emotional state, general intelligence, academic performance, communicative status, and motor abilities (Reschly 1997). Heller, Holtzman, and Messick (1982) believe, the main purpose of assessment in education is to improve instruction and learning a significant portion of children who experience difficulties in the classroom can be treated effectively through improved instruction. Considering the wide availability of education offered to students, and the mandates set forth by the government psychologists as well as teachers must ask themselves what is the purpose of education? Two fundamental, often opposing, purposes of schools are to transmit societys knowledge and values, passing on the cultural baton, and to reconstruct society, empowering students to engineer social change as adults and, sometimes, students (Sadker & Sadker 1997). Serving the purpose of schools requires a closer inspection of the relationship between intelligence and education being this is a major issue facing the educational community today. This analysis of intelligence theory will reveal issues, utility and implications held for the field of education. The combination of intelligence and education raises many issues. These issues regarding intelligence testing and theory span across the twentieth century. In 1904 a French psychologist Alfred Binet was asked to develop a way to measure a students ability to succeed in school. Binet then devised an assessment, which incorporated a number of age-scaled tests to measure a students mental age, suggesting intelligence is unidimensional (Devlin, Fienberg, Resnick, & Roeder 1997). During the 1920s issues mainly dealt with the psychological and psychometric efficacy of intelligence tests as well as the social consequences associated with their use (Flanagan & Genshaft 1997). Cultural differences and unfairness were the issues of scrutiny during the 1960s. The passage of Public Law 94-142 resulted in another...
