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=falseNature 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
