IQ's Reading: Support for speed of reasoning ability (Carroll's RE; Horn's CDS)

Article "in press" in Intelligence by Goldhammer et al. that provides support for a speed of reasoning factor. I have provided additional comments in the article via the IQ's Readings blog feature.

No major individual intelligence battery appears to measure this construct. We the authors of the WJ III (conflict of interest disclosure--I am coauthor of the WJ III) intended our Decision Speed test to represent some of this ability. To date we have not been able to demonstrate validity evidence for this interpretation. This may be due to two factors. First, all post-WJ III analyses I have completed have found the DS test to covary with the Retrieval Fluency and Rapid Picture Naming tests. RF and RPN covary very strong....and I have interpreted this as reflecting the narrow ability of NA (naming facility) or what is often called RAN, but which I prefer to call "speed of lexical access" as per the reading research of Perfetti. The DS test tends to "hang out" with these two other tests and appears to tap this speed of lexical access ability to some degree, most likely due to the need for examinee's to quickly access the meaning of the common objects before deciding which two are the same conceptually.

The other possibility that the DS test may measure some RE variance but this has not been possible to validate due to the lack of other valid RE indicators in the WJ III collection of tests analyzed.

Anyone looking for a good thesis/dissertation? I could envision a study which tests administered that allow for the specification of perceptual speed (P), speed of lexical access (NA), and speed of reasoning (RE) factors that also includes the WJ III RF, RPN and DS tests.

Double click on images to enlarge







- iPost using BlogPress from my Kevin McGrew's iPad

intelligence IQ tests IQ testing IQ scores CHC intelligence theory CHC theory Cattell-Horn-Carroll human cognitive abilities psychology school psychology individual differences cognitive psychology neuropsychology psychology special education educational psychology psychometrics psychological assessment psychological measurement IQs Corner general intelligence processing speed Gs speed of induction speed of reasoning RE WJ III Decision Speed IQs Readings

Generated by: Tag Generator

Book Nook: Uses and Abuses of Intelligence: Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven's Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics

John and Jean Raven asked me to post the following update regarding their book. The following information is reproduced as received from the Raven's.

Uses and Abuses of Intelligence: Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven’s Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics. Edited by John and Jean Raven

Now Available from Amazon.co.uk*
ISBN 978-0-9557195-0-9





The opening chapter summarises the theoretical basis of Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests and the measurement model that lies behind them. Despite their widespread us, neither their foundation on the work of Charles Spearman nor their grounding in what has become known as “Item Response Theory” is widely understood. Both are extremely interesting and important issues and the chapter will therefore be of interest to a wide audience.

Part II: Practical Measurement Issues: Lessons from 75 Years’ Work with Item Response Theory discusses fundamental measurement issues in psychology. Particular attention is paid to the problems involved in the differential measurement of change, e,g, when trying to assess the relative effects of alternative treatments. These are particularly serious when attempts are made to measure change using tests which do not yield interval scales. The discussion in the book is easily understood and very illuminating. As one of the psychometricians involved in these studies commented “At last I have understood what I have been doing all my life … and my students will too!”.

Part III deals with the stability and change in Progressive Matrices scores over time and culture. Although the intergenerational increases are now well known, their significance from the point of re-interpreting the results of many studies which had previously been thought to show a decline in abilities with increasing age has been less widely appreciated. Other findings reported in this Section – such as the trifling effect of such things as access to television and education on Progressive Matrices scores – are still often surprising.

Part IV amounts to a clarion call for psychologists to find ways of thinking about, and assessing, a much wider range of human abilities together with aspects of the environment which determine behaviour. It would seem that, compared with other unidentified and unmeasured factors, “intelligence” makes a rather small contribution to the variance in life performance. On the other hand, notions of “intelligence” or “ability” play a major role in the legitimisation and cementation of hierarchy and thus to the network of factors advancing our plunge toward extinction as a species.

Part V continues this discussion of abuses of the concept of “intelligence”, particularly via an outstanding chapter on “bias” in mental testing contributed by Jim Flynn.

*In the US the book is still only available (direct or via booksellers) from Royal Fireworks Press. ISBN 978-0-89824-356-7.


- iPost using BlogPress from my Kevin McGrew's iPad