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Testing a Sample of Iqs Compared to the Population Mean

Last reviewed: May 3, 2014 ~3 min read

¶ … colloquially individuals may think that some people are smarter than others, the more scientific term for the concept of being smart is intelligence. The notion of measuring a person's intelligence was first pursued in the early 1900s by Alfred Binet (Kamin, 1995). The French government was looking for a way in which to help predict which students would have the most difficulty in school (Kamin, 1995), so they hired Alfred Binet, who was a psychologist, to develop a test. Binet developed the first intelligence test, a version of which is still used today (Kamin, 1995). Intelligence testing really took off during World War I, when the U.S. army wanted a way to screen a high number of army recruits. This lead to the development of new forms of intelligence tests in order to determine which army recruits were of a higher intelligence and would be successfully in leadership roles (McGuire, 1994).

The modern intelligence quotient, or IQ, is based on standardized tests where the mean score of the sample is defined as 100 (Neisser, 1997). With one standard deviation being +/- 15, approximately 95% of all humans have an IQ score somewhere within the range of 70 and 130. IQ scores have been found to be very closely related to a number of achievement measures, such as educational achievement and job performance, as well as difficulties, such as whether or not an individual might be considered special needs.

Method

Ten participants completed a standard measure of intelligence in order to provide their IQ scores. In order to determine whether the IQ scores for this set of ten participants is statistically higher than the mean IQ score of the general population, one-sample t-tests were conducted.

Results

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References
5 sources cited in this paper
  • Gupta, V. (1999). SPSS for Beginners. 1st Books Library.
  • Kamin, L.J. (1995). The pioneers of IQ testing. In Ressell Jacoby & Naomi Glauberman (Eds.), The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Times Books.
  • McGuire, F. (1994). Army alpha and beta tests of intelligence. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Intelligence. New York: Macmillan.
  • Neisser, U. (1997). Rising scores on intelligence tests. American Scientist, 85, 440-447.
  • SPSS Inc. (1999). SPSS Base 10. For Windows User’s Guide. SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL.
Cite This Paper
PaperDue. (2014). Testing a Sample of Iqs Compared to the Population Mean. PaperDue. https://paperdue.com/essay/testing-a-sample-of-iqs-compared-to-the-188836

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