The Gift that Keeps on Giving—But for How Long?

Some gifts keep on giving. Being identiﬁed as intelligent or even as “gifted” through IQ orrelated scholastic test scores (SAT, ACT, A-Levels, etc.) is one of them. When children are identiﬁedas generally intelligent or gifted, teachers are likely to treat them in a special way—to expect more ofthem. Through self-fulﬁlling prophecies, if nothing else, higher expectations tend to lead to higherachievement, which tends to lead to more high expectations, and so on down the line. Thus, beingidentiﬁed as generally intelligent starts children on a positive track, and unless the children disappointtheir elders, they are likely to stay on that track throughout their schooling, which in turn will givethem access to better universities, graduate and professional schools, and likely jobs. However, whenintelligence is measured in ways that assess children’s ability to give elders what they want (and, afterall, that is what intelligence tests largely test), the children are not all so likely to disappoint theirelders. Not only general intelligence, but intelligence tests have seemed to be a gift that keeps ongiving, selecting from one generation to the next the people who later will be chosen to be the leadersof our societies.The main criteria used for identiﬁcation of children as generally intelligent or intellectually giftedtypically are IQ (or a related measure) and school performance. Children who do better on thesemeasures are more likely to be identiﬁed and then instructed in ways that suit their higher levels ofacademic abilities. Moreover, the gift keeps on giving through elementary school, secondary school,and to some extent through university education. It even keeps on giving throughout one’s life.The term, “the gift that keeps on giving,” apparently originated, at least in the United States,in the mid-1920s as a slogan advertising the newly invented phonograph. The phonograph was aremarkably successful invention, and one can see why the slogan would have been applied—once youhave one, you can keep on listening to your favorite records. So the slogan, unlike most advertisingslogans, was truly apropos.At the same time, aside from in museums, how many phonographs have you seen lately?Like most inventions, the phonograph was useful for a period of time, and then gave way to newtechnologies. It was the gift that kept on giving, until it didn’t.With school children, too, the importance of IQ never entirely disappears (people still like to listento music, even though phonographs are not much to be found), but for them to be successful as theymove through their life, they need to develop others skills, just as “listening to music” began to giveway to newer technologies. They need to ﬁnd with themselves a broader range of skills that make adifference to everyday adult life. This range includes general intelligence in the traditional sense butalso includes broader skills, such asThe authors of the articles in the symposium, “Challenges of Intelligence Testing,” have triedto capture the broader range of skills that matter, in addition to general intelligence: reading [1],creativity [2,3], emotional or “hot” intelligence [4], and practical or contextual intelligence [5]. In mywork, I have emphasized “successful intelligence,” involving traditional general intelligence (whatI call “analytical intelligence”), but also creative and practical intelligence as well as wisdom-basedskills [6,7].