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

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: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: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.