages; references, index.
Biographical study of historical geniuses with review of the literature on adult expert performance.
Lays out evidence for provocative theory that environment and individual effort matter much more for achievement of genius than inborn traits.
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Gardner, Howard (1999)
Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
New York: Basic Books
(ISBN 0-465-02611-7).
x and 292 pages; notes, appendices, index.
Howard Gardner's views from the 1990s on his multiple intelligences theory.
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Mackintosh, N. J. (1998)
IQ and Human Intelligence
Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
Masterful survey of the latest theoretical and experimental literature on the measurement of human intelligence at all levels from the sensorimotor to the cognitive.
Very balanced discussion of controversial issues and superb bibliography.
I particularly like Mackintosh's thoughtful use of diagrams in addition to verbal explanations throughout his book.
This book sets the new standard for general textbooks about IQ testing.
I think every consumer of IQ tests should read this book at the earliest opportunity.
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McArdle, John J. & Woodcock, Richard W. (Eds.) (1998).
Human Cognitive Abilities in Theory and Practice.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Conference volume devoted to some of the latest research on human cognitive abilities, with nearly all participants coming from the mainstream psychometric perspective.
Includes on pages 5-23 the thought-provoking article
Carroll, John B. (1998) Human Cognitive Abilities: A Critique.
Carroll is the author of Human Cognitive Abilities: A Survey of Factor Analytic Studies, a large meta-analysis of factor analytic studies of IQ tests.
Carroll's article consists of a critique of his own book (the mark of a true scholar) and a call for further research on many aspects of human ability testing that have yet to be rigorously studied.
Carroll is convinced after his magisterial review of factor-analytic studies of IQ tests that there are distinct cognitive ability factors in addition to the "g" factor that accounts for the greatest degree of score variation on IQ tests.
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(ISBN 1-55798-503-0).
xv and 415 pages; list of contributors, references, indexes.
Thought-provoking collection of articles from many points of view on the Flynn effect.
Contributors include
James R. Flynn,
Carmi Schooler,
Patricia M. Greenfield,
Wendy M. Williams,
Richard Lynn,
Robert M. Hauser,
Stephen J. Ceci,
Min-Hsiung Huang,
Samuel H. Preston, and
John C. Loehlin.
Highly recommended for discussion of what the Flynn effect means and what experimental designs are necessary to test competing theories about the significance of IQ gains over time.
The article by Flynn (1998) IQ Gains over Time: Toward Finding the Causes (pages 25-66) relates the importance of the Flynn effect to various theories of human intelligence.
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Friedman, Reva C. and Rogers, Karen B. (Eds.) (1998)
Talent in Context: Historical and Social Perspectives on Giftedness.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
International collection of articles on giftedness and talent development.
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Jencks, Christopher and Phillips, Meredith (Eds.) (1998)
The Black-White Test Score Gap.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Collection of interesting, thoughtful articles on the meaning of IQ scores in light of ethnic mean score differences in the United States.
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Kagan, Jerome (1998)
Three Seductive Ideas
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
(ISBN 0-674-89033-7).
232 pages; notes, index.
Thoughtful reexamination of what is scientific, and what is not, about many psychological theories.
Has great section with citations to the primary research literature on the unreliability of parental ratings of child behavior.
Includes insightful discussion on how common human cognitive illusions contribute to misconceptions about IQ.
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Jensen, Arthur R. (1998)
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Overview of IQ testing theory and theories of human intelligence by the author best known for a hard-line position of minimal environmental influence on human intelligence.
Especially useful for the distinction between genius and high IQ, and the low IQ threshold for eminent adult achievement.
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(ISBN 0-12-564930-4).
xvi and 336 pages; notes about contributors, index.
Collection edited by researchers employed by the publisher of the WISC-III on clinical uses of the WISC-III child IQ test, with articles by leading scholars on IQ testing about
intelligence test interpretation,
assessment of gifted children,
assessment of mental retardation,
assessment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder,
assessment of hearing-impaired and deaf children,
assessment of minority and culturally diverse children,
and other specialized topics.
Readable introduction to the best recent literature on the WISC-III.
Includes the article
Sparrow, Sara S. and Gurland, Suzanne T. (1998) Assessment of Gifted Children with the WISC-III,
by researchers at the Child Study Center of Yale University.
The authors urge against sole use of the WISC-III, which they acknowledge to be &one of the most appropriate IQ tests to be used& for school gifted program identification,
for children with a &nontypical profile& of giftedness.
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Devlin, Bernie, Fienberg, Stephen E., Resnick, Daniel P. & Roeder, Kathryn (Eds.) (1997)
Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve.
New York: Springer-Verlag.
(ISBN 0-387-98234-5).
It's always fun to read a book from Springer Verlag that isn't solely about mathematics, and the Springer Statistics for Social Science and Public Policy series has a book up to the usual high Springer standard in Intelligence, Genes, and Success.
The book consists of a set of invited articles on various factual claims made by Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve, nearly all of which are informative reading for parents of gifted children.
Hunt, Earl (1997) "The Concept and Utility of Intelligence" is a particularly interesting article.
Hunt's article was part of a section on intelligence and measurement of IQ, and it summarizes the different approaches taken to the study of intelligence by persons in the psychometric tradition and in the cognitive science tradition. Hunt develops a much more nuanced view of intelligence than is typical in the psychometric literature, and discusses its social implications thoughtfully. (Held by U of MN Library and Hennepin County Library, previously checked out to Karl.)
Sternberg, Robert J. and Grigorenko, Elena L. (Eds.) (1997)
Intelligence, Heredity, and Environment.
Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
Uneven collection of articles reporting research and speculation on genetic and environmental influences on IQ.
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Lehrke, Robert (1997)
Sex Linkage of Intelligence: The X-Factor.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
(ISBN 0-275-95903-1).
(Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence Series).
xiv and 188 pages; glossary, references, index.
Silly book with some of the latest speculations from the hard-line inherited IQ camp.
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Detterman, Douglas K. (Ed.) (1996)
Current Topics in Human Intelligence Volume 5: The Environment
Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
(ISBN 1-56750-136-2).
xii and 274 pages; references, indexes.
Collection of articles by many researchers, including
James R. Flynn,
Phillip L. Ackerman,
Chris Brand,
Arthur R. Jensen,
John C. Loehlin, and
Richard Lynn.
The various authors reply to one another's articles in this volume.
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(ISBN 0-275-95326-2).
xviii and 236 pages; references; indexes.
Hong Kong scholar's overview of major theories of intelligence, with a description of his theory.
Favorite quotation:
"It is necessary to make a distinction between child giftedness and adult giftedness.
A gifted adult is not simply a continuation of a gifted child.
Many gifted children do not produce creative works when they become adults and many gifted adults do not have their gifts recognized as children."
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(ISBN 0-465-01760-6).
xi and 449 pages; notes, references, index.
Excellent summation of current research on giftedness by mother-psychology professor.
The author's particular interest is artistic giftedness, about which she has been publishing for years,
but all facets of research on giftedness are well explored here, in understandable language with meticulous references to primary research sources.
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(ISBN 1-56750-241-5; 1-56750-242-3 [pbk.])).
(Creativity Research Series).
ix and 628 pages; foreword by Arthur J.Cropley and Detlev Dehn, notes on authors, indexes.
Collection of articles (all in English, but some citing primary literature in other languages, mostly German, in article endnotes)
about basic concepts relating to fostering the growth of high ability,
cognition and problem solving,
musical talent,
talent in sport,
creativity and curiosity,
school-related issues,
and counseling and family issues.
The sheer variety of countries represented by the authors of these articles underscores the point implicit in many of the articles
that schools suppressing the growth of high ability is a worldwide phenomenon, part of the nature of schooling.
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(ISBN 0-275-95179-0).
xii and 175 pages; appendix, bibliography, indexes.
Overview of intelligence theory from an artificial intelligence perspective.
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(ISBN 0-393-31067-1).
444 pages; bibliography and index.
Mistakenly dismissed as a "politically correct" attack on IQ testing,
actually a thoughtful reexamination of the "general intelligence" paradigm of Charles Spearman (1863-1945)
in the context of human biology and evolutionary theory.
Gould is an expert in factor analysis (which was the basis of his Ph.D. thesis) and explains that as lucidly as any author on the subject of intelligence.
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(ISBN 0-674-63456-X).
xxii and 288 pages; endnotes, references, index.
Expanded edition of a 1990 book, with new preface and epilogue tacked on (without any other updating)
to respond to the widely noticed The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein,
a book whose invalid arguments Ceci had anticipated in the 1990 edition.
Reports ingenious experimental research that undercuts the theory of a single general intelligence.
Indeed, Ceci's work suggests that even Gardner's view of multiple intelligences goes too far in the "lumper"
direction of assuming general cognitive domains.
Two favorite quotations:
"[from the 1990 edition:] While none of the actual findings regarding the superiority of Terman's sample's income,
health status, etc., that Butcher, Brody, Itzkoff, and many others find to be so impressive are wrong,
the implications drawn from them are misleading.
The fact is that if these 1,528 'geniuses' are compared to children from their same
childhood social class instead of to economically unselected children, as Terman had originally done,
they do not appear to be nearly as exceptional in their later professional or personal lives.
I became aware of this when I came across a relatively obscure paper by the sociologist P. Sorokin (1956),
writing in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology.
Sorokin conducted an informal comparison of Terman's 'geniuses' with children from their same social group
on everything from high school and college grades to marital dissolution rates and professional accomplishments.
He concluded that the instances of superiority among the 'geniuses' in Terman's study are within the expectation of superiority irrespective of IQ,
in view of their family social background.
Notwithstanding the effusive praise that psychologists have heaped on this study [by Terman] as evidence of the predictive power of IQ tests,
the IQ scores of these 'geniuses' appear to have added little to the prediction of their life outcomes over that simply gained from a consideration of their parental income,
education, and occupational status:" (page 89, emphasis in original)
"[from the 1996 expanded edition:] Scientists rarely make predictions except under fairly safe conditions
(e.g., if the truth cannot be known in their lifetime, they may hazard a prediction because they will not be embarrassed by refutations).
I will go out on a limb and make a prediction that no one else has made,
and it is one for which I hope to be alive to be held accountable if I am wrong.
I predict that in the coming twenty years the racial gap in IQ that has bedeviled ameliorative efforts by social and educational reformers from the New Deal to the Great Society will,
in fact, close to within eight points.
Remember that the racial gap has been fifteen to sixteen IQ points throughout the twentieth century.
I predict that it will settle around eight points by the year 2015.
I have reasons for the specificity of this prediction, but a full explanation of them would carry me beyond the scope of this Epilogue.
Remember, the IQ scores of blacks today are identical to those of whites in the 1940s;
the latter group has gained approximately fifteen points, and blacks have gained at least this many." (page 244)
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(ISBN 0-02-925212-1).
x and 390 pages; notes, references, index.
Thought-provoking review of recent research in cognitive science showing the weaknesses in the IQ construct.
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(ISBN 0-398-06523-3; 0-398-06524-1 [pbk.]).
xxiii and 442 pages; references, index.
Interesting overview of the design and use of the WISC-III IQ test.
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(ISBN 0-398-06519-5; 0-398-06520-9 [pbk.]).
ix and 228 pages; references, index.
Much detailed information about the design and use of the WAIS-R.
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(ISBN 0-465-00693-0).
vi and 216 pages; list of contributors.
Compilation of published reviews of The Bell Curve by various authors, including Stephen Jay Gould, Howard Gardner, and Thomas Sowell.
Great examination of the points The Bell Curve missed, along with some disheartening demonstrations of what some critics of The Bell Curve (other than those named above) continue to miss.
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(ISBN 0-8129-2587-4).
xiv and 721 pages; bibliography ("Further Reading") and index.
Invaluable sourcebook of primary sources on the intelligence and IQ testing controversy, which regrettably had no market until the book mentioned in its title was published and became a best-seller.
Superb guide to the literature, in the words of most of the best authors on this subject.
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Holahan, Carole K., Sears, Robert R., and Cronbach, Lee J. (1995)
The Gifted Group in Later Maturity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press.
The sixth and last volume of the Terman Genetic Studies of Genius series.
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Browne-Miller, Angela
Intelligence Policy: Its Impact on College Admissions and Other Social Policies
New York: Plenum.
(ISBN 0-306-44745-2).
xx and 255 pages; introduction by Raymond B. Cattell, appendices, notes, index, [note] about the author.
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Khalfa, Jean (Ed.) (1994)
What is Intelligence?
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(ISBN 0-521-43307-X).
v and 207 pages; notes on contributors, index.
Thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of articles on recent views of human intelligence, by scholars including Roger Schrank.
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(ISBN 0-471-30407-7).
(Wiley Series on Personality Processes).
xiii and 300 pages; foreword by Ulric Neisser, references, indexes.
Thought-provoking look at "the nurture side of the nature-nurture controversy as it pertains to intelligence."
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Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles (1994)
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
New York: Free Press.
(ISBN 0-02-914673-9).
xxvi and 845 pages; appendices, notes, bibliography, index.
Perhaps the most famous book on this list, but not the best.
The Bell Curve's erroneous treatment of the conclusions of James R. Flynn is acutely embarrassing to anyone who has read Flynn's books and articles.
Sowell, Thomas (1994)
Race and Culture: A World View
New York: Basic Books.
Single chapter "Race and Intelligence" is worth the price of the book, showing Sowell is a better analyst of the issues involved in the race-IQ controversy than most authors who write at ten times the length.
Unmatched guide to what people anywhere can learn from world historical and cultural patterns.
Sowell was too polite, in his review of the book The Bell Curve, to point out that he had already written a better book on the same subject published a few months earlier.
So I'll say what Sowell declined to say:
the chapter "Race and Intelligence" is a far better description of intelligence and far better review of the prior literature than The Bell Curve.
Sowell's whole book is well worth reading, but especially that chapter.
(ISBN 0-306-44683-9).
x and 207 pages; references, index.
Study of a group of high-IQ children found in a larger ongoing longitudinal study,
using various child development and family life questionnaires.
The study subjects were still young when this monograph was published.
The Fullerton Longitudinal Study Web site tells the rest of the story,
up till when the study ceased gathering data in 1997.
Many issues pertaining to the study data remain uninvestigated to date.
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(ISBN 1-56750-011-0).
(Creativity Research Series).
xvii and 464 pages; foreword by A. Harry Passow, indexes.
Collection of articles by researchers mostly with an educational psychology background.
Surprisingly honest observations about the drawbacks of school attendance for gifted children can be found in this volume,
for instance this favorite quotation from "Creative Thinking and Creative Performance as Predictors of Creative Attainments in Adults: A Follow-up Study after 18 Years":
"As a youngster, [Boris] Yeltsin was merely average when it came to academic achievement.
On the other hand, his outstanding leadership abilities were evidenced even in high school when he led a student protest strike against the administration to correct a perceived injustice.
As you can imagine, he was not rewarded for this display of leadership, but was instead expelled from school."
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(ISBN 0-471-57845-2).
(Wiley Series on Personality Processes).
xxii and 458 pages; references, indexes.
Kaufman was the principal assistant of David Wechsler in preparing the WISC-R test, and he is the dean of all writers in English on intelligence testing today.
He is very much a mainstream psychometrician, believing, for example, that the Flynn Effect shows that the general population has been increasing in intelligence over time.
His books are rich in clinical observations and he emphasizes the "intelligent testing" approach in all his writings,
using IQ tests as just one clinical tool for assessing a person's intellectual functioning.
He is remarkably able to discuss the specific item content of the Wechsler scales in detail without giving away the right answers, or even what the questions are.
Everyone should read the first chapter, "Intelligent Testing,"
for a good overview of current issues in IQ testing and how those issues are resolved in clinical practice.
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Miller, Lynda (1993)
What We Call Smart: A New Narrative for Intelligence and Learning
San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group.
(ISBN 1-879105-44-6).
(School-Age Children Series).
xxv and 166 pages; references, index.
Muddled view of human learning differences purporting to follow the Gardnerian multiple intelligences construct but actually mired in the unproven hypothesis that individual patterns of intelligence are largely fixed,
and in a rather "politically correct" view of Western culture, which continues to be the culture to which most willing immigrants travel, after all.
Includes useful descriptions of how rigid school programs can thwart learning and creativity.
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(ISBN 0-89391-978-0).
(Creativity Research Series).
xvi and 142 pages; appendixes, references, indexes.
Retrospective study of a sampling of grown-up children who attended Hunter College Elementary School in New York City,
which selected pupils for entrance on the basis of IQ scores from the 1937 Stanford-Binet test.
Further evidence that high IQ itself is not a sufficient condition for eminent adult achievement,
nor school an optimal environment for developing high-IQ children.
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(ISBN 0-465-02510-2 [tenth anniversary edition with new introduction, 1993 copyright 1983, 2nd ed. pbk.]).
New edition of the book by the man who wrote the book on multiple intelligence theory, MacArthur Foundation "genius fellow" Howard Gardner of Harvard's Project Zero.
Frames of Mind covers a vast panorama of ingeniously selected evidence to argue persuasively for a new paradigm of human "intelligences," rather than a single abstract charateristic of intelligence.
Frames of Mind must be reread and pondered by anyone who hopes to understand the coming new paradigm of human intelligence,
and by anyone who hopes to correct the superficial misinterpretations of Gardner's theory that have become prevalent among many professors of education.
Favorite quotation from the new introduction:
"Indeed, the very lack of a developed intelligence of one sort can serve as a motivation for the development of that intelligence.
In focusing in chapter 14 on the Suzuki method of musical education, I wanted to demonstrate that a society's decision to invest significant resources into the development of a particular intelligence can make the entire society quite intelligent in that respect.
Far from believing that intelligences are set in stone, I believe they are subject to being considerably modified by changes in available resources and,
for that matter, in one's perceptions of one's abilities and potentials (Dweck and Licht 1980).
The more one believes in the contextual and distributed views of intelligence, the less sense it makes to posit inherent limits on intellectual achievement."
(ISBN 0-89079-585-1).
xiii and 216 pages; index.
Mainstream discussion of child intelligence testing and the most highly regarded child IQ test, the WISC-III(R).
Truch is a consulting psychologist in Canada who has a particular focus on helping children with reading difficulties.
His WISC-III Companion is one of the best practitioner's guides to the WISC-III test, with many helpful insights on intelligence testing in general.
Truch is a mainstream psychometrician and thinks that "g" may be general "mental energy," and that the Flynn Effect shows that intelligence has been rising in the general population, perhaps as a result of education.
He has some interesting comments, based on both clinical observation and research literature, on the education of gifted young people.
Favorite quotation:
"The diagnosis of learning disabilities is not like a medical diagnosis of, say, appendicitis, in which the 'patient' presents certain 'symptoms,' which then reequire a specific course of action, such as an operation.
That kind of precision simply does not exist in the field of learning disabilities."
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Anderson, Mike (1992)
Intelligence and Development: A Cognitive Theory
Oxford, U.K.; Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell.
(ISBN 0-631-16193-7).
(Cognitive Development Series).
xiii and 241 pages; bibliography, indexes.
Introduction to author's theory of intelligence as it relates to cognitive development.
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(ISBN 0-316-78890-2).
x and 317 pages; notes, bibliography, and index.
First-ever independent publication based on the research files of Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of "gifted" children in California.
Includes much fascinating information about how Terman conducted--and interfered with--his study, including truly funny incidents of mistaken observations and generally bad science by several members of the Terman team.
It is interesting to chart the development of Terman's ideas about intelligence testing as the story unfolds.
Shurkin's book has a good bibliography of studies about the Terman study, and places the Terman study in a current context.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has a family member who has taken a Stanford-Binet L-M IQ test and to anyone who is interested in the lifelong development of gifted children.
"Sometimes the testing simply missed bright children.
Two youngsters who were tested but failed to make the cut grew up to become Nobel Prize winners: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez.
None of those who made the study became Nobel laureates."
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Klein, Prina S. and Tannenbaum, Abraham J. (1992)
To Be Young and Gifted.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Collection of articles by leading researchers on precocious or highly gifted children, updating many earlier studies.
Includes useful article
Jackson, Nancy Ewald (1992) Precocious Reading of English: Origins, Structure, and Predictive Significance (pages 171-203)
following-up on (and disproving) the hypothesis that precocious reading is a sign of "profound giftedness,"
which is still an influential hypothesis after the writings of Leta Hollingworth.
Includes other interesting articles by
Abraham Tannenbaum,
Nancy Robinson,
and other researchers.
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Brody, Nathan (1992)
Intelligence
San Diego, CA : Academic Press.
xi and 395 pages.
Fine overview of all aspects of intelligence theory, with a detailed account of how constructs regarding the nature of intelligence are validated.
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Flynn, James R. (1991)
Asian-Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
(ISBN 0-8058-1110-9).
xi and 169 pages; appendices, references, index.
Thought-provoking reexamination of the evidence on racial differences in IQ by the most respected scholar on the subject.
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Locurto, Charles (1991)
Sense and Nonsense about IQ: The Case for Uniqueness
New York: Praeger.
(ISBN 0-275-93803-4).
xx and 197 pages; chronology, appendices, selected bibliography, index.
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Karlsson, Jon L. (1991)
Genetics of Human Mentality
New York: Praeger.
(ISBN 0-275-93808-5).
x and 195 pages; references, index.
Intriguing book about genetic factors in human intelligence by a geneticist from Iceland.
Much neglected information about correlations between IQ and major mood disorders, including manic-depressive psychosis.
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Mensh, Elaine and Mensh, Harry (1991)
The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
(ISBN 0-8093-1668-8).
xiv and 214 pages; notes, bibliography, index.
Fine exposé of the historical roots in eugenics movements of much of the current mainstream view of IQ.
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Richardson, Ken (1991)
Understanding Intelligence
Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
(ISBN 0-335-09397-3 [pbk.]).
154 pages; references at end of each chapter.
One of the most thorough examinations of constructs regarding the nature of intelligence, with excellent use of graphs and diagrams.
Favorite quotation:
"It has to be rememembered, of course, that Galton was primarily interested in the utility of such measures [as reaction time] in connection with his projected eugenics programmes (mentioned in chapter 2),
and that social class and 'racial' differences were very much in the air, especially in the USA.
Thus when Bache (1895) administered reaction time tests to Whites and Blacks in the USA he found Whites to be inferior.
This he attributed to the fact that Whites' 'reactions were slower because they belonged to a more deliberate and reflective race.'"
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Pearson, Roger (1991)
Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe
(Washington, DC: Scott-Townsend Publications.
(ISBN 1-878465-02-3).
304 pages.
Description of suppression of the Jensen-Eysenck view of race differences in IQ on campuses in various places.
Useful for information on the views of many leading authors on this issue during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Kaufman, Alan S. (1990)
Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence
Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
(ISBN 0-205-12390-2).
xiii and 753 pages; references and indices.
Mainstream account of the currently accepted majority view of psychologists on intelligence, by a professor who was a graduate student of the late David Wechsler.
Thorough description of the WAIS-R, the most widely used adult intelligence test, and its interpretation.
Thoughtful discussion of the IQ construct and of new paradigms challenging the status quo mainstream paradigm Kaufman presents.
Favorite quotation, among many:
"Research conducted systematically on different cultures over time (or retrospectively) may help isolate specific sets of environmental variables that are most associated with the largest gains in intelligence.
Because the average intelligence of Americans seems to be increasing at a steady, measurable, and rather substantial rate, researchers can investigate possible answers to these pressing questions [of malleability of intelligence]
--answers that might be a precursor for developing successful interventions to reduce group differences between races and across social classes.
Similar intervention strategies may be developed based on research on motivation and emotional stability, as well as environmental variables 'that can effectively alter the course of intellectual development in the desired directions' (Anastasi, 1988, p. 341)."
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Radford, John (1990)
Child Prodigies and Exceptional Early Achievers
New York: Free Press
(ISBN 0-02-925635-6).
ix and 255 pages; bibliography, index.
Interesting examination of childhood precocity and how it relates to adult achievement,
with a good historical and international perspective.
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Love, Harold D. (1990)
Assessment of Intelligence and Development of Infants and Young Children with Specialized Measures
Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
(ISBN 0-398-05676-5).
xi and 125 pages, index.
Textbook on assessments for young children, from a "special education" perspective.
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Linn, Robert (Ed.) (1989)
Intelligence: Measurement, Theory, and Public Policy: Proceedings of a Symposium in Honor of Lloyd G. Humphries
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
(ISBN 0-252-01535-5).
viii and 230 pages; notes on contributors, [list of] publications of Lloyd G. Humphries.
Articles by leading scholars on intelligence,
including Sandra Scarr,
Robert Sternberg,
Lee Cronbach,
and Lloyd Humphries.
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Modgil, Sohan & Modgil, Celia (Eds.) (1987)
Arthur Jensen: Concensus and Controversy
New York: Falmer.
(Falmer International Master-Minds Challenged Psychology Series number 4).
ix and 420 pages; index.
Tour-de-force number in a terrific series on psychology, collecting articles and responses to articles by nearly all of the leading scholars on genetic factors influencing IQ and on the nature of intelligence,
including Arthur Jensen himself, Robert Plomin, Thomas Bouchard, James Flynn, Robert Sternberg, and James Pellegrino.
Flynn's article alone is worth the price of the book.
Flynn's article in this volume closely follows the format of his paradigm-shifting article
Flynn, James R. (1987) "Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure" Psychological Bulletin vol. 101, no. 2, pages 171-191.
Flynn's article set the standard for analysis of trends in IQ scores over time and is now cited in all the best monographs on IQ testing.
Includes surprising results from impeccable data sets that challenge several long-held beliefs about IQ tests and demolish predictions of previous researchers.
Flynn emerged from his research deeply skeptical that IQ tests "measure intelligence," which was a change of position for him,
and at the very least he makes clear that IQ points are not a magnitude measure of intelligence, although Flynn appears to still think (as of 2002) that IQ scores correlate reasonably well in rank order with real-world intelligence.
I have a photocopy of the original Flynn (1987) article as it appeared in Psychological Bulletin.
Flynn's first article on IQ test score trends to catch the attention of mainstream psychologists was
Flynn, James R. (1984) "The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive Gains 1932 to 1978" Psychological Bulletin volume 95, pages 29-51.
The first major article was based on the renorming of various IQ tests.
Favorite quotation from this Arthur Jensen volume, from Arthur Jensen himself:
"Now and then I am asked . . . who, in my opinion, are the most respectable critics of my position on the race-IQ issue?
The name James R. Flynn is by far the first that comes to mind."
Careful reading of the Flynn article in this volume and the response articles should make clear why the later article by
Silverman, Linda (1989) "Lost: One IQ Point Per Year for the Gifted"
presented at 36th annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children, Cincinnati, OH, November 2, 1989
is a gross misunderstanding of the then available evidence on the Flynn effect.
Silverman's article must be read in conjunction with more up-to-date publications,
notably the articles by Flynn (2000a and 2000b) and Robinson (1992) (for a more balanced view of the L-M) and the thorough monograph by Mackintosh (1998) (for a much more detailed--and correct--account of how IQ tests are scored and what their scores mean).
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Schiff, Michael and Lewontin, Richard (1986)
Education and Class: The Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(ISBN 0-19-857599-8).
xxiii and 243 pages; references and indices.
Particularly detailed examination of the genetic aspects of race-IQ theories, by one of the best scholars on human population genetics anywhere.
Superb and thought-provoking analysis of flaws in the design of experiments on IQ variations in populations.
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Fancher, Raymond E. (1985)
The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy
New York: Norton.
(ISBN 0-393-01982-9).
xvi and 269 pages; notes, index.
Fascinating biographical study of major figures in the development of twentieth-century theories of human intelligence.
Favorite quotation:
"Perhaps because they so often derive from early and fundamental life experiences, scientific positions on the IQ controversy often become highly supercharged with ethical, philosophical, or religious feelings.
. . . More mundane but still powerful economic factors have undoubtedly played roles as well.
Yerkes and Burt not only placed professional psychology 'on the map,'
but also created whole new professions for psychometricians and educational psychologists in their respective countries, through their championing of intelligence tests."
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Kearney, G.E., de Lacey, P.R. & Davidson, G.R. (1973).
The Psychology of Aboriginal Australians
Sydney, New York: J. Wiley and Sons Australasia Pty. Ltd.
Striking refutation of theories that link intelligence to race, in the context of comparisons between European-Austrialians and Australian aborigines.
The Psychology of Aboriginal Australians shows the failure of replication of reports on aboriginal IQ testing passed on to the world by Arthur Jensen.
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Terman, Lewis and Merrill, Maude (1960 and 1973)
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Manual for the Third Revision Form L-M with Revised IQ Tables by Samuel R. Pinneau University of California
Houghton Mifflin.
That I have ever seen this book at all illustrates how appallingly bad the test security is for the Stanford-Binet L-M.
Apparently this book, which gives all the answers to the L-M IQ test, has been widely available in circulating libraries for more than a decade.
Anyone could do as I have done and request the book by interlibrary loan.
Anyone who has ever taken the Stanford-Binet L-M, or who has had a child take the L-M,
maybe should do as I have done to demythologize the L-M and to be aware of the tricky interpretational issues surrounding it.
The L-M is based on an outmoded, poorly developed theory of intelligence
(a theory that didn't even fit the results of the Terman longitudinal study)
and its item content fails to tap several of the cognitive abilities identified by later cognitive science researchers.
I originally was looking for secondary literature about the L-M that would have the same quality as the Kaufman and Truch monographs cited here,
but there is a dearth of that, and all I could find about how the test was normed and validated was what I could find in the test manual,
which Waddell (1980) argues is not enough to inspire confidence in the test's norms.
What I discovered by accident is that the scoring procedure for the L-M that yields the highest scores,
in use by several consultants on gifted education, is NOT in strict accord with the 1973 manual,
which means that some children have L-M IQ scores that are terribly inflated.
Comparing L-M scores to scores of the same subjects on other IQ tests is an important area for future research.
After referring to this book, it is important to refer to
Waddell, Deborah D. (1980) "The Stanford-Binet: An Evaluation of the Technical Data Available since the 1972 Restandardization"
Journal of School Psychology vol. 18, no. 3, pages 203-209.
Waddell's article is a review of the available literature on the nature of the standardization sample for the 1972 renormed L-M,
concluding that it is impossible to objectively conclude that the standardization sample was representative of the United States national population (although it might accidentally have been).
These problems with the norms of the L-M have much to do with the L-M's swift eclipse by the WISC-R as the "gold standard" for child intelligence testing in the United States,
as noted by various later authors.
I have a photocopy of the Waddell article.
Another important article about recent use of the Stanford-Binet L-M test is
Robinson, Nancy M. (1992) "Stanford-Binet IV, of Course! Time Marches On!"
which is a Web-based reprint of "Which Stanford-Binet for the Brightest?" Roeper Review, Volume 15, No. 1, pages 32-34 (September 1992).
Robinson explains a rationale for preferring the more recent Stanford-Binet IV test to the earlier third (L-M) edition of the Stanford-Binet.
She points out that the single best reason to prefer the newer test is its much more up-to-date set of norms.
She makes the point, little noticed in the giftedness literature but abundantly confirmed in the L-M technical manual, that error of estimation in IQ scores is likely to be higher high above the population mean than at the mean.
Favorite quotation:
"Sticking with the old norms will certainly raise our estimates of the prevalence of very high IQs but will provide less and less accurate information."
I have a printed copy of the Web version of this article.
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Pedrini, Duilio and Pedrini, Lura (1970)
The Pedrini Supplementary Aid to the Administration of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M): A Handbook.
Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.
Tips for L-M test-givers on how to give the test properly,
published just before the long-term decline of the L-M.
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Environment, Heredity, and Intelligence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1979 [originally published 1969]).
(Harvard Educational Review reprint series No. 2).
(ISBN 0-916690-02-4). 246 pages.
Compiled from the Harvard Educational Review,
reprints of the famous article by Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review volume 39, number 1, pages 1-123 (Winter 1969)
and the reply articles by other scholars from number 2 of the same volume.
A fascinating look at what caused the late twentieth century revival of IQ genetic theories.
A shocking look at points that Jensen raised in 1969, only to drop them forever after.
A cautionary look at scientific controversy about a politically explosive issue.
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Moriarty, Alice E. (1966)
Constancy and IQ Change: A Clinical View of Relationships between Tested IQ and Personality
Charles C. Thomas.
Moriarty was a Ph.D. researcher at the Menninger Foundation and describes in her book a number of case studies of longitudinal observations of children's IQ.
She observed several subjects whose childhood IQ varied markedly over the course of childhood, and develops hypotheses about why those IQ changes occurred,
while the IQs of other children remained more stable, which would still be worth following up today.
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Pinneau, Samuel R. (1961)
Changes in Intelligence Quotient Infancy to Maturity: New Insights from the Berkeley Growth Study with Implications for the Stanford-Binet Scales and Applications to Professional Practice
Houghton Mifflin.
Pinneau is the author of the look-up table for determining the IQ score of persons who take the Stanford-Binet L-M (1960 or 1973).
The Berkeley Growth Study was not a very large sample of children,
but even within its limited numerical scope a surprisingly large number of children were found whose IQ scores (from various tests) changed substantially over childhood,
usually dropping to nearer the population mean.
Pinneau's attempts to make sense of the pattern of childhood IQ changes in that study led to the Stanford-Binet L-M adopting,
in its official manual, the "deviation IQ" model of scoring,
which Pinneau built into the score look-up-tables.
(Strictly speaking, there should not be a "ratio IQ" reported anymore for anyone taking a Stanford-Binet L-M,
as the scoring manual advises examiners to add correction factors to ratio IQ calculations to produce a reported score.)
It would be interesting to examine the data from more recent longitudinal studies to see what IQ variability over the course of childhood they show.
Pinneau's book includes discussion of the WISC test (just then gaining popularity in the United States, now the "gold standard" for child IQ testing) and the full look-up table for IQ scoring found in the 1960 Stanford-Binet manual.
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Binet, Alfred (1905)
"New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals."
English translation by Elizabeth S. Kite first published in 1916 in The development of intelligence in children
Vineland, NJ: Publications of the Training School at Vineland.
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)
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