Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion IQ & Environment

My kids & I attended a parent group last night that was interesting and good albeit a 45 min drive. Dd13 commented that a lot of the other HG+ teens were like her (a lot of vegetarians, similar political & spiritual beliefs, and a lot of others who had skipped grades too).

Some of my discussions brought up a number of thoughts for me and I wanted to get others' options on one in particular. I hope that I did not offend the others by disagreeing with the common thread that one can score too low on an IQ test but not too high. Everyone with whom I spoke expressed this opinion (the highest score you ever achieve is the most accurate).

When I brought up research that indicated substantial shifts in IQ scores over time in young children (both up and down), one of the others stated that a drop in IQ was likely due to poor educational fit. In other words, there is a combination of nature & nurture involved (which I agree with) and also that underplacing a child educationally will decrease his IQ (which I'm not sure on).

Any thoughts on whether having a child underchallenged in school will cause his intelligence to drop, not just his achievement?

Yes, I think that's probably true-- and moreover I think that even if g didn't drop, intelligence scores could well drop. When I did some light reading in this area last year, I recall that training is believed by many, based on adoption studies etc., to have a fairly large positive effect (2/3 - 1 SD IIRC) on IQ in the short term, and less (1/3 SD or so) long term. It makes sense to me that depression and lack of stimulation could have a large negative temporary effect as well. However, I also think that an assumption that the highest score is the most accurate sounds like the wishful thinking of an overly competitive parent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
"Dickens and Flynn (2001) argued that the "heritability" figure includes both a direct effect of the genotype on IQ and also indirect effects where the genotype changes the environment, in turn affecting IQ. That is, those with a higher IQ tend to seek out stimulating environments that further increase IQ. The direct effect can initially have been very small but feedback loops can create large differences in IQ. In their model an environmental stimulus can have a very large effect on IQ, even in adults, but this effect also decays over time unless the stimulus continues (the model could be adapted to include possible factors, like nutrition in early childhood, that may cause permanent effects). The Flynn effect can be explained by a generally more stimulating environment for all people. The authors suggest that programs aiming to increase IQ would be most likely to produce long-term IQ gains if they taught children how to replicate outside the program the kinds of cognitively demanding experiences that produce IQ gains while they are in the program and motivate them to persist in that replication long after they have left the program."

http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20020205.pdf

I get it - sause for the goose is sause for the gander: You can't blame a drop in IQ on poor educational fit without giving credit to an enriched environment for a 'higher than would otherwise be expected' IQ.

I'm going to define two different terms for this discussion:
'IQ score' - what an individual scores on any IQ test at a moment in time, the 'snapshot'
'inherant IQ' - that thing that the IQ score is a snapshot is of, 'g' for some folks.

I don't think that a poor educational fit decreases 'inherant IQ'(reasoning skill, backround knowledge) but very poor fit can lead to anxiety and depression which can make measuring IQ fully a very tricky and unreliable business.

Let's imagine a high energy child who is somehow at a school that teaches her nothing at all, but provides a rich social and emotional experience. (I know it's a strech, but this is a thought experiement - maybe she has a core of best buddies and a series of teachers who are unusually loving and accepting of her being different even though they don't consider it their job to provide her with academic learning.)

I'd fully expect that happy child to go on learning outside of school hours through reading books or surfing Wikipedia, and I'd expect her to have a IQ score that reflects her IQ. So no, I don't think that a poor fit educational environment would lead to a drop in IQ scores or inherant IQ, unless it leads to an unhappy, shut down kid, or unless the school day were 12 hours long, or summer vacation was abolished, or the child was on the low-energy side of things.

This link shows an 'almost understandable' discussion of why scientists believe that IQ is estimated at 50% to 70% due to genetics
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/mar/15/how-to-inherit-iq-an-exchange/?pagination=false

Nature via Nurture is a nice expression, and I seem to remember a study that talked about kids who are adopted getting an increase in IQ score by being raised by high IQ moms, but that as the children aged into young adults their IQ scores started to more resemble their birth parents. A difference of about 5 points sticks in my mind, but I can't remember if that was the original difference or what was left by young adulthood. It makes me wonder what the picture would have been if those individuals were checked in their thirties or fourties.

But for our purposes, is a 5 point difference in IQ going to make a difference in anyone's life? I can imagine that going up 5 points for the range of 115 to 130 might be a noticable difference, in that by 120 or 125, a person is in danger of thinking that they are 'really something' compared to a heterogeneous group. By the time a kid is at 135 I don't think 5 IQ points is going to change their life experience by much.

Nature via nurture is I think, much more interesting to study than to live - for example the last I read about breastfeeding was that some kids had genetic differences that made human milk more 'IQ supportive' than for other kids. How cool is that?

From a slightly different angle, think of a dog with a fabulous pedigree for hearding sheep and learning cues. It's commons sense that it's easy for humans to create a nervous miserable animal who will never be like it's littermate though very poor raising. Think of how much care and hardwork it was to create that set of genetics in the first place! If a handler worked even harder (or used a better technique) than other handlers, would you expect them to raise a dog that was a standout from their littermates? I think it's possible but unlikely - hasn't the history of the world been full of examples of folks doing what was previously unthought of? (Graceful Basketball centers come to mind as a recent example) But it's certianly isn't an everyday thing. In my imagination I'm still happily waiting for a new teaching technowledge that reduces the tremendous waste of human resource that our current child-raising and teaching practices represent, but I'm not expecting it to happen tomorrow. It's my understanding the gas combustion engine has about a 50% efficiency, and that squeezing an extra 1% or 10% is very very difficult, but would have widespread effects - maybe that's what our current child raising/teaching technowoldgies are like. Maybe this board and other Internet resources to help parents of gifted kids parent better and advocate better are part of that tiny uptick that will create a pool of enough comfortable gifted kids that the next generation will figure some of these things out.

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

There is random error resulting from sampling in an IQ test. For example, some IQ tests have vocabulary sections. How many of the X words the testee knows depends on his/her intelligence but also on which words are chosen.

Because there is random error, if someone took two IQ tests in a short space of time, my default approach would be to average the two scores. If the test dates were taken several years apart, I would give more weight to the more recent score, but I don't know of research saying how much more weight to give it.

IQ is positively correlated with degrees attained, income, and even staying out of jail. For a sample of people who took more than IQ test, it would be interesting to see whether the maximum, the average, or some other function of the test scores best predicted various outcomes.

All IQ tests try to measure intelligence from different... angles.

From what I have read (http://alpha.fdu.edu/psychology/wisciv_gloadings.htm) the Vocabulary subtest on the WISC-IV is most correlated with g, but it is also a measure of crystallized intelligence (http://alpha.fdu.edu/psychology/wisciv_gfgc.htm), the things you know/learned.

And I have been mulling those for a while. Because my son got the WISC-IV at school in November 2010 and the DAS-II as part of a private assessment in March 2011 (WISC couldn't be repeated). His perceptual scores remained stable, but his vocabulary jumped from 8 (WISC-IV Vocabulary subtest) to 13-14 (DAS-II Naming Vocabularies and Word Definitions). The first test was at the beginning of first grade after a year in a Spanish immersion program when we kept our rule of no English at home (our home language is neither English nor Spanish). The second test was after 6 months of intensive after-schooling in English at home (the school assesment having shown him to be below grade level in English, blamed on lowered exposure), including lots of reading.

I am not 100% sure how comparable those tests are, but based on descriptions they seem fairly similar. The fact that 6 months of hot-housing could raise a child from the 25th to the 90th percentile left me scratching my head, because I had totally internalized the "IQ is a measure of ability, not achievement" meme.

FWIW, none of these parents struck me as unusually competitive and the ones with kids similar in age to mine seemed to have reasonable reasons for believing their kids to be HG/good proof. With very young kids, I'm always hesistant to say for sure, but it didn't seem like a group of people who were making stuff up or who were totally off base.

OTH, being in CO, we are close to the GDC and they do often state the general same thoughts I was hearing last night: if the parent thinks the kid is gifted, he probably is; if you live in a neighborhood where 20% of the kids are ided as gifted, it is likely due to the demographics and not overidentification; the highest score you get is the most accurate, etc.

I tend to agree with whoever said that IQ scores may be depressed by poor environmental fit, but the innate ability isn't likely to actually decrease and that may be what this other parent was getting at. None the less, I also believe that IQ scores obtained during childhood are subject to change over time. I do believe that a score can be higher than is innately so due to enriched environment especially the younger the child. I guess that I don't want to believe that you can actually significantly diminish innate ability through poor educational fit b/c dd11 has never had a stellar educational fit and that would cause a lot of guilt!

FWIW, re another assertion I heard a lot, the main reason I don't believe that most parents are accurate in their assessment of giftedness (again not this group in particular) is b/c, while I do believe that parents generally don't want to place their kids so inappropriately educationally that they are stressed out, I also do believe that the majority of GT classes aren't designed for gifted kids but rather hard working kids. Then again, if these other kids with whom we were hanging out last night are PG or close, maybe I'm just judging GT classes off of my oldest who I've never considered more than slightly HG and maybe I'm wrong with her. She seemed pretty similar to these other teens. The GT classes she's been in are not designed for her by a long shot and she stands out like a sore thumb.

I understand how a person could feel that way, but I very much believe that if a school decides to create experiences for the top 10% or 5% or 3% and call that gifted, then gifted it is.

Remember my definition of gifted is 'having special educational needs that are unlikely to be addressed in the regular classroom' and I do believe that the kids in any of those percentage groups do have special educational needs - just not as intense as the needs of kids in the top 1% or part of a percent.

BTW, your story is perfect illustration of my 'seat of the pants' definition for HG (hey, there isn't any standard, so I invite everyone to make up their own!) - that one starnds out like a sore thumb in the classes designated for gifted kids. That feeling of looking out at the kids who are designated as MG (or OG) and thinking 'all give these kids props for their work ethic, but they just don't know much' is a hallmark of the HG kid in a fairly heterogeneous environment.

As for your DD being 'slightly HG' well, remember that the majority of HG is going to be right at the cut off - so she should be in very good company amoung HG kids - the shape of the right tail really precludes anyone from being slightly anything.

Until they start coming up with classroom fulls of HG kids for PG kids to stick out like a sore thumb from, it is going to be very difficult to get a feel for the difference between HG and PG. For now it really depends on every program to know itself for what it wants to deliver and draw it's own lines.

Which is also why I don't get any more fine grained than OG/HG/PG although some people do - I know that there is wild diversity even after the PG cut off.

Hope that helps and super glad you and your daughter had the experience of being with a good fit group!

Smiles,
Grinity

...and this brings up the interesting question (maybe the original question) of which measurement is more accurate: the one taken during childhood or the lower score as an adult? If one leans toward the belief that you can nurture a child into developing to his full potential such that his highest IQ score ever is the most accurate, but not the opposite: that you can nurture a child into performing beyond his true ability on an IQ test early in childhood, then the adoption studies would show more that nurture is the most important piece. The adult IQ numbers would be discarded as less accurate or due to deflation caused by lack of use into adulthood.

Then again, I'm not sure why adopted kids would show this pattern (and be more inclined to atrophy their brains over time due to lack of use) than would children raised by their birth parents.

I think it *is* possible, but it would be more a scenario along the lines of "brought up by wolves" rather than "was bored in class for years".

If your daughter has access to a decent library she will probably be fine . Or her brain will be, anyway.

I actually do really believe that environment has a (potential) impact, perhaps particularly on the 2e kid.

I have three DDs. My eldest was first tested at 7.5years, educationally & emotionally she was at her lowest low. Her WISC index scores ranged between the 13th and 96th. Those scores reflected innate weakness in WMI, and that she was very bright. But I look back and wonder about what she would have scored before she started school and her wheels fell off. At 9.5 years old, 2 yrs later, after much better educational fit and much intervention, she scored FSIQ of 131 on the sb5 with visual/spatial at 135 or 136 and a WMI weakness. Would she have improved or futher declined without the vast improvement in school fit AND intervention? Will she keep rising? Will she maybe even get back to where it looked like she was headed as a an under 5?

It wasn't just about anxiety or depression, it was also about stopping developing in the expected way - and starting again. Equally I look at my 2nd DD, with the FSIQ of 146 (at 5.5 yrs) and I wonder where she's headed.