Theories of Multiple Intelligence

Gift of Fire (Journal of the Prometheus Society ^ | Sept 1988 | Grady Towers

[coloradan]

I have an a sufficiently large vocabulary that I read the article and comprehended it without having to open another reference source.

This article doesn't need a 160 IQ to comprehend it, it's not designed to test the limits of anyone's verbal comprehension.

With respect to verbal items being on an IQ test, the following is from Ron Hoeflin, who has written several high-range tests including the widely-known "mega test" that appeared in Omni magazine about 15 years ago.

"A comment on verbal intelligence: Some people wonder about the value of verbal items as a measure of "intelligence," since trying such items seems to involve little or no intellectual effort. From the purely statistical standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a wide variety of test items. See for example the book Intelligence in the United States, published around 1958, for ample documentation. On the purely intuitive level, one might say that learning a language, including vocabulary, is for the child like decoding hieroglyphics. The brighter child will master this decoding process far more readily than the average child. Later, of course, one can artificially boost the size of one's vocabulary, but cleverly designed tests of verbal intelligence can get around this problem by relying on somewhat atypical verbal items that one would be unlikely to pick up through a "vocabulary improvement" course but that a gifted child would be likely to have picked up if he has been reasonably inquisitive -- and isn't inquisitiveness an important part of intelligence? Finally, to use a computer analogy, a powerful computer without adequate software (analogous to verbal intelligence in humans) would be relatively unproductive no matter how powerful the hardware. -- RKH"

This comment appears with his "Ultra Test" located here:

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html

The Ultra Test is the lowest-range test of all his tests, other high-range tests including some by Hoeflin and many by others are located at Miyaguchi's site, "Uncommonly difficult IQ tests," linked at the bottom of the above page.