Instrumental and Componential Approaches to the Nature and Training of Intelligence
2013
Probably the most famous (or, perhaps, infamous) single statement ever made about attempts to remediate apparent deficiencies in mental abilities and scholastic achievements was Jensen’s (1969) statement that “compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed” (p. 2). According to Jensen, the logic underlying many compensatory education programs has been that: since the IQ is known to predict scholastic performance better han any other single measurable attribute of the child, it is believed, whether rightly or wrongly, that if the child’s IQ can be appreciably raised, academic achievement by and large will take care of itself, given normal motivation and standard instruction. Children with average or above-average IQs generally do well in school without much special attention. So the remedy deemed logical for children who would do poorly in school is to boost their IQs up to where they can perform like the majority-in short to make them all at least average children, (p. 5) On the one hand, there are a number of respects in which people could take and have taken issue with all the points Jensen raised in these claims (see Environment, heredity, and intelligence, 1969). For example, there have been at least some successful programs of compensatory education (see Feuerstein, 1979, 1980), and probably very few people truly believe that merely raising IQ scores will in and by itself result in the disappearance of the woes that our educational system, our society, and even, in some cases, our genes have wrought. On the other hand, if one can see past Jensen’s penchant for overstatement, there are some grains of truth in weaker versions of what he is saying. Many people would agree that compensatory education programs have not met initial hopes and expectations; that many of these programs have been based upon the hope that training the skills needed for improved performance on IQ tests would result in at least some gain in scholastic performance or potential; and that there is much room for improvement in our attempts to train the skills that are needed for enhanced performance on IQ tests, or that are central to intellectual functioning, whether or not these skills are measured by IQ tests.