Katrina Strese

IQ TESTING

FRANCIS GALTON

Read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Began analyzing mental abilities and went

into three-year nervous breakdown

Wrote Hereditary Genius Analyzed family trees of distinguished men

to see if their relatives were also successful Believed this proved that ability is

inherited

GALTON CONTINUED

Believed that social class determined your worth

Decides he wants to apply natural selection to human breeding

EUGENICS

Greek roots for “well” and “born”

It was hard to recognize people with talent while they were young Needed an exam to figure it out

GALTON’S IDEA

Those who score well should be encouraged to marry and given respect in society

Young women should be tested for grace, beauty, health, temper, housewifery, and intelligence

Young men should be paired with these well scoring women

If they chose to marry, they would be presented £5,000 and their children’s education would be discounted

TESTING BOOTH

Set up a booth at a health exhibition and paid people to come in to get tested

Measured their height and middle finger

Tested hearing, ability to throw a punch, power to breath, and power to pull and squeeze

Believed measurements of physical ability showed who had natural talent

Tested about 9,000 people this way

NEGATIVE EUGENICS

Galton believed that when people learned that talent was inherited, they would voluntarily stop having kids

People should only be given respect if they don’t reproduce

If they did have children, then they would become “enemies to the state” and wouldn’t be treated well

BINET AND SIMON

Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon created a test in 1905 to test the “general intelligence” of children based on their age

First test was on concentration Second test was to name things and

repeat back to examiners Third part was to describe differences,

draw designs, and rank items

HENRY HERBERT GODDARD

Used Binet tests on students at Training School for Feeble-Minded in New Jersey

Compared results of tests to descriptions from teachers

Idiot= Performs worse than average 2 year old

Imbecile= Between mental ages of 3 and 7

Moron= Between mental ages of 8 and 12

*Felt that “fool” was too harsh of a word

GODDARD AND EUGENICS

Around this same time, people feared that the feeble-minded were more likely to commit crimes and be social burdens

Goddard made people believe that parents passed down the genes for feeblemindedness

People wanted them separated from society and prevented from reproducing

STUDY OF HEREDITY: KALLIKAK FAMILY Employed Elizabeth Kite who ‘studied’

480 of Deborah Kallikak’s relatives Met with family members and based

judgements off of social interaction Judged deceased relatives off of family

memories, reputation, and in one case on the condition of furniture

Goddard signed off on this methodology

RESULTS OF KALLIKAK FAMILY

143 are feebleminded 36 illegitimate kids, 33 prostitutes, 3

epileptics, 82 dead infants, 3 criminals, 8 “kept houses of ill fame”

Only 46 normal people The feebleminded had married into other

families and exposed 1,146 others to the “destructive feebleminded gene”

Published results in book without telling methodology

ELLIS ISLAND

Congress gave U.S. Public Health Service a list of types of people to exclude from America

Lunatics, idiots, insane, epileptics, beggars, anarchists, diseased, imbeciles, feeble-minded and those with physical defects that might affect their ability to make a living

Doctors walked through lines and had seconds to spot people

TESTING AT ELLIS ISLAND Binet-style questions

Define justice, pity, truth, happiness Count backward from 20 Tell time

Changed to “cube imitation” and jig-saw puzzle

1908: 186 out of 600,000 deemed feebleminded

After tests change in 1914: 1,077 out of 800,000 deemed feebleminded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaUK8V-5dBk

ALPHA AND BETA TESTS

Alpha= Written exam for literates Test vocabulary Unscramble sentences Remember number sequences

Beta= Picture exam for illiterate and non-English speaking Maze test Shape matching Finish pictures missing key element

Ex. Add steam coming out of a tea kettle

TESTING IN THE ARMY

March 1917, U.S. Army had 190,000 men November 1918, swelled to 3.6 million men Signed Robert Yerkes, a psychologist, to

testing program in August 1917 Administered test and had officers rank soldiers

based on their own opinion Compared test results to opinions and found

that they correlated Believed this suggested that intelligence is the

most important factor in determining men’s value in the service

CARRIE BUCK’S STORY

Her father was dead and her mother was poor and uneducated

At age 3 she was sent to live with foster parents

Her foster parents, the Dobbs, left town one summer, and their nephew raped her at age 17

She became pregnant from the rape The Dobbs wanted to cover up for their

nephew, so they went to the courts saying she was epileptic and feeble-minded

BUCK CONTINUED

The Dobbs lied about her conditions and she was sent to the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Virginia where her mother was already incarcerated

Superintendent, Albert Priddy, wanted to have sterilization of inmates legalized His friend, Aubrey Strode, drafted the law

and got it passed through the House

BUCK CONTINUED

Priddy wanted to test the laws and make sure they were official

Decided that Carrie Buck was the perfect candidate

Set it up so that Buck would “sue” the colony for sterilizing her Strode represented the colony Hired their friend, Whitehead, to “represent”

Buck. However, he did not defend her at all

BUCK V. BELL DECISION (1927)

Went up to supreme court, who agreed that this was legal

By 1932, twenty seven states had sterilization programs

About 60,000 people were sterilized Decision influenced some European

countries to sterilize as well

ALMA, WI

Arnold Gesell was from Alma and graduated from UW-Madison where he studied psychology

Believed that ¼ of Alma’s 1,000 residents were “heredity defectives”

Advocated for the town to be sterilized He manipulated his evidence and used

photos to make the town look worse than it was

Published an article that became famous

NAZIS AND IQ

Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases in 1933 Feeble-Minded Schizophrenic Manic-Depression Epilepsy Huntington’s chorea Blind Deaf Physical deformities Alcoholism

NAZIS

388,000 sterilization cases Majority were for feeble-minded, which

required IQ test IQ tests were not scientific

What does Christmas signify? Who discovered America? What would you do if you won the lottery?

NAZIS

Eventually turned sterilization into killing the ‘genetically unworthy’

Killed 200,000 Germans, majority based on the IQ tests showing feeble-mindedness

IQ IN TODAY’S WORLD

SAT Derives from the IQ tests, but without

the physical performance problems Relies strongly on verbal and

mathematical skills University of California found that SAT

predicts freshman student’s scores about 13% Power to predict scores gets worse as they

become upperclassmen High school grades are better predictors

of college grades

STERILIZATION LAWS

California’s sterilization laws were in place for 70 years

An OB at the Los Angeles County hospital believed in population control, so immediately after labor he coerced people into tubal litigation

STERILIZATION LAWS

Women were falsely mislead to agree Signed consent when in distress Some didn’t even give consent Were told that husbands already signed

form 10 women filed a lawsuit in 1978 Law was finally repealed in 1979

CALIFORNIA PRISON

Between 2006 and 2010, at least 148 women were illegally sterilized

Did not get state authorization State reviews cases and makes sure that

the sterilization is consensual Were considered “social undesirables”

because they are prison inmates, and they didn’t want them reproducing

DISCUSSION

Do standardized tests accurately measure students’ abilities? Should we continue using them to decide students’ placement?

Some states allow shorter prison sentences to inmates who agree to sterilization. Is this ethical and should we allow it?