Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Effect of educational environment

I posted on the musical talent thread but have decided to start a new thread as the point I wanted to start discussion on isn't specific to music.

Madoosa wrote:


and I responded:

Could you cite two or three of the most convincing of these books etc.? I strongly doubt this assertion, but I'm not sure I've ever seen well conducted research that addresses it, and I'd be very interested to do so.

To expand:

While there are, of course, spectacular individual success stories involving children's achievement rapidly improving once they land in an educationally favourable environment, it would take careful research to conclude that this happened to such an extent that an earlier suboptimal environment systematically has no effect on later achievement. Such research would have to be particularly careful about the definition of "the right environment" - for example, since children are so different, it is tempting to say that an environment is right if the child flies in it, which will make the claim tautologically true (only some children will be seen never to encounter the right environment). It would also be quite difficult to disentangle the effects of having the kind of parents who take action to optimise a child's educational environment (and have all the necessary resources to do so), from the effect of the environment itself. Still, one could imagine making the attempt; for example, if you can identify a particular school that is believed to be a good environment for a certain group of children but which can't admit all of them, and chooses some of them by lottery, maybe you can track those who do and do not win the lottery and attend that school, and see what happens to them later.

Here's the closest I can come to research on the topic.

In the UK there is a perennial, politically hot debate about the effect, if any, that independent (private) schools have on their students' later achievement. Context: we have no systematic gifted-specific education in the state sector (selective state "grammar" schools exist in a few areas only, the requirement for state schools to maintain a register of gifted and talented students has recently been ended, and few schools did much with it anyway) and many independent schools thrive by being highly selective and being perceived as being good environments for clever children. Our most selective universities, e.g. Cambridge, are regularly criticised for taking too many children from independent schools, the argument being that children from those schools have been hothoused into performing above their natural ability and are being admitted in place of more able but less paper-qualified students from state schools, who, it is claimed, would out-perform the independent school students at university if they were admitted. This argument is based on the same premise that Madoosa gave above: that once clever students get to a good educational environment, e.g. Cambridge university, it won't matter what their previous education was, they will quickly achieve in line with their earlier promise (say, correlated with their achievement levels as 4yos). Now, it is fairly uncontroversial that these very selective independent schools send out students who have, on average, higher exam marks* than the same students would have if they had attended state schools. (Some students would get 4As anywhere, but some get 4As at Eton who wouldn't have done at XYZ comp.) What would we see if the main claim were true? On average, comparing two students with the same exam marks at entry to Cambridge, one from an independent school and one from a state school, we would see that the former would do less well at Cambridge than the latter. Cambridge did the obvious multifactorial analysis of their entrants, investigating what factors known at the time of entry predict performance while at Cambridge. They found that this is not what you see: in fact, to predict performance at Cambridge, what you need to know is exam marks on entry. Taking school type into account does not significantly improve your predictions. In other words, it may be that the independent schools are in some sense "artificially" boosting their students' performance, but if so, the effect persists at least through undergraduate degree performance. I find this pretty convincing, but then, it agrees with my intuitions so maybe I would! [There is other research claiming to show the opposite by looking at a wider range of universities and courses, but it is problematic because it does not manage to account properly for different patterns of course choice and the way these are influenced by school type. Looking at a single highly prestigious university is a lot easier, methodologically.]

ETA links: Predictive effectiveness of metrics and the less statistically dense School background is not a factor in Cambridge degree success. (Note: these are not peer-reviewed.)

[* note for UK experts: details of which exams we mean at the first link. For most subjects, it's AS UMS (not predicted A level grades, which are practically all AAA+).]

Indeed, if we actually believed that a suboptimal educational environment had no effect on later achievement, we wouldn't be concerned about young children who are not being challenged (provided that they're reasonably happy: one could think it would have no long-term effect, but still want to change it because the child was unhappy right then, of course). I claim that the mere fact that you're here reading this is some evidence to suggest that you think educational environment can have a long-lasting effect on your child. That's certainly what I think: I may not be able to prove it, but I think that the steps I'm taking to get my DS systematically challenged are building him a better brain and a better character than he'd have otherwise, and that both of those things will affect his achievement long term.

Research that challenges my intuitions is interesting, though...

Thanks for starting this fantastic topic. I do strongly believe that educational environment can have a long-lasting effect on a person. It would be necessary to tease out the other elements of level parental involvement, quality of outside enrichment in counter-acting school negativity, child's personality...

What I am finding personally is that I've been bending over backwards to ensure my DD has outside activities or influences that help her learn skill-building discipline and confidence (including just at home and how we handle her stress etc), and my conclusion of late is that it's helped slow down any process of her sinking too far beneath her potential and keeping her self-estem from being as damaged as if I weren't stepping in...but she's still not on par with kids in these programs who have an appropriate school fit and have been experiencing optimal social development all along. I believe in the research you'd also have to have a layer of detail as to what exactly the issues with the school were...simply not being challenged, not learning good study habits but managing and more-or-less adjusted, or really having a poor academic fit across the board coupled with negative behavior management strategies such as my DD's class with the color card changes.

Thanks, ColinsMum! I'll definitely be following this thread.

Great thread. A related issue in my mind is the truth or falsehood of the "late bloomer" myth in general. As an example, on a homeschooling forum some of the parents reinforce their shared belief that learning to read many years later than average is normal. I'm particularly interested in the implications of these questions as they relate to unschooling.

Interesting thread. When time allows, I'll see what I can find to support either notion.

Would it follow, then, if we are adherents to the notion that a poor environment can permanently make one less intelligent, that a good environment can make a child who is bright into a gifted person (i.e. raise IQ to the gifted level when it was not otherwise destined to be there)?

The only study with which I am immediately familiar regarding ability changing over time does not specifically look at environmental influences on that ability if I recall correctly. I also am not sure if it was published or peer reviewed: http://faculty.education.uiowa.edu/dlohman/pdf/Gifted_Today.pdf

Then there was that study, Project Bright IDEA, out of NC that found that kids who were taught as if they were gifted were significantly more likely to test as gifted later: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2014636532_webgifted01.html Finding the original study data, though, is not something I've been able to do.

Yes; these are just two ways of saying the same thing. If environment can make the difference between IQ 129 and IQ 130, we can say either that the 129 can be raised to 130 or that the 130 can be reduced to 129, just depending on which environment we regard as the default. It's reminiscent of the discussions of whether we should say that breastfeeding decreases the chance of allergies or that artificial feeding increases the chance!

However, please let's not turn this into yet another "is IQ genetic" thread! I wrote my OP in terms of achievement, not intelligence, deliberately. It would be theoretically possible that what IQ tests measure could be completely unaffected by education or other environmental factors, and yet, achievement could be strongly affected by them. (Of course, it's unlikely to be so extreme: the obvious guess would be that both are somewhat affected, but achievement is more affected than IQ, perhaps much more.) I frankly don't care whether challenging my DS raises his IQ, whereas I do care whether it raises his achievement, long-term.

http://faculty.education.uiowa.edu/dlohman/pdf/Gifted_Today.pdf
appeared in Journal For The Education Of The Gifted (DOI: 10.4219/jeg-2006-245 ) but I don't know what its reviewing standards are like. It looks OK to me, but fully IQ-focused.

Interesting. The final report of that project is here:
http://aagc.org/FinalReport52705.pdf
but I haven't found a paper as such. (They didn't have a control group: this was run as a pilot, not as a real study. There has apparently been a followon, but I haven't found much about that in a quick google.)

CollinsMum - "think educational environment can have a long-lasting effect on your child. That's certainly what I think."

I agree with you and have been thinking of this in terms of music/art/writers/creative-off-the-wall humour/ divergent thinking.

Music - Beatles, Bee Gees, Who, Queen, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, etc. - creative geniuses/innovators - many of whom went to art school. Many had learning disabilities or were 2E.

Writing/cartoon - Roald Dahl, Gary Larson (Far Side), Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants), Monty Python. Both Dahl and Pilkey had a tough time in school.

Many of the greatest legends in rock history had a poor school or home environment and did not start playing an instrument or sing more seriously until their teen years. Many of them were bright, curious kids who were full of energy. Many of them (not all) came from poor or working-class backgrounds. Many were raised by single parents and/or grandparents. With many of them, there's limited evidence to indicate their future talents/gifts,.

I keep wondering if the poor environment in school and/or home or their 2e aspects helped to propel them into finding their 'gifts' in the music/art/creative realm. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and others (Dav Pilkey) partially based their careers on the poor school and/or home environment. It's very anti-establishment writing in lyrics, books, or cartoons.

I've heard Vanderbilt U did a study on professionally trained musicians and how their more creative, but not much on these rock musicians/artists/creative types - the vast majority of whom were not professionally trained (actually, most relished this fact).

Based on these people's abilities, many would regard them as gifted. Bowie was regarded as a gifted child. Ditto for Lennon. Yet Brian May, lead guitarist from Queen, seems to be in quite another gifted category with getting a degree in astrophysics, writing academic papers on it, and recently becoming Chancellor.

Ah, my apologies, I believe that I somewhat misread what you were asking/discussing. I guess that I was looking at it more from the standpoint of whether one could permanently lower potential or ability by improperly placing a child academically, which is a fear for me in dealing with my 2e child.

I don't think so. It's definitely true that an inadequate environment can permanently impair the cognitive ability of children; see feral children. However, it could be that the impact of an adequate-to-good environment on intelligence sees a plateau. I believe that that's fairly well supported by twin studies, and in any event it's plausible. Poor nutrition for example can stunt brain growth, but past a certain point extra food and vitamins just make one fat and sick.

What I think is unaddressed by all the twin studies is the possibility that an extra-stimulating environment, not just a "good" one of the type normally studied, might encourage a child to grow more than normal. IIRC Turkheimer et al. have done some research on high ability people influencing their own environments, which might be responsible for long-lasting gains. Stimulating environments have been shown, I believe, to have a substantial impact on intelligence, but it can be mostly short-lived with a slight residuum. If people can self-stimulate, though, the sort of mindset that sets a genius apart might keep such a person nearly constantly peaking.

ETA: I think some fertile ground for exploration might be the identical twins whose IQs are substantially different, but who both came from good-or-better environments. Are there any where the intelligence differential is due to educational environmental causes?

Ah, two different things going on. It's certainly true that there might be such threshold effects (and more generally, that the relative contributions of genetics and environment to observed phenotype might not be uniform across the scale of the latter) and I was eliding that without comment; sorry. My point was to consider a single fixed point of the phenotype at which you know there is some environmental contribution. If you know that two genetically identical individuals can end up with measured IQs of 129 and 130 because of differences in environment, then you can phrase this either as a good environment raising IQ or as a poor one lowering it. Without some external notion of which environment is "normal" there is no difference.

It has taken me a while to understand what you're getting at here so bear with me if I'm still not getting it. The obvious answer to your last question is "yes, all". Identical twins are by definition genetically identical, so any difference between them is environmental; that's the point of such studies. Is your point that it would be interesting to identify people for whom there is evidence that they have especially good environments - environments that are so rare today that their relative absence causes us to underestimate the effect of environment, because studies just don't contain enough people with environments that good - and see what they have in common? I agree that is interesting.

Indeed, the Flynn effect has to be caused by a general shift in what is regarded as a "normal" environment (because change has been too rapid for genetic change to contribute significantly), even if we don't know for sure what it is about the environment that has had this effect. Flynn's book makes this point, I think, that genetics/environment studies are only ever studying the range of environments that are actually around at the time of the study. One can fantasise about a researcher in 1912 identifying a few people who somehow had the 2012-normal environmental factors and studying them; assuming (dodgy I know) that the Flynn effect continues and will continue for another 100 years, we could be thinking about identifying the people today who have environmental factors that will be normal in 2112... It's a fantasy, because many of these factors are not, probably, things that can apply to a few individuals (e.g. in 1912 you might have had to find a few individuals for whom the integrated circuit had already been invented!) but an interesting one to me.

The issue of people altering their own environment, causing a feedback effect, is the main point of Gladwell's book Outliers as you probably know. Incidentally, it is the to-me-obvious fact that this also applies across the generations (parents who are successful, for whatever reason, typically give their children environmental factors that will increase their chances of being successful) that make naive regression-to-the-mean models such as the one in a certain recent thread annoying!

Sorry, was being vague about my use of the word "environmental". It would be interesting to find twins with differing IQs whose difference was attributable to educational environment, not random environmental physical causes. If a child gets brain cancer or falls and suffers brain damage, I guess it's still environmental but those situations wouldn't help. I guess one would have to reasonably rule out any important in-womb effects, too, for the results to be very meaningful.

Since even under the most pro-genetics studies the IQ correlation is only as high as it is, I'd expect a fair number of instances of substantial differences where major physical damage or some growth aberration wasn't the cause. Out of those people, there are probably some from really subpar educational environments or who suffered during development from poor nutrition-- and though it might be hard to pick those people out exactly, excluding on the basis of low parental income might be a decent rough substitute as such studies seem to often include such info, especially if we want to err on the side of caution. I'd personally be surprised if there were no one left at all after all this culling, but of course the existing studies are unlikely to contain much useful info for figuring out the causes.

I think one-point measured IQ differences simply don't matter, and I don't think that's what Cricket2 was asking about (passing a numeric threshold) but rather a more substantial change. This is the same thing that always bugs me about firm adherence to the Ruf Levels, definitions of HG/EG/PG tied to specific IQ measurement thresholds, etc. I think we understand each other well enough at this point not to quibble about that, though.

I've never read "Outliers", but it's on a list saved somewhere. Will have to follow up soon.