Well...it's pretty easy to REDUCE your intelligence. Hypoxia, certain drugs, chronic disease, chronic malnutrition, and head injuries spring to mind as tried-and-true methods. So in that regard, intelligence
is quite malleable.
Good point. Interestingly, you can also drastically reduce a child's IQ by having them spend their first few years in a crib most of the time with a rotating staff of temporary caregivers. And then raise it again if they get adopted into a good home, though you can't necessarily reverse the damage completely. Research on institutionalized and post-institutionalized children is probably the best evidence in support of the idea that IQ is malleable. However, what some people overlook is that this research suggests a critical age period, after which IQ stops being so malleable. A kid with a normal potential who has spent the first 5 years in a severely depriving institutional setting will probably remain in the cognitively impaired range even after adoption. If he'd been adopted after 1 year, he'd have turned out a lot better.
What bugs me about Dweck and her ilk is the feel-good lying and the distortions. Admitting that not everyone has the same level of talent for academics or sports or whatever is discomfiting. But instead of accepting reality, Growth Mindset just pretends that anyone can do calculus or be a pro athlete if they work hard enough. And it blames its victims when they crap out, because, after all, if you work hard enough, you'll increase your ability.
Yeah. I have a motor coordination impairment due to autism. If I work really hard in karate, I'll get more coordinated than I am now. But will I ever stop being clumsy? I doubt it.
Well, certainly not every 50-ish individual will learn to read or read well, but it's not a rare occurrence, especially in school systems that use phonetic approaches with those students (like Wilson or OG).
Oops. I meant that I met 50-ish of these kids over a period of 5-6 years or so. Many/most had IQs in the mid-40s or below (again, floor effects made it hard to calculate IQs in many of them). I thought that level was "severe" but maybe I was wrong?
No, you're right. 40s is usually considered severe, though, as you say, the precision of the assessments becomes rather loose in that range. It's not that all of them can learn to read, it's that not all of them can't learn to read, if you know what I mean. Also, if you were meeting them earlier in their school experience, they would have been expected to be even earlier in their literacy development. I'm thinking more of IQ 40-50 late adolescents, who have acquired roughly second- or third-grade reading skills, and some 50s late adolescents with grade level decoding skills.
Interestingly, I've read some research suggesting that Down Syndrome kids (whose average IQ is about 50) have a specific advantage in learning sight word reading. They can often be taught to read as young as preschool age, and learning to read generally improves their speech skills. Which we wouldn't have figured out if someone hadn't decided to try to teach a cognitively disabled 3 year old something most kids learn at age 6.
