Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

[james_davis_nicoll]

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Comments

[connactic.livejournal.com]

Charlie Gordon didn't get to use today's special education programs, though. He went to school some time in the 1940s/1950s. His level of disability may have been an accurate portrayal of someone with a 68 IQ who spent his entire education in a system that basically regarded him as dross.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If I remember the dates in the short story correctly, he might even have been in school in the 1930s. He's roughly the same age as my parents.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Still not representative.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I just finished working with a student whose IQ was not that far off from Charlie Gordon's. He's working and will graduate from high school. In that era he would have been even less noticed because he would have been tracked into a functional job track rather than a college track. There were more options then than there are now in the US, thanks to No Child Left Behind and its school reform spawn.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

Fair enough- I was overestimating how crappy things were in the 40s, as well as not knowing anything about the relative abilities of someone with a 40s IQ vs. 68 vs. "normal".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The novel goes into where the various developmentally challenged people get funneled. Gordon's path is atypical because an uncle arranged for him to work at the bakery but he probably would have ended up working *somewhere*.

The Warren State Home has an interestingly casual attitude towards its patients (mainly because they don't have the resources to behave otherwise). If a patient wanders off, they don't worry much if they never hear from them again: the facility assumes the patient somehow made a life for themselves out there.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

That last sentence seems somewhat chilling by modern standards.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Or because a lot of jobs not requiring clerical skills or a lot of abstract reasoning got exported or automated away?

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of it as well.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

We also have to account for the Flynn Effect. Per Wikipedia:

Ulric Neisser estimated that using the IQ values of 1997 the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80.

...

Some studies have found the gains of the Flynn effect to be particularly concentrated at the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen (1989), for example, found the effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in an increased number of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores.[8] In another study, two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that the mean IQ-scores on the test had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect), the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and the gains gradually decreased as the IQ of the individuals increased.

So it's quite possible that Charlie is an accurate portrayal of what a 68 IQ was at the time Keyes wrote the story, but would score 10 to 20 points lower if given the test today.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Stanford-Binet is, in my professional opinion, worthless. It is not normed as rigorously as the tests are we use today. So if Keyes was using a Stanford-Binet assessment, then yes, I'd agree.

I don't know of anyone who uses Stanford-Binet for IQ assessment now. It's either the Weschler batteries (early childhood, childhood, or adult) or the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognition. IIRC, Stanford-Binet was a paper and pencil test and that simply is not an accurate measure of IQ. One-on-one, individual administration as you get with the Weschler batteries or the WJ Cog are simply much more accurate because they do not depend upon reading or test-taking ability. A Weschler or WJ administration ain't the same thing, and I do a LOT of WJ academic administrations. They are expensive for that very reason--you have to do them one-on-one, and the best people who administer such tests take rigorous notes on what they observe during the testing process.

I'm also suspicious of that Wikipedia article you cite, simply because it omits some significant details. The author(s) tend to treat the IQ tests as one and the same, where as I note above, there's a significant difference between the Stanford-Binet and the Weschler or WJ batteries.

Myself, I think the factor that makes a difference in how we calculate results from these assessments is that we are improving tests and the algorithms we use to calculate the results. I work very closely with the Woodcock-Johnson academic assessments. We changed to the WJ IV over the past two years. Part of the norming process includes eliminating cultural references that may skew the assessment. The new WJ IV has much fewer of those than the WJ III, which is HUGE in my experience. And that's just on the academic side. Though it still skews high in writing, but writing is another ranty area that I'll spare folks on.

(and yes, I think the current tests are a more accurate assessment of cognition, including memory both short and long term, learned material, processing speed, and previous knowledge. Previous knowledge or passions can seriously skew individual question results and such things need to be taken into consideration. Which is why the most accurate assessments are individual, using one-on-one testing with copious note-taking)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Also, given the nature of administration, I think the Weschler and WJ batteries have less potential variance between versions.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I remember being given a Stanford-Binet around 1975 as part of the screening for a gifted-education program.

I was also given the kiddie Wechsler around the same time (WISC-R) because my mother was in a graduate program in psychology and used me as a practice subject. But the school used the Stanford-Binet.

I have no idea what I scored on either test, though. My mom did a lot of work with special-ed students and I suspect she'd have had many opinions about "Flowers for Algernon," but I don't know if she ever read it. I remember her complaining about how pretty much every depiction of genius or cognitive disability or IQ on TV was wildly inaccurate (a pet peeve of hers was fictional characters who had "IQs" so high that no test actually used by psychologists could produce such a number).

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Stanford-Binet was a paper and pencil test and that simply is not an accurate measure of IQ.

It's never been a paper-and-pencil test -- always one-on-one oral. I looked into the history back when I was hanging out with a lot of people who defended the higher ceiling of the old Stanford-Binet (which I eventually decided was not justifiable for many reasons, one being the lousy security around older tests -- I was able to order a copy of the SB-LM manual online). Schools have been known to use paper-and-pencil tests (the ancestors of today's CogAT and the like) and refer to them as IQ tests, though. My grade school gave the Lorge-Thorndike, which was multiple choice, and I'm pretty sure they reported the results as "IQ scores."

The famous story about Richard Feynman getting only 123 on an IQ test was about a high school paper-and-pencil exam.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was an oral test when they gave it to me.