[Randie Bricker]

I believe that nature and nurture play a role in a person's abilities, but I think nature plays a bigger role. I think one of the biggest inequities we see in schools has to do with students who don't come to school with as much "nurturing". Students who live in homes where they are read to and are exposed to many things like museum visits, nightly dinner conversations and vacations come to school with more prior or background knowledge than than other students. This nurturing that occurs in the early years gives children an advantage in school. They just come to school with more background knowledge. Background knowledge allows students to move more quickly gaining new information because they have something to attach it to. 

I worry about labeling children based on IQ tests. Much like Yerkes labels for army recruits, IQ testing should not be used for sorting people into categories. Labels should not be static as people are always growing and changing.

I do think IQ testing could be helpful in determining where students require extra help. If an unbiased test could be developed, it could provide educators with specific items that could should be taught. In today's world of personalized learning, testing to teach would be a great resource.

Rti, if used properly, could be a great example of using testing to help students get what they need. If testing shows a child has a deficit, provide six weeks of intervention to help the student gain the missing concepts and send him/her back to the classroom. Those who don't make gains should continue to get extra support.


I took the mensa online test. (I chose not to get the results.) Mensa is a society of people with high IQs. The test I took, as many other tests are, is biased toward English speakers. While many of the questions were visual, the test itself is very language based. An English language learner would struggle with many of the questions. Interestingly, here I am a somewhat educated person, and I didn't want to know how I performed. Perhaps I was afraid of the label.

Many of the questions relied on having prior knowledge or background information. You couldn't unscramble many of the words to find the name of a country or city if you didn't have knowledge of these things before hand. Being able to answer Paris or Germany does not make one person a genius over another. It just means that person has had experience with that information.

https://www.mensaiqtest.net