But I prefer to discuss the kind of intelligence that standardized IQ tests claim to measure. But let me be clear here.
Standardized IQ tests do NOT measure cognitive potentiality.
But standardized IQ tests do measure the cognitive potentiality that has been actuated in the students up to the time when they took the IQ tests.
Can students further actuate their cognitive potentiality and thereby increase their scores on standardized IQ tests?
No doubt about it -- they can.
However, students can also experience a subsequent drop in their IQ test scores. When this kind of drop occurs, it is referred to as "backsliding" because their test scores slide backwards.
Therefore, we should also discuss what the factors may be that contribute to the well-known phenomenon of "backsliding" on standardized IQ tests.
Long before Gardner suggested that we should think of multiple intelligences, Arthur R. Jensen of Berkeley suggested that standardized IQ tests actually measure two different kinds of intelligence, which he referred to as Level I and Level II.
But what kinds of variables contribute to the development of Levels I and II cognitive potentialities?
You see, Jensen found that there were not statistically significant differences in the group mean scores of different kinds of students in the measured development (actuation) of Level I.
But there were statistically significant differences in the group mean scores of the same groups of students in the measured development (actuation) of Level II.
Now, for all practical purposes, the Bible is an anthology of thought and expression based on Level I, as are the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
But ancient Greek philosophical thought as exemplified in the works of Plato and Aristotle involves manifestations of Level II.
See, for example, A. R. Jensen and R. A. Figueroa, "Forward and Backward Digit Span Interaction with Race and IQ: Predictions from Jensen's Theory" in the Journal of Educational Psychology, volume 67 (1975): pages 882-893.
Now, in the controversial 800-page book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1994), Richard J. Hernstein and Charles A. Murray explore various kinds of factors that may contribute to the actuation of cognitive potentiality -- Jensen's Level I and Level II.
However in my controversial 1983 article about IQ, I set forth a possible environmental explanation that Hernstein and Murray did not discuss.
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