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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."
Loss of scientific and technical reasoning eh... so folks are saying "I don't care, I just want it to WORK!"
Man, where have I heard that before?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
What with Celebrity Big Brother, the Crazy Frog and chav culture, I'm amazed it's that few!
You must think in Russian.
We're not stupid... We're advanced.
That obselete test just fails to keep up with modern applications of science and math. Like manipulating them to support your point, or redefining them for political reasons.
Also in this section:
Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.
Cheers,
Ian
Why is IQ judged only on the basis of science & technical application?
Is science the only field worth measuring an IQ on?
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?
The internet is a vast information resource available to a large portion of the civilized world, but I don't think kids today are interested in learning anything. As parents (and people in general, I think) have become more selfish as time goes by, this is the only behavior our children see, leading them to behavior that isn't interested in learning. All they really want is to be entertained. In this regard, the electronic age might be our worst enemy. Instead of using computers and the internet as a tool to expand thier world, they use them as a crutch -- for entertainment when needed, and to do the thinking for them when presented with things like math problems, spelling and grammar. If being smart is no longer 'cool', what's the incentive to learning anything? Money in the form of 'future income' is not enough of an incentive for many kids -- Future income means future work, and many of these kids will settle for a job at a fast food restaurant (despite those jobs being incredibly stressful and low-wage) because they don't want to put forth the effort to learn anything and/or find another job.
This guy really had to study 25,000 kids to determine that people are getting dumber at a worrying rate? All he had to do was turn on MTV for a half hour and watch what they consider entertainment nowadays.
Don't mistake a "drop" in IQ with rising IQs elsewhere.
Recall that places like India and China have, for various reasons, not been the best places to foster intellect in recent times (the last two or three hundred years). The people there are just as intellectually capable as anyone from a Western nation, but did not have many of the advantages that Western society was able to offer due to its better economic position, and so forth.
But times have changed, and education is far more available in places like India and China, in addition to many other developing countries. So it's no wonder that the comparative IQ gap between Western and Eastern cultures is closing, and closing quickly. It's not because people in the Western world are becoming stupider; it's because the people in the East are now able to take advantage of better educational opportunities.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
No, they had other problems that kept them from thinking of those things:
- Starving to death
- Cholera
- Freezing during the winter
- Smallpox
People during those times were depressed too, they just used alcohol (that's what most medicines were then anyway) People who were rich enough that they didn't have to worry about the things listed above had the same 'problems' you allude to the general population having today. It is only that now enough people are well off enough to sit around and worry about such higher level problems.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.
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....
Sometimes I get lost inside my head....
Well thank heavens for that. We're still up on the U.S.
There's nothing special about the chav "movement" of today. It's much like the punks of the late 1970s. They wear different clothes, but the attitude is still the same.
Even then, it's something that they'll be forced to grow out of. If any of them wish to obtain and retain jobs, even as custodians or trash collectors at McDonalds, they won't be able to act like chavs or punks. And if they don't conform, then they'll likely turn to crime, and end up dead or in prison.
The basic economics of living, and the criminal justice system after that, acts as the good parents that these kids didn't have.
Nevertheless, those with intellectual talent do almost always manage to succeed, even in the fact of punkism or chavism. There won't be a shortage of British scientists or researchers, for instance.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Speaking as a parent in the UK I have to agree with the general sentiment of the article, though I can't speak about the percentages, not being in possession of the statistics. One only has to listen to the Universities saying "we now have to set basic literacy and numeracy tests for all 18 year olds as part of the entrance process" to know that something is very wrong.
It's the "all shall have prizes" culture where children aren't told "that's wrong, go and do it again" lest we scar them for life and someone brings a law suit.
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.
bang goes my karma... again...
CNN recently reported about a study that found that bat species with larger testes have smaller brains, and vice versa. Maybe these kids just have extremely large gonads, and that's why they're morons.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This is all too true in my opinion. I'm probably in the group of 'UK Youth' and I go to a Grammar School, which accepts the top 10% of the area, and I often find myself thinking that if some members of my class are in the top ten percent, this area has no chance. Still, I think this may be a little flawed.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is very unsurprising.
There was a time when engineers and trailblazers were popular heroes. But a lot of damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a culture of outright greed and everybody's dream was to be a fat-cat manager. Education reflected this, and children were trained to be capable pen-pushers, perhaps also possesing relational and organisational skills. (It was not all bad.) Politicians listened to business leaders, and business leaders naturally emphasised the type of skills they themselves had.
However, the people who did this forgot that management does not create ideas or value. Problem-solving, creative and scientific skills took a back seat; some of this was an understandable reaction to the way education was organized in the 1970s. But they were also considered less important because they were not culturally appreciated and besides, they were not the kind of skills a professional human resources department was looking for.
The result has been a loss of cognitive ability, in part a lack of creativity, but to substantial degree a loss of interpretative ability. The generation that was still educated in Latin and Old Greek may have wasted time on subjects managers now consider unimportant, but they did have a knack for extracting meaning from obscure and incomplete evidence.
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.
I'd definitely agree with this. My little sister is 14, and although she's not bright in the way that my other sister and I were, she's not dumb. However, she and her friends generally seem uninterested in learning, reading (the hobby that I attribute most of my intelligence today to), and just general education. Kids today (and I say this as a 19 year old, so don't mod me -1, Old Timer) are just apathetic about learning, and I can definitely say that as time passes, kids just aren't getting smarter.
Same with a lot of other stuff. I could help out with fixing the car. Well stand by but you could actually see stuff and the adults could actually do things themselves. Todays cars? Black boxes.
I learned a lot about electricity helping out with a model railroad. Pokemon is a nice game but it is played on another black box.
But lets face it, the rot started without especially your generation. YOU are the one raising these 11 year olds and we just don't have the need to get down and dirty anymore.
Odd thing about the sexual revolution? Rather then men learning how to cook as well now nobody learns how to cook. Freaky.
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?
Maybe parents need to get more involved with their kids. Nah.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
I take it you've never tried browsing here at -1. It's certainly not for the faint-hearted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's unpossible!
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.
A nice dose of 220 through your hand will teach you more about electricity then any classroom lecture.
As for wiring a fuse with say a screwdriver. Sometimes you just got to do stuff that is unsafe. If we only did was what safe we would still be up a tree somewhere in africa. (or for the religious people, inside the garden of eden)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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?
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This UK youth is not an elitist asshole.
/. here who posted earlier, I attend a grammar school. These are specifically designed to harbour the most intelligent and train them to their potential. If what is available in my year is the cream of our province, then we have serious issues, especially since my school is highly selective.
/. crowd, they were in the "geeky" social group. I'm a geek, that's where I like to be. Where we DO talk about maths, we DO talk about computers, we DO talk about more than "Lost" and, "OHMIGAWD DID YOU SEE WHAT SHE WAS WEARIN'?!" . None of us are dysfunctional geeks, we have lives, but our lifestyles are different enough to realise what we lack and have that the others don't have. What the others, who don't care how things work and have fun in free periods bundling each other on the floor work.
Like a fellow
I cannot imagine how other provinces ("Counties" here in the UK) manage. Grammar schooling was abolished in every other county, and there is a serious movement to abolish them here. Why? Through some twisted use political correctness and an attitude of, "All are equal in ability, thus, it is unfair to split staffing between schools, where the grammar school may take the better staff due to a more prestigious position." Luckily the Labour party has recently begun motions to keep and enhance selective schooling in the country, which I think is a good thing.
However, back to my experience. Technical and applied sciences are sorely, sorely lacking. I had a girl in my economics class a few weeks ago requiring explanation and a little time for the mathematical cogs to grind to work out the total sum of 50 - 40 = 10.
I am not joking.
I believe I know the problem, and it purely is our society, and the crap we are force-fed, and most of use ingest. Who to blame for this, I'm not sure. Maybe corporations aiming to control our habits from birth, maybe lazy parenting, maybe government attitude, likely a combination of these things and more. I am however certain of the society in my school.
I attend a sixth form at the top grammar school in my area, and I find it fairly boring, but I love to learn. Most likely like a lot of the
+ Major point: None of us watch TV. We do grow a liking to a certain series here or there and we watch (Much which is popular here, too. Futurama, Firefly, BS:G and so forth), but none of use sit in front of that square box and just sit there mindlessly because we don't have anything else to do.
+ We learn where we can in school. Let me explain this. I have slowly and methodically found out school grades are in no way whatsoever a representation of intelligence in any way. They are simply a test of memory, this is how ninety-five percent of the school treat it, and that is how it is taught. You never have to think at any point, you are told some bare facts, and you need to memorise them. This is why some truly idiotic people can get good marks. I think a further factor why science and maths is worst hit is that is requires minimal amounts of though, we have to memorise equations, sure, but then we have to APPLY them. Oh that scares them. They didn't memorise that one. We as a group want to truly learn. I aced triple physics with an A* at GCSE with barely any revision, it being the toughest physics test open to me at the time, simply because I've always been interested in physics, and how the world works.
+ Peer pressure of hatred of science and learning. Being a geek, I do of course have geek attire, such as the exceptionally cool, "Shroedinger's Cat is dead" T-shirt from ThinkGeek.com. Ninety-eight percent just don't care, ask, and as I'm always willing to teach, start off with the phrase, "It's about physics..." knowing it'll scare them off. They don't care. They don't want to stay and listen. Their social position may fall! However, people have complimented me on this T-shirt, in private. Girls especially, I'm assuming because they have a greater "pack" society. We don't do t
It's odd that every comment here is about circuits and electricity. The article refers kids couldn't figure out that pouring water from a a tall thin jug into a fat small jug gives you the same amount of water!!!
What the living heck does that have to do with ICs? You can play with electricity not understanding the simply or complicated explaination underlying physics all day long. This is about the basics of interacting with this world on a mechanical level.
OK, but like many of you, I taught myself programming as a kid and studies EE later... but hell, I also played outside and got a sense for gravity, forces, and geometry. That's what this is REALLY about!
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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Intelligence is heritable and the intelligent are having fewer children than the dull.
Intelligence is aborting/abstaining/contracepting itself out of existence and leaving the world to the idiots.