Intelligence tests require that certain things be ﬁgured out, but the ﬁguring out doesn’t count. If the ﬁguring out leads to the right answer, then of course the right answer counts. But no tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on ﬁguring things out on the test, the less time there is for ﬁlling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the score will look.
Eleanor Duckworth
education, learning