Children’s IQ dropped during lockdown, study finds
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/...
If the difference between the 2012 and 2020 cohorts is roughly the same as between the 2012 and 2002 cohorts, why should I suspect this isn't just a failure to pick comparable cohorts across the decades?
Edit: Also, how can the average IQ be 112? I thought it was always 100?
Sample mean (112) != population mean (unknowable) != an estimate of the population mean (100)
If you give a subset of a population an IQ test, the average of all those results isn't going to be exactly 100, because sample means differ from population means due to sheer noise not to mention sampling bias. You might get 98 or 112. Assuming no bias (such as selection bias), the expected value of the sample mean will asymptote to 100 as you increase the sample size.
Likewise if you measure the average height of a group of people, you may get a sample mean of 5'9.6, but it won't be exactly 5'10 or whatever the population mean happens to be in the country at large, again due to noise or sampling bias.
Zoom and friends are generally speaking a terrible way to teach children. The medium is more or less limited to auditory and visual learning. With some preparation and parental involvement you can do some hands on learning, but it is much more limited than in a classroom.
This is also why people who say that the average IQ has been rising or falling over time are mistaken.
IQ doesn't really mean what most people think it means. What it really means has been a matter of disagreement ever since it was introduced, but it is a poor proxy for "intelligence" at best, and can't be used to compare intelligence differences over time.
By the definition of the IQ scale, 100 is always whatever the average intelligence is. So the average intelligence of people in the 1960s was 100. Let's say people have become dumber (or smarter, doesn't matter) in the time since then -- the average IQ of people now is still 100.
How much absolute intelligence "100" represents now is not the same as how much intelligence "100" represented then. IQ is about measuring differences in populations at a moment in time. It is not suitable for (or intended to) measure differences over time.
There's a good reason that IQ works the way it does -- it's because IQ tests are affected by lots of things other than intelligence, and those things are not constant over time. How well you do on an IQ test is affected by societal factors, for instance.
This goes back to why I said that IQ tests are a poor proxy for intelligence at best. IQ test do not measure intelligence (there's not even any consensus on what "intelligence" actually is, and if you don't know what it is, it's pretty hard to measure). IQ tests measure competency in things that roughly orbit intelligence, but are also influenced by your cultural upbringing, your socioeconomic status, and even strange things like what type of thinking (not how good it is) your brain happens to engage in.
The one thing that IQ seems to correlate well to is how well you'll do in college. But even there, the correlation is pretty loose.
This was the first thought that came to mind, and I also wonder if this goes further to increased media consumption and phone use/dependence across the board.
Smartphone adoption and use was already on a hockey stick trajectory, but adding lockdown to the mix added to many people’s screen time massively. And for kids growing up in that setting, learning that knowledge comes from these magical slabs of glass seems like a good way to stunt certain kinds of curiosity quite early.
To whatever degree phone and social media use is a factor, it does seem highly likely that lockdowns accelerated/magnified this effect.
My school when I was growing up tracked you based on an IQ test at age 4. How does that type of test vary as you age?
Similarly I have always felt that it's strange that SATs get changed periodically but then compared en masse across generations routinely, makes little sense to me.
To use an extreme comparison, children who were locked up in basements also come out being less mentally capable than their peers.