Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'

Parent Cafe Parent Cafe
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<p>I think its just an artifact of testing and how we define “IQ”. </p>

<p>If IQ testing had an attention-span measurement, perhaps with a focus on listening skills, I bet this generation would do a whole lot worse than previous generations. </p>

<p>But the tests are all structured around rapid-fire multiple choice type questions – and everyone now spends their whole lives preparing to perform well on that type of test – so the scores go up. </p>

<p>“IQ” is just a category that reflects a lot of cultural assumptions about what counts as “smart”. For example, brain scientists know that proficiency in multiple languages has lasting, positive effects on brain functions – but there’s never been an IQ test geared to testing multilingual ability. Creativity is an important mental skill that leads to superior problem-solving and inventiveness, but it’s hard to design a way to test and measure that. </p>

<p>It is true that people who do well on IQ tests tend to be “smart” at the stuff that academicians and educators think is important. But it’s circular reasoning.</p>

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<p>Oh my, this is one of my seminal childhood memories. For some reason my family was standing around waiting for a plane to land. (Dad was aerospace engineer, I was about 9 so in Albuquerque…don’t know why I was the kid he focused on). He asked me if I could figure out how tall Mt Sandi was based on the fact that he knew the flagpole was 50’
high and the shadow of the mountain was falling across the field. We paced off the triangle and although I didn’t get the arithmetic I really got the geometry. Kids need more hands on math in the early days, and less computers. There, I said it.</p>