DESIGNED FOR THE PSYCHOLOGIST, THE HANDBOOK DESCRIBES INSTRUMENTS COMMONLY USED FOR INTELLECTUAL EVALUATION OF CHILDREN SUSPECTED OF BEING MENTALLY RETARDED. INFORMATION IS GIVEN CONCERNING DEFIITIONS, IDENTIFICATION, AND CHARACTERISITICS OF MENTAL RETARDATION, TEST SELECTION, AND THE TEST SITUATION. TESTS DESCRIBED AND DISCUSSED INCLUDE…

In an effort to determine whether intelligence and school readiness could be estimated from observin g behavior and if middle class Head Start teachers ranked highly those pupils whose behavior resembled middle class behavior, the behavior patterns of 36 Head Start pupils were compared with their teachers' ranking of perceived intelligence and…

This study was designed to assess and compare the roles of intelligence and moral judgment in relation to patterns of behavior in temptation situations. Six Resistance to Temptation (RTT) tasks were administered to 106 sixth grade students. One year later, four Kohlberg Moral Judgment (MJ) tasks were administered to 100 of the same subjects. IQ…

Six current issues in the use of tests are examined in this paper. Are the tests used in education valid? In general and to a reasonably satisfactory extent they are. Is the emphasis these tests place on cognitive achievements a serious limitation? Because of the basic and pervasive role of cognition in human affairs, and in the absence of any…

The study sought to use Jensen's two-level theory of mental abilities to predict some hitherto unknown or unnoticed phenomena--facts about which the theory should yield clear-cut predictions and which are not as clearly predictable from other theories, though they may receive ad hoc explanations after the fact. From the two-level theory of mental…

The major emphasis of this study is on the comparative validities of paired-associate learning tests and IQ tests in predicting reading achievement. The study engages in a brief review of earlier research in order to examine the validity of two assumptions--that the construction and/or the use of a tactic that simplifies a learning task is one of…

More than 17,000 children were interviewed or tested to investigate their political attitudes. Data relevant to social class and intelligence are as follows: compared to others, children of high intelligence acquired political attitudes earlier, saw the Supreme Court as a more powerful decision maker, perceived laws as less rigid, had more…

This issue of the IRCD Bulletin is devoted to commentaries on an article by Arthur R. Jensen on the nature-nurture controversy in a recent number of "Harvard Educational Review." Contents of the Bulletin are comprised of the following: "Education, Ethnicity, Genetics and Intelligence; Jensenism: Another Excuse for Failure to…

It has been said that the heritability of learning ability or of intelligence is irrelevant to teachability. In support of this statement we see it pointed out that a child or a group of children show some response to training, and this is held up as evidence against the heritability of intelligence or learning ability. Most estimates of the…

Thirty children, 7.5 to 8.5 years, in two classrooms in a Catholic school trying to implement an informal curriculum were studied. The classrooms were not "exemplary"; The children had lower-middle-class origins. Each child was observed under free-choice conditions for approximately 80-90 minutes over a 3-month period. Two-minute narrative records…

Six papers are included in this collection. "How Misconceptions about Language Affect Judgments about Intelligence," by Roger W. Shuy, and "The Cultural Context of Learning to Read," by R. P. McDermott, deal with contexts in which evaluation of a student's reading are made: a teacher's direct evaluation of a student's reading performance, and a…

Theories explaining differences in IQ performances between races in terms of (a) genetics and (b) the role of the environment are both criticized. It is argued that the Cultural Distance Approach, which stresses the role of a subculture's distance from the major culture on which IQ questions are based, has the greatest explanatory power. (RDN)

Human cognition research is shifting away from the importance of IQ and is emphasizing the stimulation and acceleration of a child's mental development. The emerging field of instructional psychology is trying to facilitate cognitive development. Current experimental programs--a university-school project in Belgium and a family project in…

The assessment of hearing impaired children is fraught with a number of problems. These include lack of valid assessment measures, faulty theoretical assumptions, lack of knowledge regarding the functioning of cognitive processes of these children, and biases against these children. This article briefly considers these issues and describes a study…

Based on the view that young children have a different intellectual culture from adults' in the way they know and understand nature, this paper explores ecological human brain development, children's intellectual culture of naturalist intelligence, and developmentally and culturally congruent curricula for young children. The paper discusses the…