Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

90 Educability and Group Differences
to those who are not bom with it. To teach intelligence might mean
to point out more or less all the conceivable connections, generalizations,
and possible transfer of every item of acquired information,
and to elicit and reinforce the appropriate responses to these
situations. This could involve teaching more than anyone could
ever learn. Probably no one would live long enough ever to acquire
even a mental age of six. The design of a computer that can ‘learn’
and ‘think’ both inductively and deductively is necessarily very
different from that of the computer which merely records and stores
items of information that can later be elicited by specific cues in
a pushbutton fashion.
One of the ways in which scholastic achievement tests differ
from intelligence tests is that at any given point in time, the usual
achievement test scores reflect a relatively larger G or gain
component, intended to assess what had been taught in the recent
past in a particular grade in school. Since various subjects of the
curriculum are newly introduced at different grades, the G component
of achievement tests constitutes a larger proportion in
relation to S than is the case for intelligence tests. The G component
is largely a function of environmental influences, interests, motivation,
and the like, acting at any given time. Bloom (1964, pp.
113-19) has reviewed convincing evidence that G is more related
to environmental factors, while C is genetically and constitutionally
determined. (Professor Bloom, however, may not concur in this
interpretation.) Thus, accelerated achievement gains brought about
by an enriched and intensified instructional program generally
‘fade out’ in a few months to a year. Without a strong consolidation
factor, accelerated gains are not maintained without constant
rehearsal of the acquired knowledge or skills. Because variance in
achievement test scores reflects a larger gain component at any
given time than do intelligence tests, which are designed to reflect
the consolidation factor, one should expect populations that differ
on the average on intelligence measures to differ significantly less
on achievement measures at any cross-section in time, and this
has been found to be the case (Coleman et al., 1966; Jensen,
1971a). Consolidated achievement, however, provided it involves
intellectual skills, should show about the same magnitude of
population differences as are shown by intelligence tests.
An interesting difference between scholastic achievement scores
and intelligence test scores (including vocabulary) is that the latter