An increase of intelligence in Saudi Arabia, 1977–2010

Using Technology for the Efficient and Precise Assessment of Cognitive Skills in Countries with Limited Standardized Assessment Instruments: A Report on the Case of Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia, the country’s progress toward appropriate and inclusive education programs for children with disabilities is still evolving. A crucial aspect of this evolution has been the development of a comprehensive assessment battery that covers a broad range of cognitive factors for the diagnosis of neurodevelopment disorders and other types of intellectual atypicalities, including giftedness. The Alif–Ya Assessment Battery consists of 47 subtests based on various theories of intelligence. Alif–Ya capitalizes on advanced technologies to enable its delivery either in person or remotely. Moreover, over half of Alif–Ya’s subtests are adaptive; items are selected for the test takers based on their previous responses. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Alif–Ya Assessment Battery, describe how it was designed to make the best use of the latest and best features of technology for the appropriate and accurate assessment of children and adolescents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia via remote or in-person administration, and present initial data collected with the battery.

Changes in the Intelligence Levels and Structure in Russia: An ANOVA Method Based on Discretization and Grouping of Factors

In the present paper, we investigate how the general intelligence quotient (IQ) and its subtests changed for students from Russian University from 1991 to 2013. This study of the effect of such factors as gender, department, and year on the IQ response is carried out using the ANOVA model. Given the unevenness of the initial sample by years and departments, and consequently, heterogeneity of variances when divided by the original natural categories, we decided to aggregate the values of explanatory variables to build an adequate model. The paper proposes and investigates an algorithm for joint discretization and grouping, which uses the procedure of partial screening of solutions. It is an intermediate option between the greedy algorithm and exhaustive search. As a goodness function (an optimality criterion), we investigate 26 intermediate options between the AIC and BIC criteria. The BIC turned out to be the most informative and the most acceptable criterion for interpretation, which penalizes the complexity of the model, due to some decrease in accuracy. The resulting partition of the explanatory variables values into categories is used to interpret the modeling results and to arrive at the final conclusions of the data analysis. As a result, it is revealed that the observed features of the IQ dynamics are caused by changes in the education system and the socio-economic status of the family that occurred in Russia during the period of restructuring the society and intensive development of information technologies.