Many scholars feel that this is the result of the wholesale importation of intelligence tests from abroad. Such tests are not suited to the environment and cannot truly reflect the intellectual development of Chinese people. Others believe that in being influenced by traditional ideas about intellectual abilities, we are being stupid to be smart.
(1) How many blocks are there in the figure below?
(2) There are four rabbits, seven chickens, and two dogs in a cage. How many feet are there altogether?
(a) 13 (b) 34 (c) 38 (d) 52
(3) Which series is in opposite order to the series:
You probably aren't a stranger to questions like these. All through school-elementary, junior high, senior high, and into college-we have all faced this kind of test. Items like counting how many blocks are in a pile, folding a flat piece of paper into a box, mirroring or splitting a drawing, mathematical calculations and logical deduction tests, analogies and grouping of words are all commonly seen on intelligence and aptitude tests.
The scores these tests provide are seen to show a person's intelligence. Schools often use such scores on tests of spatial or mathematical logic or language ability, which reflect a person's personality or aptitudes, as an academic reference to estimate a student's academic potential or progress.
IQ tests-not intelligent enough?
Many people might view IQ tests as harmless; others may begin to think of themselves as smart, average or stupid based on the scores they receive. Some schools even use IQ scores to assign students to classes. At times, IQ scores might be a preliminary qualification: the majority of military, police, and officer candidate examinations, as well as entrance exams for jobs in the civil service, financial institutions or business include IQ test items.
However, as in the example of author Lin Ching-hsuen, people are often wrongly categorized based on these test results, and more and more doubts are being cast on this type of testing. This has been particularly true in recent years with Taiwan's active promotion of special gifted and talented programs. Because such a large proportion of gifted students are chosen based on IQ tests, the question of the practicality and fairness of such measures has stirred up a great deal of controversy.
As an example, the Science Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University tracked five hundred gifted high school students and found that about seventy percent of these "talented" students achieved only average grades after entering college, and indeed hadn't shown outstanding performance in the gifted and talented program during high school.
The Ministry of Education and the National Science Council have produced an "Experimental Guidance Plan for Gifted and Talented High School Students in Mathematics and the Sciences," which uses faculty and testing facilities from colleges to provide a head start on nurturing high school students with special talents or strong interest in mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
The results? A number of students coming out of this program, despite having the advantage of the support of college faculty, were foiled by the intelligence tests required to continue in the program and college. Several years ago, an outstanding physics student who had been mentored by Tsinghua University, and whose professors regarded him as an almost freakish talent, was unable to pass the intelligence tests necessary to be admitted to university via the program.
Such results lead people to question whether such gifted students may not have been wrongly chosen. IQ tests have been fingered as a partial cause for such biased selection.
"Most IQ tests used in Taiwan are purchased from foreign countries and merely translated or edited before use. Can such tests, many dating from the early days of IQ testing and consisting of conventional questions brought in from abroad, really reflect the special qualities of individual intelligence?" Tseng Chi-lang, head of the Cognitive Science Center at Chung Cheng University, has his doubts.
Because problems are not readily apparent at the time gifted and talented students are selected, the National Science Council's Science Education Office unveiled another plan three years ago for an in-depth investigation of the qualities needed by today's gifted and talented science students. The aim was to discuss and develop suitable methods of intelligence testing to meet modern needs. The study, headed by Tseng Chi-lang, includes research into spatial and language skills.
Does speed mean intelligence?
The investigation points out that current intelligence tests are given under conditions where time pressure prevents students from using tools or methods which might help them to think. What the test reflects is the student's skill at answering, and many of the gifted students selected with such measures are "grade-gifted": in actuality, they stand out only by virtue of their high test scores, not because they possess particularly outstanding aptitudes or talents. For a number of such students, these high scores are the result of cram school classes.
Furthermore, as Professor Tseng points out, when one takes successful scientists as models, exploring their special characteristics and analyzing the factors behind their successes, one finds that "their success depends mostly on their working strategies and their problem-solving abilities." Such qualities are precisely those for which testing is problematic using current IQ measures.
In "The Rise and Fall of Chinese Genius," educational psychologist and American University professor Kuo You-yu cites the story of Cao Chong weighing the elephant to illustrate how problem solving abilities have been regarded by Chinese people as a manifestation of genius from ancient times.
On one occasion, Sun Chuan gave Cao Cao an elephant. Cao Cao wanted very much to know how much this elephant weighed, but the elephant was too large to weigh. None of his officials could come up with a way to weigh the animal. Cao Cao's young son Cao Chong was only eight years old at the time, but he came up with the idea of having the elephant put into a boat and marking the water line on the side of the boat, then filling the boat with stones after taking the elephant off. When the water level reached the mark which had been drawn on the side of the boat, the stones were taken out and weighed, giving the weight of the elephant. Cao Chong was hailed as a child prodigy as a result of this idea.
Associate Professor Chiang Chia-tang, of the Department of Special Education at Changhwa Normal University, participated in the National Science Council project, designing questions to test spatial abilities. Her test is given without a time limit, and the testee is asked to record methods and thoughts about solving the problems during the course of the test. "Their thinking is extremely varied and rich. Some people react directly, some go at it obliquely, and still others take an entirely different angle, providing all different kinds of answers. It's a very creative thing," she says.
Problem solving: method and persistence
Dr. Chiang's research has shown that for those students willing to spend a long time mulling over the meaning of a question, a comfortable amount of time to give answers meant comprehensive planning. After receiving the test paper, these students would first browse through the entire paper, then decide the order in which they would tackle the questions. They took longer before beginning to answer, but when they did start, they already had a firm idea of how to proceed and had already decided on strategies and methods for answering. "This habit of planning before acting, and of regarding an overall plan as more important than immediate reaction, is the hallmark of gifted students."
"Furthermore, people who use more time on the test are really showing their determination in that they can keep at it until they have completed all the questions," says another professor working on the project, Professor Hung Lan of National Chungcheng University's Cognitive Science Center. "If they run into a difficult problem, they put it aside for the moment, but they keep mulling it over. When they're on another question, and are able to draw an analogy to the first problem as a result, they jump back to the earlier question."
Dr. Hung added, "However, right now many students are under time pressure when testing, and they skip questions for the sake of getting a higher grade. They look at the questions, and do the easier ones first; as a result, the harder ones get left out." Students who lack will power find it harder to hold fast to their ambitions and develop talent. This could be one reason that some of the students who are chosen early as gifted and talented fail to live up to such early expectations.
"If you think of the really major things that change people's lives, their greatness doesn't come from the speed at which they were completed. It comes from their inherent elegance and creativity. Cao Xueqin spent half a lifetime writing The Dream of the Red Chamber, but it would be hard to say that his lack of speed makes the work any less excellent," says Chiang.
Professor Liao Chun-chen, Dean of the College of Sciences of Tsinghua University and head of the Experimental Guidance Plan for Gifted and Talented High School Students in Mathematics and the Sciences for the North and Central Taiwan Region feels that intelligence is not the only factor which influences success in scientific research; an individual's behavior is a more important component. For example, a person's methods in and attitudes toward doing research, as well as leadership and self-expression skills, are all indispensable prerequisites for a successful scientist. However, these characteristics are difficult to develop quickly, and are definitely not something which can be thoroughly measured using a single test.
As a result, in selecting and training high school students, Liao does not use intelligence tests. Instead, school recommendations, written tests and interviews are used to explore the students' interest and potential for academics.
Untestable cultural differences
"The intelligence tests in use in Taiwan today are mostly direct translations or edited versions of tests brought in from foreign countries. Differences between countries and cultures can make these modified instruments unsuitable for use and influence the accuracy of the tests." Tseng Chi-lang says that another major point in his plan is to bring about discussion of whether the results from intelligence tests now used are inaccurate due to language differences.
Taking words as an example, the average intelligence test will often consider the size of an individual's vocabulary in order to assess that person's language ability. Tseng Chi-lang says that studies have shown that when a child graduates from primary school in the United States, he can read tens of thousands of English words, while a child completing elementary school in Taiwan will only be able to recognize about three thousand individual Chinese characters. From this angle, Taiwanese children might seem to have less language ability.
"But this discrepancy is related to the essential differences in the structure of vocabulary between the two languages. English vocabulary is circumscribed: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs all have their own different word forms. Vocabulary in Chinese, however, comes from combining individual characters. Different combinations can give rise to tens of thousands of variations." He asks which child shows more knowledge or a better grasp of vocabulary: the child who can memorize words, or the child who understands how to manipulate the items in his vocabulary?
Differences in grammar, writing systems and phonology between the two languages are also marked. The portion of Dr. Tseng's project involving research into language began only this past August, so it is difficult to make any concrete assertions. Still, other educators have also made note of the content of current intelligence tests, and a few areas are clearly inseparable from a person's living environment.
Hsu Hsia-pai, a teacher at Tungmen Elementary School in Hsinchu, said that in her experience, the intelligence tests used in elementary schools often contain many foreign words, or references to things which Taiwanese elementary school students haven't encountered before. "For example, the word 'hinge'-in the US, where people are into do-it-yourself, a child might have heard that word, but in Taiwan, even many adults wouldn't know it. Using that word on a test for primary school students is not appropriate here."
On the other hand, Chinese also has some special characteristics that English lacks. In You Can't Draw Straight Lines Without a Ruler, Liu Chun-yi, a teacher at Lee-ming Junior College, discusses the problems of Chinese for science education, saying that Chinese, with its one-square-per-character form, is more convenient than English letters for teaching science. For example, Chinese characters for the words "oxygen," "hydrogen," "nitrogen" and "chlorine" all contain the "gas radical"-that is, a portion of all these characters is a common element which shows that the meaning of the character has the sense of air or gas. The characters for elements like carbon, silicon, phosphorus, and arsenic all contain the "stone" or "mineral" radical, and the Chinese characters for gold, silver, aluminum and tin all show the "metal" radical. With this system, students can glance at the characters and know which elements are gaseous and which are solids or metals. And the character for the one metal normally found in liquid form, mercury, sports a water radical, making its liquid nature easy to remember.
"So while students overseas might get a test question like 'Is oxygen a gas or a liquid?', Chinese teachers would never ask this, because the Chinese character for oxygen tells you immediately that oxygen is a gas. Even the names for chemical elements, which are combinations of characters like 佈の否_" ("two oxygen-ated carbon") for "carbon dioxide," show the chemical formula clearly. Chinese characters for many organic compounds, such as acids, alcohols, esters, and hydroxyls, have clues to the meaning within the written form, which makes the words easier to memorize. It's not like English, where you end up with extremely long terms."
Chinese views of the child prodigy
Apart from the doubts being cast on the screening tools, some scholars feel that one of the fundamental reasons why Taiwan's gifted and talented education programs are not performing as well as originally planned lies in traditional cultural views. For example, Chinese people traditionally place a high value on "early prodigies," and this in turn is reflected in the ways gifted and talented students are identified.
In Inventing Psychology, Kuo You-yu did a study of the lives of famous Chinese people, and found that the positive terms used to praise or describe them were often traditional phrases such as "wrote beautifully at an early age," "photographic memory," "can read ten lines at a glance," "encyclopedic knowledge," "rare prodigy," "a standout from youth," and so on. "Speaking in terms of modern psychology, these descriptions have to do mostly with knowledge and memory, and the need to show oneself as outstanding from an early age. This view of talent not only limits the scope of intelligence involved in being talented, but also the age of talent," the book points out.
National Taiwan Normal University Special Education Professor Wu Wu-tian also states that our education of the gifted and talented derives from the importance placed on "child prodigies" in ancient times. In the Eastern Han, talented youngsters were sought to enter the Imperial Academy; in the Tang and Yuan Dynasties, special programs was established for prodigies, and in the Ming Dynasty, the Emperor himself personally recruited and tested particularly talented children. In modern times, outstanding youth still attract attention. The fourth annual National Education Conference in 1962 proposed a plan to select talented youngsters for special training.
"Under the influence of this kind of value system, people are proud if they have a gifted child in their household, and feel that the earlier the child begins study, the better," says Professor Wu. As a result, many parents send their children to cram schools so that they will perform well enough on intelligence tests to be selected as gifted, a practice which skews the test results.
The problem here is whether or not the over-emphasis on intelligence is creating an "IQ Thought Model." Professor Hong says that it is undeniable that intelligence testing can very accurately reflect "the degree to which a testee can cooperate, and whether or not he can concentrate on completing a series of unrelated tasks under time restraints."
However, she emphasizes that intelligence is not one concrete item, but rather a group of abilities working in concert-memory, language, visualization, consciousness, and attention. Underlying these abilities are many concerted processes.
The idea of intelligence is like that of life in that neither is one discrete and measurable item. Both consist of many contrasting and independent phenomena.
The Asian EQ philosophy
In actuality, different cultures and societies have radically different definitions of intelligence. The well-known American psychologist Howard Gardner, in a study on intelligence done at Harvard University, showed that intelligence testing pigeonholed human intelligence too narrowly. From the literature, he categorized six types of intelligence which are attributable to neurobiology: linguistic, musical, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic and personal. Another scholar, J.P. Guilford, put forth a theoretical structure of intelligence featuring 180 different types. From these examples, it is obvious that intelligence is extremely diverse in nature. No one intelligence test is currently capable of ferreting out more than ten types of intelligence.
Gardner feels that American society places too much emphasis on verbal and mathematical or logical intelligence, the types most often tested by contemporary IQ tests, to the neglect of the other four types.
Gardner indicates that traditional ideas of intelligence all revolve around a narrow scope of linguistic and arithmetical ability, which are what intelligence tests are best able to directly predict. However, while actual classroom performance or academic success can be predicted with such tests, activities outside of school are much more difficult to touch upon. For example, in a primitive society where hunting is necessary for survival, physical intelligence is much more important. In Japanese society, interpersonal intelligence is more valued, and proper relationships between people and group leadership are hallmarks of this culture.
Recently in Taiwan, the best-seller Emotional Intelligence has attracted much attention. The book mentions the emphasis of Asian cultures on "self-motivation," and puts forth this emotional intelligence as a reason for the standout performance of Asians in the United States.
The book cites research studies which show that Asian children in the United States have an average intelligence quotient which is only two or three points higher than that of Caucasian children. However, the Asians excel in their careers, and are disproportionately successful in fields like medicine and law which require high ability. "The reason seems to be that from the earliest years of school, Asian children work harder than whites. Sanford Dorenbusch, a Stanford sociologist who studied more than ten thousand highschool students, found that Asian- Americans spent 40 percent more time doing homework than did other students."
Emotional Intelligence quotes Dorenbusch's comment: "While most American parents are willing to accept a child's weak areas and emphasize the strengths, for Asians, the attitude is that if you're not doing well, the answer is to study later at night, and if you still don't do well, to get up and study earlier in the morning. They believe that anyone can do well in school with the right effort." In other words, Asians' strong cultural work ethic gives them higher motivation, zeal and persistence.
To put it another way, the idea that "hard work can make up for lack of intelligence" can be seen as a kind of Chinese cultural intelligence. Isn't that just the kind of persistence which today's intelligence tests fail to measure?
I've been born. . . I must have some talents
Tseng Chi-lang states that with all the emphasis placed on high or low intelligence, what really bears exploration is what the components of intelligence actually are. If those components could be individually teased out, and society made to accept a broadly diversified notion of intelligence, even mentally-retarded children would have space to develop.
As psychologist Gardner puts it: 'The time has come, to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. . . . We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there."
Doesn't that sound like the very idea Confucius put forth some 2000 years ago, when he emphasized that "one should teach anyone who wishes to learn" and "teach according to the student"?
p.111
Smart children appeal to everyone, but what makes a kid smart? As a result of different values stemming from different eras and different cultures, there is no one universal standard of intelligence. (photo by Diago Chiu)
p.112
Chinese children excel at mathematical calculations, the result of long periods of practice and training. Is this a sign of a high I.Q.? Or is it really E.Q.? (photo by Lily Huang)
p.113
Chinese characters can be manipulated endlessly to achieve different effects. The ancient practice of judging talent using the writing of couplets is a good example. (Sinorama file photo)
p.114
Space is a three-dimensional concept. In pencil-and-paper tests, space can only be represented by pictorial shapes. Some experts have discovered that when children take tests, they display different results than when they play.
p.115
Although constant practice can teach an individual to perform better on a test, experts say that too much practice can bring unwarranted pressure to bear on children, and cause frustration.
p.116
Intelligence is not the only factor which influences a person's success in scientific research. Other factors, such as research methods and attitudes toward research, as well as persistence, are also indispensable. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)
p.117
Nobel Laureate Lee Yuan-tseh has long worked for educational reform, and hopes to reduce the emphasis placed on I.Q. tests in the system. This will provide more varied opportunities for children and help break through the "I.Q. Thought Model".
Space is a three-dimensional concept. In pencil-and-paper tests, space c an only be represented by pictorial shapes. Some experts have discovered that when child ren take tests, they display different results than when they play.
Although constant practice can teach an individual to perform better on a test, experts say that too much practice can bring unwarranted pressure to bear on children,and cause frustration.
Intelligence is not the only factor which influences a person's success in scientific research. Other factors, such as research methods and attitudes toward research, a s well as persistence, are also indispensable. （photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang）
Nobel Laureate Lee Yuan-tseh has long worked for educational reform, and hopes to reduce the emphasis placed on I.Q. tests in the system. This will provide more varied opportunities for children and help break through the "I.Q. Thought Mode!".
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