22 Facts About IQ

The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests at University of Breslau he advocated in a 1912 book.

IQ'storically, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months.

IQ scores have been shown to be associated with such factors as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity and mortality, parental social status, and perinatal environment.

IQ scores are used for educational placement, assessment of intellectual disability, and evaluating job applicants.

IQ hypothesized that there should exist a correlation between intelligence and other observable traits such as reflexes, muscle grip, and head size.

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IQ set up the first mental testing center in the world in 1882 and he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development" in 1883, in which he set out his theories.

IQ observed that children's school grades across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated, and reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general mental ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tests.

IQ suggested that all mental performance could be conceptualized in terms of a single general ability factor and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors.

IQ believed that differences in a person's ability were acquired primarily through genetics and that eugenics could be implemented through selective breeding in order for the human race to improve in its overall quality, therefore allowing for humans to direct their own evolution.

IQ quickly extended the use of the scale to the public schools, to immigration and to a court of law .

IQ argued that "feeble-mindedness" was caused by heredity, and thus feeble-minded people should be prevented from giving birth, either by institutional isolation or sterilization surgeries.

An alternative to standard IQ tests, meant to test the proximal development of children, originated in the writings of psychologist Lev Vygotsky during his last two years of his life.

IQ asks whether it represents a real increase in intelligence beyond IQ scores.

Decades, practitioners' handbooks and textbooks on IQ testing have reported IQ declines with age after the beginning of adulthood.

General figure for the heritability of IQ, according to an American Psychological Association report, is 0.

Dickens and Flynn have argued that genes for high IQ initiate an environment-shaping feedback cycle, with genetic effects causing bright children to seek out more stimulating environments that then further increase their IQ.

The authors suggest that programs aiming to increase IQ would be most likely to produce long-term IQ gains if they enduringly raised children's drive to seek out cognitively demanding experiences.

That said, for highly qualified activities low IQ scores are more likely to be a barrier to adequate performance, whereas for minimally-skilled activities, athletic strength is more likely to influence performance.

The American Psychological Association's 1995 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that IQ scores accounted for about a quarter of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance.

However, a systematic analysis by William Dickens and James Flynn showed the gap between black and white Americans to have closed dramatically during the period between 1972 and 2002, suggesting that, in their words, the "constancy of the Black-White IQ gap is a myth".

Currently, most IQ tests, including popular batteries such as the WAIS and the WISC-R, are constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males.

IQ classification was preceded historically by attempts to classify human beings by general ability based on other forms of behavioral observation.