anbuend wrote:
I know you mean well but I'd prefer when people don't say things like that to me. (It's one reason I don't always mention my IQ.) It makes it sound like they think there really is a thing called an "IQ" that is inside of a person, instead of inside of a test score. What I write is the writing of someone with an 85 IQ because that's what an IQ is it's a test score. Not an attribute of the person. I'd rather people open their minds about what's possible for a person of a certain IQ to do, instead of writing off their IQ once they show a skill you don't associate with that number.
My thinking on this subject has bounced all over the place over the years.
I remember being taken by my parents to an institutional setting when I was in preschool or kindergarten. All I remember was being asked to guide some balls through a maze and getting a rubber frog as a prize. That sounds like part of an IQ test for children too young to read. Whatever the results may have been, I was put in neither gifted nor special education so if it was an IQ test the results must have been in the 80-120 center of the bell curve. My parents have no memory of this so who knows. Or maybe they remember but don't want to talk about it because they are ashamed of thinking I might have been mentally ret*d due to something or other I did or didn't do or they are disappointed they thought I was gifted but am actually average. A moot point now. But if I have ever received a test score, I don't know what it is.
The lack of knowing what my test score is (or would have been if tested) hasn't stopped me from having assumptions over the years. For most of my life, I've had the standard assumption that IQ is an inherent quantity, measurable by tests. I learned over the years about past cultural biases in older tests that would penalize people for not knowing what a tea cozy was or some silly thing, but I assumed that such things had been sorted out by now. I also read about how enviromental things such as Head Start education or lead paint could raise or lower children's IQ scores. This didn't change my assumptions about its' inherent nature. It just made me think that education could bring a child up to the full IQ potential they were born with or damage what they had been born with. I still thought of it as fixed, but that enviroment could reveal or suppress what was inherently there.
Then came the Bell Curve wars. Suddenly everybody was talking about IQ and IQ tests. But the upshot of all that was that people came down on the side of flawed testing of an inherent quality (me and many others) or accurate testing of an inherent quality (the authors and many others).
My own dyscalcula made me investigate the concept of learning disabilities (and buy a calculator as soon as they became small and affordable which was in the 80's). If you read
anything about learning disabilities, the core concept is that a person scores average or above average on an IQ test in order to qualify for learning disabled rather than mentally ret*d if they are having academic problems. The hard and immovable line seems to be that if you score above the mental retardation cut-off, your academic problems can be addressed with various workarounds because you are smart, just learning disabled. The sky is the limit once you get those workarounds in place. But if you score below the cut-off, there is a very low ceiling to what you can ever do mentally, no matter how much education you get.
As part of a routine autism psych workup, my daughter got an IQ test. She scored really low. How low is not something I'm about to post but it was well below the mental retardation cut-off. I'm not one of those parents who can protest "but she reads 3 grades above grade level. But she can do calculus in her head". She can't. She really does have a lot of problems understanding certain things and pretty serious academic difficulties. So I went through a period of mourning that she would be forever trapped in a fog of confusion, unable to understand basic things because of that low score. Then I googled "autism and IQ testing" and found WP. It comes up in the google hits for that because there's a thread about IQ testing about once a week.
So I went through the archives and read every thread about IQ. Some posts pointed out, with linked references, that autistic people test artificially low on conventional IQ tests. I showed these to my husband. There was much rejoicing. She and other autistic people were artificially testing low through a form of cultural bias in the tests that was similar to the cultural bias of 1930's tests that lowered black childrens' scores. This didn't shake my assumptions of IQ. It merely shook my assumptions (in a good way) that modern IQ tests had managed to remove all the cultural bias and therefore were accurate.
Many posts in those archived threads I read were posts like the one you are replying to. A verbally agile person would post their own low score and somebody else would say "I can tell from your post that the low score is innaccurate". After I got comfortable on WP and posting in those threads myself, some of those posts were made by me. I was giddy with the idea that my daughter's own low score was an artifact of NT cultural bias in the test.
So for awhile (as I made posts similar to the one you are responding to) my thought was that IQ is inherent and more or less fixed (outside of minor enviromental tweaks) but that current IQ tests are little better than past IQ tests at accurately measuring it. Autistic people who really had IQs >100 were getting scores <70. They just
seemed mentally ret*d. They weren't really. There are plenty of anecdotes on the web of catapulting scores once somebody gets a communication device.
Then I had another thought. What if it isn't merely that people are being mislabeled as mentally ret*d when they aren't, but that mentally ret*d people are considerably smarter than I ever imagined. The writings of and interviews with people who have Down's Syndrome made me think that. This elusive thing we call "intelligence" is not necessarily linear so that somebody who scores 65 no matter how expertly the test is designed can nevertheless think quite well because even the best IQ test only measures a tiny sliver of what goes on in the human brain. The work of Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences talks about that. But it's probably more than even he thought.
I didn't want the rigidity of ABA for my daughter so I found Greenspan and his Floortime therapies for children with autism. The Floortime therapies are built around the concept that thinking is not a fixed skill but rather something that develops in certain enviroments or does not in other enviroments. Institutions are one of those enviroments which doesn't let it develop, which may be part of where the "75% of autistic people are mentally ret*d" figure came from.
But still unchalleneged was my core assumption that intelligent is better than not intelligent. That's one I'm still working on. The posts of Callista and b9 especially have been something I read and re-read to get there.
Did anybody make it all the way to the end of this horrifically long post? Congratulations!
02 Mar 2011, 11:30 pm
1% of our several THOUSAND members should be pretty significant.
