My absolute first question when I read this is "How did they measure the IQ?"
If they used Raven Matrices, then I might be tempted to think better of it. If they used most of the other available IQ tests, the questions are already biased towards the wealthier countries. For instance, they've shown that the sequencing of the comic-like sections on the WISC differs widely with experience, even in the US, with assumptions being made about things like a child having owned a bike.
My thoughts exactly. I'm really scratching my head how you can test IQ's across different languages and cultures. We recently moved abroad and even in the short time we've been it's quite obvious that kids are exposed to very different things at a young age. In the US there a lot of emphasis on early literacy so you have libraries everywhere, tons of kids books stores and story hours. Here reading to kids just doesn't happen as often. We don't even have a library in our neighborhood, books stores are just not as abundant here, and the children's section of book stores is rather small and filled with toys/DVDs instead of a lot of books. Obviously, that's going to affect how smart kids appear on paper at least in respect to language arts (I'm not talking about how smart they actually are because they are plenty of smart kids here too!).
It's hard enough to compare kids within the US when you have things like 2E kids, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and multilingual families, how in the world can you compare this worldwide?
