It seems reasonable that various activities and enrichment programs could cause gains on IQ or other tests. But are the gains lasting in the absence of continued practice? The answer seems to be no, except in a very limited set of circumstances (related to adoption in infancy). Here's
one example. Here's a summary
of some other information. Hence, I don't really agree with the use of the term "raises IQ," because it implies permanence where none appears to exist outside of one well-defined area (adoptions).
Anecotal example of talent:
My DS9 could distinguish different dinosaurs that were in the same family when he was two, just by looking at their skulls (NOT scaled to size). He could even tell me why he knew they were different (e.g. "his snout is longer, so he's..."). No one taught him that; he just noticed it. He notices errors in stuffed animals ("He's a reef shark, not an xx shark; just look at his teeth."). And he does this kind of thing
all the time, just because he notices the details.
This ability seems to be due to genetics, not practice. My husband and I are both very good at faces. I'm the kind of person who categorizes different facial types and can tell twins apart because of differences in the way they smile or their bone structure. Some of my cousins are the same way.
Likewise, a two-year-old who can teach himself to read is relying on talent. Practice obviously makes him better, but he needed to have a minimum amount of talent just to get started.
I'm of two minds about the SAT, etc. being IQ tests. Given that they test specific knowledge (e.g. geometry, vocabulary), they're achievement tests. It seems reasonable that if you're testing innate ability, you should ask questions that rely minimally on knowledge. Yet, given that you have to be able to remember a lot, they're IQ tests. Plus, those passages on the verbal section can be very difficult to understand and students don't have much time to digest them, so there is some IQ testing there. But...the SAT and GRE general tests don't go past around 2.5-ish standard deviations from the mean, so if they're IQ tests, they have a low ceiling and a high floor. I think of them as being primarily good discriminators of levels of averageness (LOA [LOL
]).
