JKBOSE Class 12th Psychology Notes | Intelligence and Aptitude | jkboseclassnotes.blogspot.com

JKBOSE Class 12th Psychology Notes | Intelligence and Aptitude

Concept of Intelligence: Intelligence is a factor that is common to all mental abilities. We can generally say that conscious and wise adaptation to new situations is intelligence. Basically, the term intelligence refers to individual variations in a wide range of cognitive abilities. These variations date back to Plato when he discussed some variations in human abilities over 2000 years ago. 

The early approach involved three view points with regard to the meaning of intelligence: 

• The capacity to learn. 

• The total knowledge a person has acquired 

• And, the ability to adapt successfully to new situations and environment in general. 

Thus intelligence is explained in such a manner in which an individual deals with people, things and ideas. In other words, the degree of intelligence depends upon the degree of effective integration of one’s capacities and abilities for dealing successfully with one’s environment. Intelligence has been deemed for a long time as a descriptive concept. In the qualitative concept, philosophers described it as a power of combination, ability to think in abstract terms, power of making good responses from the view- point of truth, etc. Faculty psychologists considered it as an aggregation of different faculitiesof mind like reasoning, observation, imagination, memory, etc. An individual is said to be intelligent in proportion to his success in meeting general life situations. In order to understand the full significance of intelligence, we should consider various definitions of intelligence as given by different psychologists. 

• According to Woodworth and Marquis, “Intelligence means intellect put to use. It is the use of intellectual abilities for handling a situation or accomplishing any task.” 

• According to Alfred Binet, “Intelligence is the ability to judge well, understand well, and reason well.” 

• According to Spearman, “Intelligence is the ability to discriminate or perceive differences.” 

• According to Wechsler, “Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of an individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment."


Characteristics/ Nature of intelligence: 

Characteristics of intelligence are: 

• Intelligence is an innate natural power and not acquired. 

• It differs from individual to individual. 
• It helps the individual in learning things and making adjustments. 

• It helps man to solve problems of life. 
• Heredity exercises a good deal of influence on intelligence. 

• Intelligence is not memory. A very intelligent person may have a dull memory and vice- versa. 

• There is no difference in intelligence due to difference in sex. 

• Socio-economic and cultural factors as well as racial differences affect intelligence. 

• Intelligence in not the birth right of particular race or group. 


Theories of Intelligence: 
Psychologists have proposed several theories of intelligence. These theories can be broadly classified as either representing a psychometric/ structural approach or as information –processing approach. The psychometric approach considers intelligence as an aggregate of abilities. It expresses the individual’s performance in terms of a single index of cognitive abilities. On the other hand, the information- processing approach describes the process people use in intellectual reasoning and problem solving.The major focus of this approach is on how intelligent person acts, rather than focusing on structure of intelligence or its underlying dimensions , Information - processing approach studying cognitive functions underlying intelligent behavior. Some representative theories of these approaches are: 

1. Theory of multiple intelligences: 

Howard Gardner (1983) proposed this theory is based on three principles: 
a. Intelligence is not a single entity, rather there exists multiple intelligences, each distinct from others. 

b. These intelligences are independent of each other. 

c. Different types of intelligences interact. That is, different intelligences work together to provide a solution of a problem. 

Gardner has so far proposed eight intelligences. However, all the individuals do not possess them in equal proportion. 

The eight intelligences are as follows: 

1. Linguistic intelligence: It is the capacity to use language fluently and flexibly to express one’s thinking and understand others. Persons high on this intelligence are 'Word-smart', i.e. they are sensitive to different shades of word meanings, articulate and create linguistic images in their mind. Poets and writers are very strong in this component of intelligence. 

2. Logical-mathematical intelligence: This type of intelligence deals with abstract reasoning and manipulation of symbols involved in numerical problems. It is exhibited in scientific work. 

3. Spatial intelligence: is used while navigating in space, forming, transforming and using mental images.Sailors, engineers, surgeons, painters etc. have highly developed spatial intelligence. 

4. Musical intelligence: It is the capacity to produce, create and manipulate musical patterns. Persons high on this intelligence are very sensitive to sounds and vibrations, and creating new patterns of sounds. 

5. Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence: 
It requires the skills and dexterity for fine coordinated motor movements, such as those required for dancing, surgery, craft making and the like.

6. Interpersonal intelligence: It requires understanding motives, feelings and behaviours of other people. Sales people , Teachers, Clinicians and religious leaders have high degree of interpersonal intelligence. 

7. Intrapersonal intelligence: It is related to understanding one's self and developing a sense of identity. Persons high on this ability have finer sensibilities regarding their identity, human existence and meaning of life. Philosophers and spiritual leaders present examples of this type of intelligence. 

8. Naturalistic intelligence: This involves complete awareness of our relationship with the natural world. It is useful in recognising the beauty of different species of flora and fauna and making subtle discriminations in the natural world. Hunters, farmers, tourists, bird watchers, zoologists possess more of naturalistic intelligence. 


Stenberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence: 
Another important modern theory of intelligence is one proposed by Robert Sternberg (1985). According to this theory known as the triarchic theory of intelligence, there are actually three basic types of human intelligence, the first is called 

1. Componential or analytic Intelligence: involves the abilities to think critically and analytically. Persons high on this dimension usually excel on standard tests of academic potential and make excellent students. This intelligence has three components, each serving a different function. 

a. The knowledge acquisition component: This is responsible for learning and acquisition of the ways of doing things. 

b. Meta or higher order component: which involves planning concerning what to do and how to do. 

c. Performance component: This involves actually doing things. 

2. Experiential or creative Intelligence: emphasizes insight and the ability to formulate new ideas. Persons who rate high on this dimension excel at zeroing in on what information is crucial in a given situation, and at combining seemingly unrelated facts. It is reflected in creative performance. This is the kind of intelligence shown by many scientific geniuses and inventors, such as Einstein, Newton. 

3. Contextual or practical intelligence: It is the most interesting of all. It involves the ability to deal with environmental demands encountered on a daily basis. Persons high on this aspect easily adapt to their present environment or select a more favourable environment than the existing one, or modify the environment to fit their needs. Therefore, they turn out to be successful in life. 

 According to Sternberg, solving practical problems requires a kind of different intelligence from that required for success in school or other intellectual pursuits. And, as this example suggests, practical intelligence can be valuable in many contexts.
 
 Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence represents the information processing approach to understand intelligence. 


PASS Model/THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE: 

Arguments against a general factor of intelligence arise from logical considerations and from clinical observations. Clinically, in case of brain damage, specific cognitive functions are often spared while others remain impaired. In addition, individuals who have significantly damaged frontal lobe functions may have normal IQ’s. Similarly, some dyslexic children have high IQ’s despite their significant difficulties in reading. These examples challenge the usefulness of a one-dimensional notion of general intelligence.

A general ability view leads to different questions and measures of ability than a view that intelligence is made up of multiple and independent cognitive processes. 

 Addressing these concerns, Das, Naglieri, and Kirby (1994) proposed the planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive (PASS) theory which refers to four kinds of competence. 

1. Planning: Planning processes are required when an individual makes decisions about how to solve a problem, carry out an activity, or compose a narrative. This component involves goal setting, as well as anticipating and monitoring feedback. It allows us to think of possible courses of action, implement them to reach a target and evaluate their effectiveness. If a plan doesn’t work, it is modified to suit the requirements of the task or situation. 

2. Attention or arousal: is the process that allows a person to selectively attend to some stimuli while ignoring others, resist distractions, and maintain vigilance. Arousal and attention enable a person to process information. An optimal level of arousal focuses our attention to the relevant aspects of a problem. Too much or too little arousal would interfere with attention. 

3. Simultaneous processing: one can integrate the information into her/his knowledge system either simultaneously or successively. Simultaneous processing integrates stimuli into groups. As a result, stimuli are seen as whole, each piece being related to others. 

4. Successive processing: includes integrating stimuli in a specific serial order, so that the recall of one leads to the recall of another. For example, to understand English syntax an individual has to process words to determine their grammatical function. Learning of digits, alphabets, multiplication tables etc. are example of successive processing. 

Culture and intelligence: A major characteristic of intelligence is that it helps individual to adapt to their environment. The cultural environment provides a context for intelligence to develop. A person’s intelligence is likely to be tuned by different cultural parameters such as customs, beliefs, attitudes and achievements in art and literature. 

Sternberg’s notion of contextual or practical intelligence implies that intelligence is a product of culture. Vygotsky has argued that culture provides a social context in which people live, grow and understand the world around them. For e.g. In less technologically developed societies, social and emotional skills in relating to people are valued, while in technologically advanced societies, personal achievement founded on abilities of reasoning and judgment is considered to represent intelligence. 

Vygotsky also believed that cultures, like individuals, have a life of their own; they grow and change and in the process specify what will be the end product of successful intellectual development. According to him, while elementary mental functions (e.g. Crying, attending to mothers voice, walking, running,etc) are universal, the manner in which higher mental functions such as problem solving and thinking operate are largely culture-produced. 

Technologically advanced societies adopt child rearing practices that foster skills of generalisation and abstraction, speed, minimal moves, and abstraction, speed, minimal moves, and mental manipulation among children. These societies promote a type of behavior, which can be called technological intelligence. In these societies, persons are well-versed in skills of attention, observation, analysis, performance, speed and achievement orientation. Intelligence tests developed in western cultures look precisely for these skills in an individual. 

Technological intelligence is not so valued in many Asian and African societies. In addition to cognitive competence that is very specific to the individual, the non-western cultures look for skills to relate to others in the society. Some non-western societies value self-reflection and collectivistic orientation as opposed to personal achievement and individualistic orientation. 

Contrary to technological intelligence, intelligence in the Indian tradition can be termed as integral intelligence, which gives emphasis on connectivity with the social and world environment. Indian thinkers view intelligence from a holistic perspective where equal attention is paid to cognitive and non-cognitive processes as well as their integration. 

Intelligence in the Indian thought system is treated as a state, a process, and an entity, the realization of which depends upon one’s own effort, persistence, and motivation. 


MEANING OF APTITUDE: 

An aptitude is a combination of characteristics that indicates an individual’s capacity to acquire some specific knowledge or skill after training. It simply states that you need to possess various qualities in different proportions to learn or become something, such as to acquire ability to speak a language or to become a musician and so on. 

These qualities can be harnessed by appropriate training e.g., If a person does not have special abilities required to become a musician, such as discrimination between pitch, tone, rhythm and aspects of musical sensitivity, he/she would not be a musician, even after a sufficient training. 

Aptitude refers to the potential ability of the individual to perform a task, which generally consists of a combination of abilities. 

Definitions:

According to Bingham, “Aptitude is a measure of the probability of success of an individual with training, in certain type of situation”. 

According to Hahn and Mclean, “It is hidden potential which can be trained”. 

TYPES OF APTITUDE: 

1. Mechanical Aptitude: means the manipulation of objects to achieve desired practical results. It also involves the manipulation of symbols representing the objects, their relationships in time and space as engineering or piloting.
 
2. Clerical aptitude: Super says, “In routine clerical work one would expect speed and accuracy in checking numerical and verbal symbols to be characteristic of the successful worker. There is some justification for referring to this ability as clerical aptitude”. Clerical duties include gathering, classification and presentation of data of all sorts and analysis and use of these data in planning, executing and determining the results of experiment. 

3. Literacy aptitude: it is a recently recognized aptitude. It represents a number of skills like information and literary events, literary composition and appreciation etc. 


GIFTEDNESS MEANING: 

The term ‘gifted’ is an adjective, which refers to a person endowed with one gift or many gifts, exceptionally talented or intelligent. The study of such gifted persons began with the work of Lewis Terman in 1925, who developed intelligence tests for screening populations to identify individuals of superior cognitive ability. Thus, giftedness was defined as light general intelligence as measured by high score on test of intelligence. In recent years, however, giftedness is defined as a superior ability in any worthwhile line in human endeavor including moral, physical, emotional, social, intellectual or aesthetic life of the humanity. 

• Gifted individuals exhibit high level of performance in comparison to their peers living in the same social-cultural background.

 • Giftedness is not restricted to performance, on a test of intelligence. Rather, it is combination of general ability, special talents, self-concept and motivation that predisposes the gifted person to learn, to achieve and strive for excellence. 

• It is not just limited to school related activities but it is the nature and organization of abilities that constitute giftedness. 

Characteristics of Gifted Children: 

A few characteristics of gifted children are as: 
• A higher order in thinking process, problem solving and decision making. 

• High incidence of social and emotional problems. 

• Transferring skills to new problems and solving problems insightfully. 

• Preference for being solitary and is introverted. 

• Independent thinking and non-conformism. 

• High on self-efficacy and internal locus of control. 

• Intrinsically motivated to achieve mastery, derive pleasure from work and having a high selfesteem about their intellectual capacities. 

Identification of Gifted: 
The tests of intelligence and achievement have been most frequently employed for the identification of the gifted children. Many special programmes for gifted children have rather used to cut off points such as IQ’s of 130, 135,150 or 160 or achievement at about 95th percentile. 

However attention is given to the following types of data as an indicator of giftedness:  

Performance on group intelligence test.  Teacher judgment.  
School record, including achievement test scores and teacher grades.  
Performance on individual intelligence test.  
Appraisal of social and emotional maturity and adjustment.  
Parent interviews.  
Pupil ambition and drive. 


Tests of Intelligence: 

We are only familiar with that intelligence of an individual which is manifested by him on an intelligence test or tests. Psychologists have devised so many such tests for the measurement of intelligence. 

Classification of Intelligence Tests: 

 As far as the administrative point of view is concerned the intelligence tests can be classified into two broad categories namely: 

1) Individual tests: In which only one individual is tested at a time. 

2) Group test: In which a group of individuals is tested at a time. 

Another way of classifying the intelligence tests is based on the form of the test. Accordingly there are two types of tests. a) Verbal tests or Language tests. 
b) Non-verbal tests or non-language tests. 

a) Verbal or Language tests: - These tests make use of language. Here the instructions are required in words (either in written or oral form or both). Individuals are required to use language as well as paper and pencil for giving the responses. The test content is loaded with verbal material. 

b) Non-Verbal and Non-Language tests: - These tests involve such activities in which use of language is not necessary. The use of language is eliminated from test content and response except in giving directions. 

The typical examples of such non-verbal tests are performance tests. 

Performance Tests: 
A performance test is an assessment that requires an examinee to actually perform a test or activity, rather simply answering questions referring to specific parts. The purpose is to ensure greater fidelity to what is being tested. 

The main characteristics of these tests are given below:- 

What an individual has to do is indicated by the tester either through oral instructions or by pantomime or signs.
 
Test contents of these tests are in the form of material objects. 

Individual responses depend upon what he does or performs rather than by anything he says or writes. 

Generally these tests are individual tests. As Dr. Pillaj observes, “These cannot be used as group tests, chiefly because it is necessary to supervise the individual testee at work and give him/her necessary directions. 

Individual difference in Intelligence (the Role of Heredity and the Role of environment): 

Human intelligence is clearly the result of the complex interplay between genetic factors and a wide range of environmental conditions. 

Several lines of research offer support for the view that heredity plays an important role in human intelligence. If intelligence is indeed determined by heredity, we would expect that the more closely two persons are related, the more similar their IQs will be. This prediction has generally been confirmed. For example,. The IQs of identical twins raised together correlate +.90, those of brothers and sisters about +.50, and those of cousins about +.15. 

If intelligence is strongly affected by genetic factors, the IQs of adopted children should resemble those of their biological parents more closely than those of their genes than to the persons who raised them. 

In this investigation, the researchers studied 245 children who were placed for adoption by their mothers shortly after birth until they were teenagers. In addition, measures were obtained of their biological mothers ‘intelligence and of their adoptive parents’ intelligence. A comparison group of children who were living with their biological parents was tested in the same manner. The result showed a clear pattern: The correlation between the adopted children’s intelligence and that of their biological parents increased over time, as did the correlation between the intelligence of the control group and that of their parents.In contrast, the correlation between the intelligence of the adopted children and that of their adoptive parents decreased over time. These findings suggest that genetic factors play an important role in intelligence. 

Genetic factors are not only the entire picture where intelligence is concerned, environmental factors/ variables are also important. Changes in environmental factors like better nutrition, increased urbanization, the advent of T.V, and better education, more cognitively demanding jobs, and even exposure to computer games also play a role in intelligence. 

Additional support for the role of environmental factors in intelligence is provided by the findings that many biological factors that children encounter while growing up can affect their intelligence. Prolonged malnutrition can adversely affect IQ. Exposure to such factors as alcohol and drugs, indicate that these factors can also adversely affect intelligence. 

In sum, therefore, many forms of evidence support the view that intelligence is determined, at least in part, by environmental factors. Especially when these are extreme, they may slow- or accelerate- children’s intellectual growth; and this effect, in turn, can have important implications for the societies in which those children will become adults.