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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."
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
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.Location: London on a night bus.
Time: Last January
Subjects: A thicket of Chavs.
The one started doing a 'Rap' to impress his 'friends' and the chavettes that were with them. The lines of the end of his rap went like this.
You think you so smart because you went to University.
Well I gots more intelligence than you and me.
I think that sums it up.
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.
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.
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.
Chavs are nothing like the punks of the late 1970s.
The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture.
Chavs are just brain-dead zombies. They're apathetic, ignorant, uneducated, and wouldn't know what Politics were if the Sun or News of the World attempted to explain to them. As for culture, they're at the forefront of the establishment of pop culture. Just look at BBC Top of The Pops. Those orange whingers in the top 10 are just what your average(sic) chav is "in to."
Stick Men
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.
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!
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...
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?