Re: Statistics / more compare & contrast

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

Not In Our Genes is another book from the same ideological perspective.  (The
authors -- Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin are in the same collectives as Gould --
either Dialectics of Biology and/or the Campaign against Racism, I.Q., and the
Class society.

bc



"Daniel L. MacIsaac" wrote:

> > It is not  PC to mention it,  but an important predictor of
> > academic test results is that old faithful, the IQ measure.
> > This measure is designed to be normally distributed.
> >       A high school may expect to see student results in general that are
> > reasonably normal, even if test results are not 'marked on a curve'
> > [i.e. transformed to a normal distribution] for this reason alone.
>
> Brian:
>
> Check out Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man"  IQ is a very cooked statistic
> (as you say, "designed" for statistical reliability), but after reading
> Gould's book I rather believe it measures very little about actual
> intelligence (whatever that means).  If you really want an indicator for
> predicting student success, try SES.  If you are looking to predict success
> in college physics, look for whether the HS physics teacher used no text.
> (after Sadler's recent _science education_ article)
> Dan M
>
> Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
> danmac@nau.edu          http://purcell.phy.nau.edu         PHYS-L list owner