Intelligence and Intelligence Testing by Fletcher, Richard B, Hattie, John published by Routledge

by Richard Fletcher

Excellent Book

Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Richard Alexander Fletcher was a historian who specialized in the medieval period. He was Professor of History at the University of York and one of the outstanding talents in English and Spanish medieval scholarship.

Reviews

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read the full book as I have read enough books about IQ already and this one is not a top tier one anyhow. It's a very short and simple intro to IQ research where the authors then later go into an IQ test they made for a TV show, Test the Nation: New Zealand. Unfortunately they only loosely describe the making of the test and just mention that it took 3 weeks to make 100 items and how they needed variety in the test items to make it fit for the show. They also wanted it to be easy and largely focus on below 125 IQ as it was made to entertain people and make them feel smart. They go over the data they got, but yet again don't go into details. I think this whole book would have worked better as a 40 page paper without any of the intro stuff that you can read in 100 other books anyhow. If they wanted to write a smash hit they would have needed to explain how they made the test in details step for step. They only allude to items here and don't go over each group carefully. Having a book describe the full making of an IQ test would have been amazing.

It's an intro to IQ for the newcomers. And it seems fine enough. It does skip all the controversial findings or often loosely disputes them like disputing the country IQ studies because the average IQ of the world is below 100. Yet that's quite a misunderstanding as the average of 100 is what you aim for when creating a test for a specific group. No one is taking the world IQ into account when making an IQ test for a specific country or region. The world average could be 120 or 80 if you compared it to an average of a single nation.

It is absurd to claim a country has an average IQ so low, based on so few, leading to such a ridiculous average. Something is wrong, for example, when it is noted that the overall average IQ score from the 81 countries listed is 88, well below the expected average of 100.

I get why a pop-psychology books needs to dispute all controversial findings to sell. But I would have expected something deeper or something new. It either had to be a book with colorful photos, charts, and jokes. Or be a deeper book with a stronger logical presentation that dared explore the more juice controversy head on. Otherwise there is no need to read it instead of books like: