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Loss of Applied IQ Among UK Youth?
Baldrson writes "The UK Times Online reports that: 'After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."' 3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73 -- a massive loss of 27 points. Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning, it nevertheless appears to blow 'a gaping hole' in what has been called The Flynn Effect: that IQs have been rising in most parts of the world -- particularly the developed countries."
Um, no.
IQ = 100*MA/CA where MA = Mental Age and CA = Chronological Age. It helps to look things up rather than try to guess the meaning of a formula.
Or the idiotic laws that force the parents to babysit their offspring till they are 14 years old removing any sense of reason and responsibility? I remember that at the age of 7 I had to travel across one quarter of a 10 million city alone to school every day.
I don't think there is any law which forces parents to drive their kids to school. They do it for a variety of reasons: laziness, paranoia about paedophiles, the fact that more mothers have cars now, etc.
No, as opium was widely available for pretty much the same purpose.
No, standard IQ is calculated based on the rarity of a score on a test in a population that is assumed to have normally distributed scores using a mean of 100 and a 15-point standard deviation. IQ is not a constant or absolute measure of ability. It is on roughly an equal-interval scale, but in the tails of the distribution it closer to a ordinal scale since the actual distribution of abiliity is closer to log-normal.
Three years difference in scores is likely going to be substantially less than 27 IQ points. Figuring it out precisely is difficult because there is a huge spurt and then dropoff in the rate of increase in intelligence on a ratio (Rasch-based SB5 CSS score) scale from about 8 to 12, peaking at age 10. Testing would be a more accurate way of finding out the IQ equivalent of 3 years difference at that age in that population than attempting to calculate it anyway.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
People during those times were depressed too, they just used alcohol (that's what most medicines were then anyway)
Heh! And the "alcohol" was better in those days, too. Beer was regulary >15% by volume (cf 4-5% today) and other drinks contained opiates, in the form of morphine.
Large parts of Victorian Britain were designed under the influence of alcohol and opium mixtures.
Stick Men
It's called busy work.
Basically as part of the national child care service, what you know as school,
they assign your kids busy work to keep them occupied in the evenings so theoretically at least your sproglets are in school 9 or so hours, in transit for 1 and have at least 2-3 hours work per night, totalling an impressive 12-13 hours of the day which you do not have to come up with a reason to ignore your kids.
Great isn't it?
Of course as they get older the workload increases thus keeping them out of your hair longer, in theory.
Schools aren't about learning or about much else other then busy work and standardised testing.
Of course I imagine some might disagree with me, but it is how I feel after my experiences.
No, the parent is correct the assumption that an 8 year old is 8/11 as intelligent as an 11 year old is one of the many bizarre assumptions made in measurement of children's intelligence. That the questions in tests are selected according to this assumption might compensate for this if the development of intelligence were to follow a smooth curve like a logarithmic scale. However it is well established that children's mental development follows a series of stages which would suggest that intelligence develops in a series of advances and plateaus.
Strangely, the man (Piaget) responsible for demonstrating that children develop through a series of stages is also responsible for the way we measure children's IQ's, and the really weird assumption that all children complete their development on their sixteenth birthday.
The parent is also correct that a drop of IQ of 27 points, which is nearly two standard deviations, across two generations is impossible. That degree of difference represents the gap between average intelligence and retardation. This suggests that the test was not one of intelligence but one of knowledge.
I didn't read that in the referenced article. I read that in a study of 27K children, 11yo children are "less intelligent" than they were 30 years ago. Someone mentions that the children today are doing about as well as 8year olds then. And then there's some journalistic hand waving about how this represents a serious problem that change within our educational system to resolve.
OK. Now for some real background. The study the researchers are repeating is part of a group of studies done by Jean Piaget back in the late 1960s through the 70s. Piaget was a developmental psychologist was was interested in discerning developmental stages in childhood that could be predicted and potentially nurtured with special education. He broke development down into four stages:
1) Sensimotor Stage: birth -> 2yo (a child who developed object persistence, or the recognition that a physical object persists even when out of the visual field and across time, would pass to the next stage)
2) Pre-Operational Stage: 2yo -> 7-8 (a child who developed conservation skills, recognizing that certain abstract things which appear different are actually the same, would pass to the next stage
3) Concrete Operational Stage: ~8-11yo (a child who developed abstract reasoning, such as manipulation of abstract variables in math or algorithmic reasoning, would pass to the final stage
4) Formal Operational Stage: cognitive adulthood.
This study -- cited in the article -- tests when children move from Pre-Operational to Concrete-Operational stage. They do so with a conservation skills test. In one test the researcher takes a tall and thin beaker and fills it up to a certain amount in front of the child. Then the researcher hands the child a light block and a heavy block and asks the child where they think each will displace the water in the beaker. If the child realizes that both displace the water equally, the child understands conservation of water displacement.
They then move to another test where the child is faced with a tall set of blocks stacked upon one another, and a short and wide set of the same blocks stacked upon one another. The researcher asks the child to use the short and wide blocks to build the same tower as the tall and thin one. If the child realizes that since both contain the same number of blocks it is actually possible for him/her to complete the task, the child understands volume conservation.
In yet another test, the researcher takes one cup of water and pours it into several smaller cups and then asks the child where the water line will be if they pour all the water from the smaller cups back into the larger cup. Ya'll get the idea.
Now, these researchers are testing children today using the same methods as Piaget back in the 70s. What they found is that the mean for transitioning out of Pre-Operational Stage is today later than it was back in the 1970s. They don't know why. Is it due to changes in our educational system? If it due to environmental changes? Hell, how about: does Paiget's development model hold any factual water? *cough!* Are these results meaningful, and what do they mean?
I don't know.
But one thing I do know is that these results say NOTHING about relative IQ differences from then and today because neither study measured IQ!!!! It is a gross misunderstanding of this work to compare the actual results of relative changes in children developing specific conservation skills over time, and then claiming that these results can extrapolate general intelligence changes in children over time. They are not the same!
To sum up, baldrson misses this "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": know what you are measuring and confounds it with a second "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": take accurate measurements. So, now that we have that all cleared up, how 'bout heading over to the pub for a Guinness?
The supposed "link" between the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine and autism, based on the notion that the mercury in MMR causes autism, has been studied over and over again. NO credible studies have turned up any links. The one famous study in the Lancet that *did* allege a link turned out to have falsified data. Do the reading here, here, and here.
Despite the clear research, my wife gets several patients per year whose parents have been "educated" by reading anti-vaccine junk on the Web. As a result, they refuse to vaccinate their kids. That's nutty. I'm all in favor of reducing environmental risks, but avoiding vaccines is not an effective route to doing so. The diseases that vaccines protect against are far more likely to be dangerous to a child than any supposed benefit obtained by avoiding vaccines.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Yeah, that will have a great effect on their kids. Good plan. Or maybe it would be cheaper to just round them up and gas them? After all, nobody who's lost their job is strictly speaking human, right?
Since the idiots are spawning idiot sprogs much faster than intelligent people are producing normal offspring, it drags the average IQ down.
If the "intelligent people" can't work out that the solution is to settle down and have kids instead of fucking around on scooters snorting coke and aspiring to be DJs until they're in their late thirties, then perhaps they're not as intelligent as they like to think, just arrogant, smug and small-minded.
IQ tests can be taught just like any other skill. The claims that they measure innate intelligence have never been substantiated. I was drilled in them when I was 10, my IQ rose from over 120 to over 140. By the end I was getting every question on the paper correct
Until the 1970s the UK had a two tier state education system. 5% of the kids went to grammar schools the rest went to 'secondary modern's' - sink schools in other words. To get into the grammar school and get a decent education (albeit not quite as good as the private education) you had to pass the eleven plus.
During the eleven plus era large numbers of kids were drilled in taking IQ tests. This continued for a while after the grammar schools had been phased out, partly due to inertia but also because there was tight competition for places at private schools which still have selection today.
so this is not a demonstration that kids are getting stupider, merely that the local effect of one bias in a ridiculous test is greater than the general bias.
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He wrote a kind of sequel to that story a year later, The Marching Morons, 1951. Though this shows the geniuses did not actually have any free time, being busy stopping the majority of idiots from killing themselves.
As I was taught 25 years ago..."It's volts that jolts & mils that kills" (milliamps)...I.E. It is current that stops hearts (70mA or so will do the trick), Voltage will make you jump, but NOT stop the heart.