Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Questioning assessment of kids based upon parents

Most people - even most very intelligent very well educated people! - have startlingly poor understanding of statistics. Something I've seen stated repeatedly even here is that siblings usually have IQs within 10 points of one another - nothing wrong with that as a statement, but it gets used with the implication that if you have one child who has tested with some IQ then if your next child tests more than 10 points below that then the test must be wrong. Frankly, this is statistical nonsense so many ways that I hardly know where to start. (If you think about it, we collectively have plenty of experience even of the very same child testing more than 10 points apart on different occasions, so why we should be surprised at a child's sibling testing more than 10 points away from them, I cannot imagine). I think the root cause is a strong cultural tendency in the US to believe in the entity theory of intelligence - almost everyone here appears to believe at core - even if they deny it when they think about it - that there is a fact of the matter about what a child's "real" IQ is and that that number tells you something permanent about the child. Everyone should read Dweck. (Can you tell I've been out to a congenial argumentative bookclub tonight and had several glasses of wine, lol?)

Yes. I'm thinking of a dyslexic person I know well who can make that kind of mistake. She wouldn't self-correct in the way that a non-dyslexic person might - e.g., noticing "per se" and realising that that's the same phrase as what they've been spelling "persay" - because the kind of attention she can pay to the written material isn't the kind of attention where she'd notice that kind of detail. It's as if all her attention goes on getting the gist of the text.