Schooling in adolescence raises IQ scores (2011) [pdf]
pnas.org
pnas.org
I was required to do mental calculation during the WAIS-IV I did.
I also think they try to introduce elements that makes it hard to prepare for the test.
That said if someone has never taken one of these then getting used to how the test works and doing a sample test could help them get a better score right away.
This is why there's so much confusion about "how can the IQ test be considered studied and reliable, bah!" - because the ones that are properly performed are labour-intensive and require a lot of training - and this is why results are all over the place. It's just not the case that $RANDOM_YAHOO[1] on the internet knows more about the caveats around IQ tests that the professionals who apply and study them.
Disclaimer: have formally studied 'intelligence' (and cognition, perception etc) and been given a partial IQ test myself by a properly trained professional, which came with the caveat "the results can't be properly used, because you're familiar with the process, which confounds the results".
[1] I don't mean you, I just mean that this is a common complaint
We should consider the real possibility that both a) IQ tests are a reasonably good proxy for general intelligence AND b) preparation by training on problem solving improves IQ
Id really like to know how much IQ is improvable. If the brain is plastic and physically adapts to training, what are the most effective methods? It seems an important issue, not least for schooling.
Part of the problem is that there are too many slightly different definitions of IQ and intelligence, and what's worse: we're not even sure what exactly we mean by "intelligence".
No, it does not mean that IQ scores don't measure general intelligence.
It does mean that things some people believe about general intelligence may need to be reevaluated.
> But if you can increase this with schooling, isn't it just how smart you are right now?
That intelligence (and particularly IQ) can change over time, and that there were environmental contributors to that change has been well-know for some time.
That education in adolescence is a relevant factor is perhaps new, and certainly challenges the treatment of education and intelligence as orthogonal factors that contribute to outcomes.
It started long ago when everyone thought you could be good at Math, or good at History, or good at Science, and sometimes good at all 3.
One day Suzy(named changed and story overly simplified for explanatory purposes), a very smart math teacher, was promoted to principal. So she finally had the chance to look at students grades from every class. And she found something curious. Her students that succeeded in her Math class also succeeded at Science. And kids that did well at History, scored highly in English. So Suzy decided to call these newly discovered traits "Verbal Ability" and "Quantitative Ability" respectively.
But Suzy didn't stop there, her investigations found that Verbal and Quantitative were correlated with each other. So she invented a third trait which was the combination of Verbal and Quantitative ability and she called that g for General Intelligence. Of course Suzy wanted to measure this g with a test so she could predict(though by no means perfectly) a student's Math, Science, English, and History grades from just one score. She settled on IQ as the measure of this test, and thus IQ was born.
Basically when we give someone a whole bunch of different tests we find that if someone does well on one, they will probably do well on others. For instance if we know someone is really good at theoretical physics we know they'll be good at working memory, and solving silly matrix puzzles. But if we know someone is really good at poetry we don't know as much about how good their working memory is, or how good they are at solving silly matrix puzzles.
I've dealt with many people with advanced degrees from top tier schools who seem to be completely unable to grasp subversive or non dominant thought patterns.
For years I was stunned, thinking "how on earth could they have such impressive academic credentials and be struggling like this."
The entire institution continually fosters and rewards a set of specific things with limited application.
The rebellious person did a deeper, objective, thoughtful analysis but did worse than the obedient mimic.
Often it's a D student who knows the material the best, has the most passion for the subject, is the smartest in the class, and puts the most work in. I saw it all the time while I was TAing.
Perhaps a smart person is a rebel roleplaying as a conformist. In a game theoretic sense you get the most advantage without the penalty. It is one explanation I suspected but haven't seen for why contradictory traits might be expressed by somebody in or close to power.
> A conformist would mimic what the professor sees and pick his right one.
Less Wrong calls this 'Guessing the teacher's password'.
It's the art of mimicry. That there is no penalty for this in the education system is an indictment.
> Often it's a D student who knows the material the best
Even most A students will agree with you. There is an argument made by Alfie Kohn that grades should be abolished.
You could either solve the problems using techniques taught or you couldn't. Grades were a direct measurement of this ability. Maybe grades don't matter in Psychology or Sociology class, but I don't want to rely on an electrical system designed by the D students in my classes. It would probably kill me.
"The measure of IQ used in the analysis was obtained from tests of cognitive ability administered by the Norwegian military to all draft-eligible men at approximately the age of 19 y as part of the universal military draft in Norway. "
So they weren't even IQ tests.
So there are issues with the results, but the results as they stand seem to contradict current understanding.
Is the pdf significant or not? You'd need an expert to say.
There's also the fact that IQ tests need to be designed for a specific culture. Taking an IQ test for a very different culture is likely to cost you a couple of points. They're unavoidably subjective.
I think it could easily be a lot more than 10 points. I once (ages ago) did an IQ test from a book and then 2 days later did another test from the same book and scored 27 points higher.
From this I concluded that either I had become vastly cleverer over those 2 days or that IQ tests weren't a good measure of intelligence.
Actually there is no precice definition of intelligence outside IQ tests. My psychology professor had a nice saying: "Intelligence is what an IQ test measures".
IQ tests in general have very low prognostic reliability, e.g. they neither say how smart you could be (neglected children can easily rise more than 20 points after living a a few years with a nurturing foster family) nor how successful you'll be in your professional life (where motives and motivation play a more important role).
The most cautious defensible position, in my opinion, is that "we can crudely measure a quantity that is related to the folk notion of intelligence"[1]. IQ tests are good, not great, at measuring something which 1) correlates to performance on just about any task that we regard as "mental", and 2) which we are thus far unable to divide any further – it appears to be impossible to split this "something" into a bundle of uncorrelated disparate abilities[2]. This "something" is called general intelligence, or g. However, all IQ tests are trainable and have different emphases; there is no bulletproof g test.
> My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered.
The g factor is not a potential. It is defined by statistically extracting a factor common to all (or all minus epsilon) measures of intelligence, which factor is then found – empirically – to predict future performance. It does appear to measure a kind of intellectual potential[3], which is one reason psychologists are interested in it.
So, does this notion of general intelligence contradict the findings linked in this post? Logically, not at all; there is no reason a priori why the general factor should not be malleable. The question is if the general factor is in fact altered. Not an easy question to answer, due to the fact that g, being a statistical construct, cannot directly be measured, but must be inferred from other observations and tests.[4]
Since the linked Brinch-Galloway paper was published in 2011, others have attempted to determine whether education changes g[5]. Briefly, the authors measure a set of other cognitive skills, only partially correlated with g, but which cognitive tests also measure, and compare three models:
A) that education affects these skills via g; B) that education partially affects these skills via g, but also directly affects some of these skills; C) that education does not affect g, but only these domain-specific cognitive skills. In this last model, the positive effects of education on cognitive test scores are fully mediated by domain-specific improvements.
They find that Model C is favoured (p=0.04). The state of play is that education appears to improve performance in things like "Logical Memory" (the capacity to recall ideas and the logical connexions between them), and that this is what causes gains on IQ tests.
Practically, this means that education is good, very good even, but that there's something that it doesn't seem to touch. At this point one may wonder what exactly is so great about g compared to domain-specific cognitive skills. For probably the majority of jobs out there, domain-specific skills are exactly what are required; provided one has some moderate level of general intelligence to cover exceptional situations, the rest is trainable. If this becomes the received wisdom I wouldn't exactly be upset, as it would likely take a good deal of the heat out of "the IQ controversy". Perhaps instead of "general intelligence" we would refer to "abstract generalization capacity" or "cross-domain transfer ". With the great g threat on the back-burner for the time being, the discussion on trends towards increased demand for generalization skills on the decadal scale would then have room to breathe. Some of the proposed solutions[6] are rather radical for the current political climate...
[1] Steve Hsu, http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.... [2] Not for want of trying – most prominently Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which is quite popular outside of psychology, but which lacks empirical evidence (Waterhouse (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4104_5) [3] With a few exceptions, by far the most significance of which is childhood neglect, as commented by bildung at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183521 . But his point on motivation as a factor is misplaced – yes, motivation matters, but on average g will also have its effect. It is the combination of g and other specific factors which predicts any given facet of an individual's life. [4] All this hairsplitting is an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a firm reductionist model of g. If we had such a model (grounded in neuroscience, for instance) we could just study the effect of educational interventions on the brain directly. Of course we can (and do) do this anyway, but it tells us a lot less without the model. [5] Ritchie, Bates and Deary (2015), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/ [6] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-genetically-engineer-i...
- not meeting basic nutrition requirements during gestation and early life
- not consuming enough iodine. iodine gets added to salt to ensure people consume it.
- exposure to lead and other toxic substances.
...and mental stimuli.
Some people (notably alt-right Twitter accounts), promote that idea that certain races have significantly lower IQ, spreading maps of average IQ per country. It is my duty to call out that as wrong. Having the aforementioned factors in consideration quickly refutes that idea.
Some people point out that there are genetic markers associated with higher IQ. To be honest, we haven't listed all of them yet. So I would stay quiet before pointing out that certain population doesn't have certain SNP.
source?
Also, it's ridiculous to argue that genetics don't affect IQ. There are many genetic disorders that impair cognitive skills.
So beware of feeding kids and pregnant women with sea salt only.
Also interesting, the historical summary of the "distributed" nature of the Norway educational system: The reform [...] required that all municipalities provide their youths with an additional 2 y of standardized education in the eighth and ninth grades. [...] The reform was introduced at the municipality level, the lowest of three administrative levels in Norway, with the other two levels being the national level, which has responsibility for higher (tertiary) education, and the county level, which has responsibility for secondary education. [...] Following the reform, the new type of middle school was administered by the municipalities. Each separate municipality was able to introduce the full compulsory schooling reform after local officials submitted a reform plan to a national committee, provided national funds [...]
It sounds like they used a bottom-up approach rather than a plan forced from on top, which seems like a good thing.
This makes me want to learn more about how school systems / school boards work. It seems to be a city-level organizational structure, but there are provincial/state, and federal rules too. This is a lot of APIs: you pay federal, provincial, municipal, and school taxes, and then some portion of your taxes comes to the schools. Surely there's room for simplification...
Plus your prior on this should be pretty low given Turkheimer's 3 laws of behavioural genetics. Especially since education is more like a shared environment variable rather than a unique environment variable.
The link to the paper here is from Eric Turkheimer's faculty webpage at the University of Virginia, which I visit often to read his latest publications.
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for...
You're right to correct me on school being part of the nonshared environment that's my mistake, you probably know more than me how complicated it is to extract meaning from the nonshared environment. Also the temporary nature of the improvements are very confusing. Thanks for the paper.
Here's a summary by SSC (not really an expert but worth reading): https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-tha...
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