Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns

Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns is a report issued in 1995 by a task force created by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The Board of Scientific Affairs (BSA) of the APA had concluded that after the publication of The Bell Curve (1994) and the following debate that there were "serious misunderstandings" and "that there was urgent need for an authoritative report on these issues—one that all sides could use as a basis for discussion". Furthermore, "Another unfortunate aspect of the debate was that many participants made little effort to distinguish scientific issues from political ones, Research findings were often assessed not so much on their merits or their scientific standing as on their supposed political implications." The report stated that "The charge to our Task Force was to prepare a dispassionate survey of the state of the art: to make clear what has been scientifically established, what is presently in dispute, and what is still unknown. In fulfilling that charge, the only recommendations we shall make are for further research and calmer debate."

It was published on August 7, 1995. It was authored by a task force of 11 experts. The APA Board on the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (BAPPI) nominated one member of the Task Force. The Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessment nominated another. A third was nominated by the Council of Representatives. The other members were chosen by an extended consultative process with the aim of representing a broad range of expertise and opinion. Ulric Neisser was appointed Chair. Three of the experts were also among the 52 signatories to "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", an editorial published in 1994. Members of BSA and BAPPI were asked to comment on a preliminary draft of the report. The entire Task Force gave unanimous support to the final report. An edited version of "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" was published in the journal American Psychologist in February 1996.

"Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" stated that many different theories of intelligence have been proposed. Many questions were still unanswered. Most research had been done on psychometric testing which was also by far the most widely used in practical settings. Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests do correlate with one another and that the view that the general intelligence factor (g) is a statistical artifact is a minority one. IQ scores are fairly stable during development in the sense that while a child reasoning ability increases, the child relative ranking in comparison to that of other individuals of the same age is fairly stable during development. The report stated that IQ scores measure important skills as they correlate fairly well (0.5) with grades. This implied that the explained variance (given certain linear assumptions) is 25%. "Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. There may be styles of teaching and methods of instruction that will decrease or increase this correlation, but none that consistently eliminates it has yet been found." IQ scores also correlated with school achievement tests designed to measure knowledge of the curriculum. Other personal characteristics affecting this may be persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study which may be influenced by the degree of encouragement for academic achievement a child receives and more general cultural factors. Test scores were the best single predictor of an individual's years of education. They were somewhat more important than social class as measured by occupation/education of parents.

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