Hi Jurgis, being edu-sig, I'll send this to the list and not just you personally, despite it having somewhat low actual python content. I teach at grad and undergrad level, and do research into individual differences in self-control, and sometimes use IQ tests (see http://www.yale.edu/scan/) python is pretty useful in the lab, especially PsychoPy. I'd like to test my students' general ability to undersnand examples.

Because I am confused, is it my fault or their laziness, or sth else, that some of them (nearly 30%) understnand nearly nothig what they were taught.

rather than to get into assessing and interpreting IQ-ish scores, I think you'd be much better off asking other teachers / instructors for advice on how to get through to those 30%. from what you are saying, the real problem you want to solve is how to get through to those students, right? maybe a mentor teacher can sit in and observe you and the class and offer suggestions? or ask someone who taught the course previously what examples they used, and how the course went? maybe you could ask students for anonymous feedback after each class one what was really clear and what was really unclear. (how useful this might depend on the age group.) you might ask about whether students can see well enough, hear well enough, and so on. it sounds like you are hoping to tease apart motivation from ability, which is not a trivial thing to do. for this, giving students problems to do in class is unlikely to be informative: its the same class (with the same social setting including distractions, history of expectations, etc), the same time of day (fatigue, etc). its not just as simple as giving a page of problems out, and getting a score. once it become "IQ" there's an implicit threat of revealing that a given student is either lazy or incompetent, so some will become nervous and do poorly as a result. and there's what's called stereotype threat, which is the fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one's racial or ethnic group. its basically a way of eliciting anxiety that interferes with performance, and everyone is susceptible to it (including white males in the context of being compared to Asian males on a math-y test). so IQ: its better not to go there if you don't have to. and the real problem is getting through to that 30%, not quantifying their ability. if you still want to go the IQ route, out of personal curiosity or whatever, you would be better off if you can obtain student scores on a standardized test that someone else has already administered, on which the student was personally invested in doing well, and took under optimal conditions (low distraction, etc). if you are in a school setting, maybe there's a way to work with the administration to get standardized test scores? if these are college level, SAT scores work surprisingly well as a measure of general cognitive ability (you can convert one into the other with pretty high accuracy, for individual people). or perhaps down the road we could collaborate on a research project :o) I'm only half-kidding. there would have to be a scientific question, not just an assessment of students in a class.

Main question of email: Does anyone know freely distributable DB of such IQ quiz questions -- preferrably mostly graphical, like http://iq-test.co.uk/iq-test/ or so

sorry, I don't know of any but I've toyed with the idea of developing a battery of mini-tasks for this. there are a number of pretty creative, and non-threatening tasks out there that correlate to some degree with IQ. reaction time does, for example. if we got enough of such tasks, implemented as mini-games in python, ... could be interesting.

I think it could come in handy for others (mathematics here as well)... I also hope, one can train the attention/concentration with IQ tests -- which is verty important skill in understanding examples.

yes, its possible to train attention / concentration to some degree, hard, but possible. people in my field talk about "working memory training" (for which the wikipedia page is pretty bad and out of date). the most interesting study I've seen is by Jaeggi et al, available free, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18443283 (or pdf: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/19/6791.full.pdf+html) best regards, --Jeremy

There are a number of papers on the topic of measuring programmer aptitude. In general, I would strongly recommend looking through the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG, http://www.ppig.org). One paper in particular attracted a lot of attention about 4 years ago: "Testing Programmer Aptitude" (http://www.ppig.org/papers/18th-dehnadi.pdf). It was controversial at the time but was followed up sometime later. Have a look at the author's web page: Saeed Dehnadi (http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/) for his followups Another article that tries to measure aptitude is Jeff Kramer's article on abstraction (in the Piaget sense) as a measure. (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.120.6776&rep=rep1&type=pdf) though see the following for a, kind of, rebuttal (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1138430). >>>bill<<< Jurgis Pralgauskis wrote:

Hello,

I think one of best ways to teach programming is with examples (of course with a bit of theory explanation). I'd like to test my students' general ability to undersnand examples. Because I am confused, is it my fault or their laziness, or sth else, that some of them (nearly 30%) understnand nearly nothig what they were taught.

Main question of email: Does anyone know freely distributable DB of such IQ quiz questions -- preferrably mostly graphical, like http://iq-test.co.uk/iq-test/ or so

I think it could come in handy for others (mathematics here as well)...

I also hope, one can train the attention/concentration with IQ tests -- which is verty important skill in understanding examples.

Thanks in advance