Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research IQ levels can greatly fluctuate over time

I am no expert, but I thought that most kids (and adults) have fixed IQs that may fall in a range based on the type of test. It is interesting to read this article that says that the IQ level can fluctuate a lot! An old article, but I came across it today and thought I would share it here.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203935604577066293669642830
The interesting part for me was this:
Schooling in general raises IQ by several points a year, based on research by Stephen Ceci, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell, and others. "If you look at an IQ test, it asks things like, 'Who wrote Hamlet?' or 'Why do we pay for postage?' You are most likely to come across the answers in school," Dr. Ceci says. Even nonverbal abilities such as solving puzzles and spatial tasks may blossom because math classes today include visual reasoning with matrices, mazes, blocks or designs, he adds.

Knowing who wrote Hamlet is part of an IQ test? Wow! If I were from a different culture, I might have a really low IQ if this was the case.

Many IQ tests do still have some cultural bias, but much less so than in the past. And there have also been clear moves to distinguish between crystallized (learned) knowledge and fluid reasoning (more innate ability).

33 subjects, ages 12-16. If one wanted to cook a research design related to IQ and brain changes, you couldn't do much better than straddling puberty with your testing. Considering IQ is age normed, and the brain does change through puberty, nice. It's probably a better argument that kids develop at different rates and that intelligence+maturation has a relation to brain structures than it is to conclude that intelligence is generally volatile.

And on the other side of head scratching is the professor suggesting that IQ changes are related to school learning in the context of an age-normed test amongst kids assorted into school in age cohorts.

Some things my DS said about his IQ test indicated cultural bias to me... One was the postage stamp question! Apparently he got that wrong because we pretty much never deal with postage stamps at this house as we do just about everything online! I remember my mom doing bills and writing letters when I was kid and helping her put the postage stamps on them. DS never sees a postage stamp. LOL. The other thing that he mentioned that really got me was one of the picture tests. I don't know what the "question" was but he said he was confused by one of the pictures on the picture test because it had what looked like a keyboard but no screen attached! He said he figured paper went with the picture but wasn't sure b/c it was only "half" of a computer. "Mom" he says to me "no computer has just a keyboard! some types of computers have just screen with no keyboard but none the other way around, right?!" He added "that he looked very closely for a picture of a printer but didn't see one." LOL. I realized the picture must have been of a typewriter - again something else DS has never seen. And, just the other day, I pulled out an iron we had in the basement and was thinking of donating it to goodwill. DS asked what it was. I told him. He asked "so it gets hot, then?" I said yes. he said "darn! now it makes sense!" Apparently there had been a picture of an iron on the picture test and he didn't know what it was. When I was a kid my mom would watch soap operas and iron the laundry. Obviously, I never iron - we use "wrinkle release" and the clothes dryer! LOL.

SO I realized there may be quite a lot of "cultural" bias in those IQ tests!

Both of my kids scored 18 and 19 on the Matrix Reasoning and Picture Concepts sections of the WISC and the two of them aren't even genetically related to each other! What are the odds? I am wondering if it is because they both spend so much time playing Minecraft or if they play Minecraft because of their abilities in that area. They both scored quite a bit lower in verbal--maybe if they spent more time reading books and less time playing video games we wouldn't have that gap.

DS was tested back in May and again a couple days ago (just on the working memory section the second time) and his score went up from 110 for WM to 116....maybe within the margin of error, I don't know. Is he improving with WM or just had a better day?

The problem being, of course, that in order to properly answer the question you have to understand what the question is talking about in the first place.

But if IQ is normed against the age population surely a general increase due to schooling would be compensated for?

That is one of the puzzling things for me. Also, they talk about "erosion" of IQ at college age. What really brings that about? Do you lose it if you don't use it? Is that what that is about?

Irena, on the same vein, my 4 year old took an IQ test and came out and asked me what a candybar was. We are a sugar free family and I do not feed my child any sugary food. So, he had not eaten a single piece of candy until age 4. I was taken aback that he would stumble on such a question because of our lifestyle choices. So, I took him to a store that day and bought him a candybar and told him to try it. Though he is not a great fan of it, he knows what a candybar is now.

mine didn't know what a baby sitter was.

We've made quite the game of this now with our 14yo-- introducing her to all manner of offensive/biased/appalling slang and cultural references.

She finally knows that an a-shirt isn't really called that by most people, for example, and that "It puts its shoes in the basket" had a lot more to do with parental frustration than helpful scaffolding.

I mean, I kind of think that Silence of the Lambs questions are likely to be few and far between. But we want her to be fully prepared. {ahem}