Экзаменационный билет №3

Intelligence tests.

Piaget’s curiosity about children’s thought processes was initially triggered by his work on early intelligence tests being developed in Paris. At the beginning of the 20^th century, school administrators in that city asked the psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a way of identifying children who could not handle academic work and who should be removed from regular classes and given special training. The test that Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon developed was the forerunner of psychometric tests, used for children of all levels of ability, which try to score intelligence by numbers.

In contrast with Piaget’s concern with qualitative change, the goal of psychometric testing is to measure quantitatively the factors that make up intelligence, such as comprehension and reasoning. IQ (intelligence quotient) tests consist of questions or tasks that are supposed to show how much of these abilities a person has, by comparing her or his performance with that of other test-takers. A child’s score is compared with standardized norms - standards obtained from the scores of a large, representative sample of children of the same age who were given the test while it was being developed.

Test developers devise techniques to try to ensure that tests have high validity (that is, that tests measure the abilities they claim to measure) and reliability (that is, that test results are reasonably consistent from time to another). For school-age children, intelligence test scores can predict school performance fairly accurately and reliably.

Экзаменационный билет №4

Handedness.

Handedness, the preference for using one hand over the other, is usually evident by 3 years of age. About 9 out of 10 children and adults are right-handed. This propensity seems to reflect the usual dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the body. In people whose brains are more symmetrical, the right hemisphere tends to dominate, making them left-handed. Boys are more likely to be left-handed than girls. So are children who suffered difficult births and those whose maturation is delayed.

Although some scientists have suggested that handedness is genetic, twin studies indicate otherwise: Identical twins are no more likely to be concordant for handedness than fraternal twins or any two people of the general population. Some research suggests that fetal position may be a factor.

Both “lefties” and “righties” have advantages and disadvantages. “Lefties” tend to have a highly developed spatial imagination; this may explain the high proportion of left-handed architects. Left-handed people may be more likely to be academically gifted. Among more than 100,000 twelve- and thirteen-year olds who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, 20 percent of the top-scoring 300 children were left-handed, twice the rate in the general population. On the other hand, left-handed children tend to have more accidents and to suffer from allergies, sleep problems, and migraine headaches.

Many cultures have viewed left-handedness as abnormal and have tried to discourage it. In Japan, for example, many parents try to force their children to use the right hand, even by binding the left hand with tape. However, science has found no reason for such practices, and prejudice against left-handedness is waning.