Tales from the Shark Tank

A friend of mine sent me an article from the current issue of Newsweek about intelligence testing and autism. Basically, it says that scientists have found that standard IQ tests consistently show autistic children as being of low intelligence, but that if a different form of test is used which relies on pattern determination rather than verbal responses, the test results go up into the normal or high range. There’s no such difference between the two tests for neurotypical kids, but for the autistic kids it’s tremendous – something like 60 points in some instances. The author goes on to wonder how many autistic kids have been written off due to failure to detect “blazing intelligence”.

My first response was to wonder why this was such a discovery. It certainly isn’t news to me. I know how my son scored on the standardized IQ tests he was given, and he functions far above many autistic kids verbally. I also know how bright he is, and that a test predicated on patterns and structure would be a thing at which he would shine, as that’s how he thinks. I can see the same thing applying to his best friend, also on the autism spectrum. But my perception is based on an intuitive understanding of my child, no more quantified or measured than that of any parent. My second thought was that while the second test got better results, it would still fall far short of providing any kind of valid indicator of intelligence. I don’t have the skills to devise a test that would measure reasonably well for kids like mine, but I can recognize pretty quickly what will be outside their pattern far enough that they would have to “translate” the instructions before they could even begin to respond to the questions. By the descriptions, the second test is better than the first, but it isn’t perfect either.

I have no doubt of my son’s intelligence. I see the structures he creates. I watch as he grasps mathematical or engineering concepts on the first explanation. He struggles with sequencing, with implication and inference, with verbal clues and behavioral cues, but makes up songs with lovely, complex, cyclic melodies. He doesn’t generalize (a requirement of many tests of mental acuity), but does keep track of and understand whole webs of interconnection. He taught himself to read before he could talk, and understood what he read; I have never understood why that was dismissed by education professionals as a sign of mis-wiring rather than an indication of innate intelligence! If a neurotypical child taught herself to read by age two, those same people would be talking about what a wonder she was, a prodigy – but if it is an autistic child, then it’s “hyperlexia”, another “condition” rather than a skill, and they’ll go right back to the tests that show the child in question is of barely average ability.

And I think the problem is that the scientists and medical professionals who define the paradigms want things that are measurable and quantifiable into neat packages. My son isn’t – really most kids aren’t, but kids on the autism spectrum even more than most. It’s so much easier if you can reduce everything to numbers and then compare the numbers, nice and linear and consistent. But autistic kids don’t think in linear fashion; they think in webs of interconnection and interaction. It’s like the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. And if it is a newsflash to those who study them that verbal, language based, linear tests which presume understanding of social interactions won’t provide valid results, then I think I shall continue to rely on my own intuition, flawed and unquantifiable as it may be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Parenthood, Ruminations and ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.