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."

Comments

From the links below the article

[mccalli]

From the links below the article.

Also in this section:

• Brain or bimbo?
• Bad girl
• Confessions of a middle-class pole dancer: 'It's permission to be sexy'

Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.

Cheers,
Ian

Correlation: Food vs. IQ?

[reporter]

As the population has grown, humankind has resorted to increasing use of pesticides, cow-based feed (for other cows), and other extreme measures to grow the food supply. When I say, "cow-based feed", I am referring to rendering cow carcasses into foodstuffs that is fed to other cows. Some scientists suspect that cow-based feed may be the catalyst behind mad-cow disease.

Also, "other extreme measures" include farming fish, like salmon, in confined ponds where heavy metals and other chemicals can accumulate because the farmer does not bother to clean the water. Numerous government studies show that farmed salmon had much higher concentrations of toxic metals and chemicals than wild salmon like that in Alaska.

The key question is whether there is a correlation between the increasing contamination of our food and the behavior of the brain. Has anyone noticed the increasing amounts of psychotherapeutic drugs consumed by people in developed countries? What is happening to our brains? Did people in 1850 need to consume Prozac just to cope with their own lives?

Society is decadent its the Romans all over again!

[WebWeasel2006]

Western society has become decadent. Everything is provided for you so you dont need to work. I see it all the time here in Britan everyone acts like they are a celebrity and are born with the right of everything being handed to them on a plate. The work ethic is left to us few....

Explains...

[19061969]

This is quite worrying. With falling numbers in technical and scientific fields, this does not bode well for the future of industry in the UK. I can see this applying to other developed nations.

Quoth TFA: "Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning"

Hmm. May explain the rise in belief of intelligent design.

And there was me thinking it was almost cool to be a geek. What I got wrong was that it is cool to look geeky, but not actually be a geek.

Too many black boxes

[EmbeddedJanitor]

When I was a kid (~40 years ago), I had a bunch of technical stuff like steam engines, radios etc that I could take apart and understand (OK they didn't always work again afterwards). The radios had valves (tubes in American) that glowed and you could see stuff happening. I built crystal sets which worked fine with MW radio. Now most things that kids get are electronic gizzmos that are stuffed with ICs. No hope of really learning and understanding anything there.

Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.

Re:Too many black boxes

[baadger]

These toys stuffed with IC's are what make some of us Brit's go into studying Electronics. Me for one. I'm not sure how much water that argument can hold, I just don't think less visible workings stunts curiosity or the mind of an engineer to a great extent.

What it does probably do is stunt the creativity side of things.

Re:Too many black boxes

[drgonzo59]

That is a big problem. Learning to use an application interface is very counter productive if one doesn't already understand the basics of the concept. This is the major challenge for those who take classes at places like a community college. Most often people who go there will not know what a file is, or what the CPU does, how a megabyte is different than a megahertz. They will be learning only how to use a specific application and stuff like "Click on the top left menu called File", "then click on Save As...","Then click on My Documents", "Then type the file name". Show these people a different operating system, a different program with the same basic functionality and they are completely lost. My mom was so shocked the other day that I could figure out how to use PageMaker even though I have never used it before. I used Quark Express and Scribus before though, and I know what a general layout program should do and can find how to do those things by poking around through the menus. That is the benefit of understanding the fundamental not just remembering menu sequences.

Kids should be learning both the applied and the abstract general concepts. So when learning about HTML, it would be good to know why are people using HTML, why not something else, what is HTML related to, how is it different than Java and stuff like that, while at the same time learning how to make pretty tables with nifty javascript event handlers that makes stuff blink and such.

A general downturn in the western world?

[RyoShin]

I think that any American Slashdotter who has spent time in the general public knows that the falling average IQ is not just a problem in the UK.

I'd be curious to see the rate of IQ change amongst various western countries. Has the common "easy" life stopped working in our favor and started working against us? So many things we had to do before are now done automatically (or not at all,) and so our minds don't have to work nearly as hard to get stuff to happen. Granted, modern life has allowed us to focus more on things lik science and mechanics, but the lack of necessity is keeping many from allowing themselves to be educated.

I also blame America's increasing "stupid" problem partly on the parents that let their kids do whatever they please, with little in the way of punishment. The lack of respect I see everyday from my generation (I'm 20) is just appaling.

Re:Society is decadent its the Romans all over aga

[stevied]

But for those "few" of us who are interested in things technical or creative, we have an unprecedented opportunity. Assuming you can find a moderately stree-free way of earning a reasonable income (not always straightforward given the climate in many modern workplaces), then the time-saving technologies available allow you more hours a week to pursue the stuff that really interests you, and to leverage those hours to be more productive. Finding solutions to technical queries was much harder before the net (Fidonet Echomail was horrendously slow <g>)

Incidentally, most of the rest are perhaps not as decadent as they might look to a depressed geek; they just need a little leadership. It's actually not that hard to do, it just takes subtlety, and overcoming the fear of / antipathy towards the "herd" that thinking people tend — quite reasonably — to develop at an early age.

Re:Fair?

[zCyl]

Why is IQ judged only on the basis of science & technical application?

Because artists don't conduct scientific studies of IQ. Ponder that for a while...

Re:Well perhaps we were lucky

[DenDude]

/* As our tech increases we need less and less knowledge about it. My mom knew how to wire a fuse. I know how to screw in one. My kid knows how to throw a circuit breaker. Wich one of us would be more likely to be able to get a car moving when there is no replacement fuse available? */

There is a science fiction story that has fascinated me from the first time I read it. It's called "The Black Bag" by Kornbluth, and it's about a doctor's "little black bag" from the future. The bag is filled with instruments that any person of any intelligence can operate effectively.

That's only part of the subject of my post, however. One of the asides in this story is that in this future, technology makes it possible for anyone to become just about anything (career-wise) at least. The point was that the people who were operating the equipment were just not that bright, and could only follow instructions because the instruments were so perfectly made. The high-powered careers were filled by the mediocre, and the true geniuses were janitors with lots of free time to ponder and invent.

This seems more and more like the situation we are now in. I remember writing code in x86 assembler, not for the fun of it (although if it wasn't, I'd have never done it), but because if you wanted your computer to do certain things, you had to know what the stack, the heap, the registers, the segments, and all the other intricacies were. With the power of computers now, it's like the black bag; the geniuses write the tools, and anyone with a little ability can do the easy stuff like coding. Now apply that to your favorite technology, and mix well.

Re:standards in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me give you an example. When I was in college (Computer Studies), we had what I can only describe as a remedial course in maths. This stuff was taught in secondary school to all thirteen year-olds, I don't know how people got out of school without learning it or why it was the college's job to catch them up at the expense of everybody else's time and money. Very few people paid attention in the classes. We got to the end-of-year exams, and three or four of us got 90%+ for this particular module. The pass rate was 40%. Everybody else got 30-40%.

So these imbeciles, who have shown themselves incapable of learning basic maths not once but twice, should have to resit the exams or fail the course, yes? No. Because it was very unlikely that they could pass, and because failing them would mean cancelling the second year of the course and screwing the rest of us, the pass rate was lowered so that everybody passed.

I finished college, and went on to university. Guess what? A huge part of the first year was dedicated to repeating stuff that I had spent the last two years sitting in classes for. Why? Because half the people on my course (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence) had never written a program before in their life. And you know what? By the end of the year, they still hadn't. Not even Hello World. In all our programming assignments, we were given complete programs and told to change a couple of things ("make it print the numbers 1 to 20 instead of 1 to 10"). These people have degrees now.

I left school at thirteen years old due to illness, so I skipped a huge amount of school. And yet most people I meet seem to be way behind me when it comes to education. That's not my opinion, I think I'm average, but everybody else thinks of me as a bit of a genius. The majority of people I know haven't read a book since school unless they were forced to for work.

So how I can do way better than average with moderate effort, even though I'm at a huge disadvantage? Because most people are completely apathetic. And yet they get free passes anyway. At every point in my education, I've felt that you have to be exceptionally bad to fail at anything.

Kids have lost conservation laws

[Animats]

It's not an "IQ" issue. The original article makes a key point - kids are not getting conservation laws, like conservation of volume. I can see why. Neither television nor video games enforce conservation of mass, energy, or volume. That basic observation about the physical world gets broken. Game worlds have much better graphics than they have physics. This may be messing up the worldview of kids, especially if they spend more time with games and TV than playing with physical objects.

I've noticed something else in the last year that worries me. I own a horse, and I recently had to move him to a barn that mostly teaches 6 to 14 year olds to ride. Often, the parents have non-riding kids in tow, and they hang around the barn. Many (not all) of the non-riding kids have no clue how to deal with an environment that isn't entirely kid-safe. Some basic survival skills seem to be missing. They don't notice, let alone get out of the way of, horse traffic. They're unaware of what's happening behind them. They have no sense that they need to have some caution when near these huge animals and their big, steel-shod hooves.

I've seen a horse, faced with an 8-year old child in his path, stop, reach down with his nose, and nudge the child out of the way, as a horse would do with a foal. The horses have more sense than some of the kids.

These are school-age kids from rather well-off families. They're not retarded or autistic. But they have no sense of what's hazardous.

Two Cultures.

[Grendel Drago]

Are you familiar with C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"? It describes the kind of nonsense that makes people who are not self-identified dorks reluctant to understand anything the least bit technical or scientific. Willful ignorance bothers me to no end.