School improvement is admittedly the main business of school leadership. However, while there is agreement on the importance of school improvement, sustaining this improvement remains a challenge. The challenge seems to lie in the disconnection between the leader and the context in which the school operates. This chapter presents contextual…

Morality and moral intelligence are important in our society and schools. Moral intelligence is discussed in the context of Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences. Moral intelligence helps apply ethical principles to personal goals, values and actions. It consists of four competencies related to integrity, three to responsibility, two to…

Because no single characteristic defines intelligence, there can be no adequate process-based definition of intelligence. In principle, a combination of many empirically derived measures into a single index, as in a Binet test, would be appropriate. In practice, many of the relevant characteristics are simply impossible to measure. (Author/RD)

A major criticism of standardized intelligence tests is their improper use in measuring the intellectual competence of culturally diverse children. Factors which complicate the issue are the definition of intelligence, content bias in intelligence tests, and the interpretation of test scores between white middle class children and children of…

To examine whether or not retarded individuals have the same structure of intelligence as normal IQ individuals, test scores from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), Reitan's Trail Making Test (TMT), and Beery's Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI) for both a mildly retarded and normal IQ population of…

Eighteen mentally retarded children were selected for study because they exhibited low levels of skills in sitting, eye contact on command, and following other commands. Ten other children were selected because they showed high levels of those skills. High skill Ss were found to have higher scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Training…

The author questions why intelligence and intelligence testing have been so lightly treated in recent years. The topic has been in disfavor, and citizens and educators have tended to swing from one extreme to another in their evaluations of such matters of social concerns. This virtual dismissal of intelligence has been followed by great…

Research has shown that differences among ordinary people in intelligence and personality depend equally on individual genetic variability and on differences in the environments that siblings experience within the same family, not differences in the neighborhood, school, and community environments. As of yet, there are no adequate theories to…

The study examined the intellectual performance of 248 school age students 157 of whom were taken from public school settings. Of these, 93 were emotionally handicapped (EH) students and 64 were regular education students. The remaining subjects came from a residential school for EH children and youth (n=15) and from a summer program for…

The specificity doctrine, holds that psychometric tests measure nothing other than the specific bits of knowledge and learned skills reflected in the item content of the tests. This prevailing doctrine has influenced the interpretation of test scores and the conceptualization of test validity, as well as the practical use of tests in educational…

This paper reviews the research on sex differences in intellectual functioning as it relates to verbal abilities, spatial abilities, and reading aptitudes. Research supports such statements as: sex aptitudes do not become significantly apparent until adolescence; males perform better than females on problems involving field-indep (picking out one…

In this study, children (ages 7-12) of average intelligence who had learning disabilities (LD) (n=29) and typical children (n=30) were individually tested in a task that investigated the development of proportional structures of thought. In addition, mathematical knowledge was assessed on the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-Revised (WJTA-R).…

Arthur Jensen has argued that genetic differences in abstract reasoning ability, not cultural bias in the test item, are the causes of differences in standardized test performance between American Blacks and Whites. He used a study by Frank McGurk to support his argument. McGurk's study used test items judged most cultural or least cultural. These…

A reanalysis of B. Inhelder's (1968) data concerning cognitive development among retardates was performed by selecting from the original 159 subjects a sample of 104 educable mentally retarded Ss (7-19 years old) who were diagnosed as fixated or nonfixated at three of the cognitive stages postulated by Jean Piaget. The results indicated that among…

There is no accepted definition and no adequate measure for the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Some of the myriad issues surrounding EI are discussed here. One problem in the consideration of EI is the confusion between the terms "feelings" and "emotions." Differences between the two are examined and a working definition of feelings is…