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ARTHUR JENSEN THEORY
Jensen (1969) proposed two level-theories of mental abilities, which sparked a debate on the association of heredity versus environment with intelligence after his studies, got published in the "Harvard Educational Review" in 1969. He demonstrated clear-cut genetic differences in the average intelligence of races and social classes. Jensen suggested that two genetically based levels of intelligence exist.
In other word intelligence consists of two levels of abilities. The Level I ability is associative learning, which consists of Short-Term Memory (STM), rote learning, attention and simple associative skills. The Level II is called cognitive learning, which consists of abstract thinking, symbolic thought, conceptual learning, and use of language in problem solving.
He argued that Level I ability, i.e. associative learning is equally distributed across all racial and national groups but on the contrary, Level II, i.e., cognitive learning is concentrated more the middle class Anglo-American populations than in the lower class black populations.According to him, genetic differences in intelligence exist among people coming from different races, nationalities, and social classes.Jensen conducted studies of intelligence comparing identical fraternal twins. Identical twins have identical genetic dispositions for that their IQs are assumed to be similar.
Jensen’s interest in this topic began when one of his graduate students noted that the white special education students he was working with appeared to be more genuinely “retarded” than the students from minority groups who had been placed in special education. In fact, it seemed to Jensen’s student that whereas the white children functioned at a low level both inside and outside the classroom, the minority children sometimes appeared “quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal intelligence, except in their scholastic performance and in their performance on a variety of standard IQ tests (Jensen, 1974, p. 222).” Jensen’s student wanted to know if there were any “culture-free” intelligence tests that might explain the differences he observed in his students. This question spurred several experiments, and the results persuaded Jensen that standard g-loaded intelligence tests are fairly good measures of intellectual ability, and that racial differences in average IQ scores are not due to any “culture unfairness” intrinsic to the tests. Jensen articulated evidence to support these views in his 1969 article.
Jensen accepts Spearman’s idea of a general factor in human intelligence, and his own theory divides intelligence into two distinct sets of abilities: Level I abilities account for memory functions and simple associative learning, and Level II abilities comprise abstract reasoning and conceptual thought. Jensen concluded from his research that Level I abilities are equally-distributed among the races, whereas white and Asian students demonstrate advantages in tests of Level II abilities. Since Level II abilities appear to be more important for success in school, white and Asian children are at an advantage (Fancher, 1985).
In years since the publication of the 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, Jensen has published a large body of empirical research demonstrating that genetic factors are a substantial source of the variance in individual differences in IQ (Fancher, 1985). Despite the controversial nature of his claims, in 2003 Jensen won the prestigious Kistler Prize for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the human genome and human society.
