My daughter is doing and experiment on parakeet intelligence and would lioke to know how to test them on it. Thanks

Hmmm is this for school? Then usually part of the student's task is to design an appropriate test I'd feel guilty doing her homework for her in that case.

Or is it just for fun?

Its more for fun. Basically Nurin and her friend are doing a test on animal intelligence but they are examining a horse but Nurin wants to compare Parakeets and horses just for the sake of it....according to her

Have her go to parrotresearch.com ....It's this really detailed site this guy made on his study of parakeet speaking skills. In my opinion, a lot of it is crap, but he has helped kids who are doing research on this kind of thing before. He has all these recordings of his keet talking REALLY well. Some recordings are very clear, while others make you think he might be a little nuts for thinking his bird said what he thinks it said. But anyway, he seems to know a lot about keets, their intelligence, and how to research it. So maybe your daughter could drop him an e-mail asking for help. Or she could just surf his site cuz it's really detailed. Good luck to your daughter, hope this helps.

Talking isn't really a good judge of intelligence because it is so specific. Males talk more than females do, and you have to teach a bird very specifically for a long period of time when they are young for it to work well.

A better test would be to test some of the basic components of intelligence -

* memory
* problem solving

like human intelligence tests do.

So first, memory. That's easy, heck, MythBusters did intelligence memory tests with goldfish. Just show your parakeet a treat in their play area, and then put it into one cup of a cardboard egg holder (i.e. rip an "egg" top and bottom off the set of 12). See if the parakeet tries to get into the egg holder for the treat. Do this once a day for a few days. Then the fifth day put the treat in the cup out of the keet's site and see if the keet is smart enough to try to break into the egg holder anyway, because it remembers the treats are in there.

For problem solving, make a little obstacle course for your keet with cardboard, leading to a treat. Make things she has to go under and around, and see if she figures it out. Like put a treat into a box she can see into through holes but not get into via the holes - and then make a tunnel that leads into the box with a paper towel tube (NOT a toilet paper tube). See if she figures out to go into the tube

That sort of thing is great for intelligence tests

Really thanks, my daughter said thaat she and her friend are doing sorta the same thing on her friends horse... excepts it it choose the treat. Thats their web stite on the horse one.
http://www.geocities.com/atlanta_sun/Equine_intelligence.html
Thanks ill tell her to do that.

I'm not sure how having an animal choose a treat is a sign of intelligence? That just shows that it has a taste preference, which is often quite instinctive. Animals know what they like to eat best without thinking about it You need to do something tied to memory, not something tied to favorite foods

Heck, I think any animal owner knows that their animals will go for things they like to eat before they'll go for things they don't like to eat. That's basic survival instinct ...? Even amoebas know what to eat and what not to eat, to stay alive.

For horses, again for memory, many people teach their horses complex combinations of steps to perform. Just look at the Lippanzer stallions who are so incredibly talented. So you would want to teach the horse "when I do this, you do these two things" That would be fairly easy to do and would be definite proof of memory.