When I studied psychology in university, the general thinking at the time was that IQ tests measured education and not actual intelligence.
Why would psychologists believe something so clearly wrong?
Because they are scared of the slippery slope in questions of nature vs. nurture. Steven Pinker's book 'The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' explores this topic and the cultural antecedents of naive nurturism.
But I'm guessing that fact makes _you_ uncomfortable.
I understand why it's something that we've collectively decided to ignore, but my entire life my state has also been throwing money at the "achievement gap" to no avail. You can't help fix a problem when you're coming at it with wrong assumptions.
I would imagine from their research? Why are you so self-assured that you are right?
Often the issue with 'IQ' tests is that the way they are written introduces biases. Any definition of intelligence is at some level socially constructed, which brings social biases into play. Designing accurate, fair, and reliable tests of any educational measure is difficult. Doing a generalized one is even more so.
really obvious example: I write a question that references a baseball game, some people have the tacit knowledge that there are nine fielders and one batter...some don't. Am I measuring education? information gained? 'intelligence'? Is someone from India who makes an analogy to cricket more intelligent than someone who doesn't? IQ tests have generally been shown to mostly be predictive of...scores on IQ tests.
Fundamentally, when dealing with people you are dealing with latent constructs. They, by definition, cannot be measured directly and we presume they cannot be measured exactly. The issue in this paper is they aren't even really defined - they measured cognition not 'intelligence'.
But it's not a simple issue. Tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices looks like they should be culture-free but in fact they're based on assumptions, contexts, and operations that are taught implicitly in basic math classes in the West.
If you don't have that education, you're going to find it hard to understand the test.
Other culture have different ideas about what intelligence looks like and how it's expressed. If you threw equivalent non-Western challenges at a supposedly smart Western kid it's not obvious how well they'd do.
The problem is how do you disentangle Differential Item/Test Function being from cultural purposes as compared to 'we expect this group to perform worse'.
The larger point is that culture, intelligence, and measures of culture developed in a particular culture are difficult to disambiguate.
What makes me self assured here is that best counter arguments to the body of scientific research I read on this topic that I hear is people musing about some hypothetical IQ tests that might possibly ask about baseball. I mean, consider Raven’s progressive matrices. It’s not the best IQ test (for reasons other than knowledge bias), but it correlated very well with WAIS and Stanford-Binet, two most popular and arguably the best IQ test. It asks for no knowledge of baseball, regattas, or anything else, in fact, it used no words at all. How comes that it nevertheless gives the same results as other, allegedly biased IQ tests? What exactly makes it biased, and why in exactly the same direction as other tests?
Beyond that, yes, RPM is culturally biased. If you have experience with basic geometrical manipulations and bitmap manipulation you will find it much easier. For example if you have CS training you will notice that half or more of the questions in many RPM style tests are basically XORing two images together, with a small twist some times.
You'll also find it difficult to argue that that people who culturally do less manipulation and work on paper or on a screen will have a more difficult time.
Beyond that, there is clearly a body of research that finds IQ tests to be culturally loaded, and solid research that shows that even further studies in the same society where the IQ test was developped has a significant and measurable impact.
IQ tests are incredibly predictive of a whole host of outcomes.
I work with high performing undergraduate students (think top 10 US public university). In one of our classes, they work on global public health design projects. Last year, the project was centered in the country of Chad.
One thing the students learned was that if someone isn't part of a culture that regularly uses paper/2D representations of things then using those modalities to communicate prototypes doesn't work.
Does that mean my students are smarter than the Chadian people? Why? Because they come from a culture where interacting with abstractions and representations of information is normed? The people of Chad certainly can.
If they are smarter shouldn't I be able to drop my students near Lake Chad and let them learn how to navigate without a map and compass? its just cognition so they should be able to figure it out right? They could memorize the map in advance?
It's not that 'some things have bias' its that all things are socially constructed at some level...
As far as dropping your students near Lake Chad, that's not general intelligence. Babies born in Chad learn how to navigate their area, just as your students can. The question would be who would be able to learn how to do it faster, and how many of each group could learn more complex things.
Research has found that differences in IQ at a young age are not very stable over a lifetime. That being said, education starts at birth, and cognitive development doesn't go at the same speed for everyone even when the endpoint is the same.
And actual, we did find that education does raise IQ in a significant and sustained way, with measured increases persisting for 40 years : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253 (ie, the OP)
I am not a social scientist, but based on my experiences seeing people attempt to learn programming, it seems like certain types of thinking patterns cannot easily be learned by everybody.