IQ Tests for Children: Are They Helpful?

The KinderIQ free Children’s IQ Test is a tool to help assess fluid intelligence in children as young as three years old. As a parent, you surely want to provide the best education for your children. However, there are different factors in play when choosing an appropriate school or a career track for your kids. Some children are better at math and engineering. Others are more adept verbally or in writing, and may be better suited to pursuing journalism or legal studies. Hence, IQ tests for children can be used to determine the intellectual strengths or weaknesses of your kids. With the variety of skills your children need to acquire these days (reading, writing, socializing, computer knowledge, etc), it’s understandable that no child can get a perfect score in each area. Oftentimes your kids can give you clues, depending on their state of arousal and happiness, when they get better or worse at a particular skill. But sometimes neither you, nor teachers can tell what’s wrong. Therefore, it's important to find out where your child excels, as well as where progress is still needed.

Benefits of IQ tests for children

Predicting future academic achievements

IQ tests often predict the future academic achievements of your child and help in understanding how smart it is. Another advantage of IQ tests is that they’re useful for accurately measuring human behavior. This allows educators to tailor their teaching or parental approach to suit the needs of children, thus enabling your kids to achieve the best results.

Helping teachers and parents recognize children skill levels

Your children may test better than others, so it's important for both you and the teachers to accurately assess the learning qualities of your kids before sending them to an appropriate classroom. Kids who score better may be enrolled in a more advanced and challenging learning environment, whereas those who score lower can be taken to an environment that will match their educational needs. However, this is also one of the main disadvantages of IQ tests - they segregate children according to scores, and might create premature perceptions. The IQ test score may affect the attitude of both you and teachers, and adversely affect your children. If revealed to your kids, IQ test scores can lead them to conceive negative perceptions about their personalities (i.e. your child may think of itself as being stupid or super smart). The veracity of these perceptions is irrelevant if your children go on to stifle their future academic achievements. Still, identifying kids with low IQs at an early age might encourage teachers and schools to fine-tune their instructions if your child risks falling behind. As a result, your kid may yet achieve success in its future educational and academic career.

Helping children with learning disabilities

Low academic achievements are not always due to low intelligence. Your kids may suffer from learning disabilities. If these disabilities go unnoticed, they may lead to a misdiagnosis of your child's low academic scores. There is a range of possible disabilities, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia, that may affect the learning skills of your child. Using IQ testing, these disabilities can be identified and treated on time. As painful as it may be to hear that your child has a learning disability, identifying it at an early stage ensures that your little one won’t fall far behind its peers in the future. Kids with learning disabilities are often very gifted, but their talents are harder to recognize as a direct consequence of said disabilities. Through IQ testing, both the learning disabilities and talents of your kid can rise to the surface. Without an IQ test, your child's talents may go undetected, hence it won't be able to reach its full potential.

Encouraging children to focus on their strengths

IQ tests allow your kids to identify and build upon their intellectual abilities. Modern IQ tests differentiate between various reasoning abilities, including mathematical, verbal, and spatial ones. The level of detail these tests offer helps your children discover their main strengths and weaknesses, after which they can take appropriate action and improve even further.

Benefiting society

Schools and teachers may develop curricula specifically for children with extremely high academic potential. They can use the results of the IQ test to utilize the natural talents of your child. Many of the gifted kids are bored at school because they don’t find most of the school tasks challenging. Schools can ensure that your child will maximize its talents and provide benefits to society. Some children may have extraordinary talents in math or engineering. If these kids are directed towards a career in research or medicine, they could advance their respective fields in significant ways.

Possible disadvantages of IQ tests

Overlooking specific skills

Although it’s useful to identify your child’s general intelligence level, some experts believe there are many forms of human intelligence that cannot be measured by a single IQ test. If your children score low on an IQ test, they may still possess extraordinary creative skills that could easily go overlooked.

Providing misleading results

If your children have experience in taking IQ tests, they may do better than their counterparts. Also, some of the tests have multiple-choice questions, while others do not. This may lead to inaccurate results and raises the question: does your child have exceptional intelligence? Or is it simply a great test taker?

Offering an incomplete overview of intelligence levels

Although IQ tests are a great indicator of general intelligence and a host of other cognitive abilities, they don't measure emotional intelligence, empathy, or work ethics, all of which can largely contribute to success in work and personal life. Testing your children in cognitive and intelligence abilities is not a simple decision for two reasons. First, you will have to bear with the results, no matter if they are good or bad. Second, there are all kinds of IQ tests for children available out there, so you might not know which one you should choose. Fortunately, apart from the traditional tests offered in schools, KinderIQ offers online skills tests that are fun and engaging, and adapt to the knowledge level of your child. By providing instant feedback and recommendations, parents can more easily see areas where their child excels and be able to focus on the areas most in need of improvement.