Think of the opposite extreme to what good teaching does: Stifle all attempts that the child make to satisfy its curiosity. (A bit like some primary schools: "Johnny: Don't touch! Keep quiet!")

This will impede all the facets of IQ measurements: numeracy, literacy etc.

Contrariwise, intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) is raised by education.

Your paper:

Your figures show unproven constructs, and should only be regarded as tentative sketches.

inferered --> inferred

metarepresentation, that --> metarepresentation, which

nigles --> beings

nappows --> sparrows (?)

their own mind --> their own minds

cognitiv abilities--> cognitive abilities

Omit fullstops (periods) after titles

Intelligence can definitely be raised by education. Education should be focussed on increasing and challenging intelligence. When we read or listen to something, our intelligence is automatically put to work. As we go on using the various facets of learning centres in our brain, our IQ level increases. I don't mean to say that it is the only way of raising intelligence! But cognitive abilities can be sharpened by continuously using all capabilities given to us by HIM!

Intelligence can definitely be raised by education. We know that every extra year of schooling increases IQ by about 1.5-2 points of IQ. Also, it accelerates cognitive development by about a third of a cognitive developmental level (specified in neo-Piagetian terms). Actually, my question intended to activate a discussion on what aspects of education can raise what aspects of intelligence. In the current literature in the field, a hot question is if raising working memory or executive control can raise general intelligence (inference and problem solving) or if we need to address inferential processes themselves. This is still debated.

Ian:

Thanks for the corrections. However, some non-sense words (nipples, nappows, etc) are indented as such. The figure synthesizes a long series of experiments ran in our laboratory and also research by others.

Andreas

Andreas: Then you should also cite the sources in the title to Fig 1.

Ok Ian, I will do this. Actually, this is for a booklet to be published by the International Academy of education in collaboration with UNESCO and it is addressed to teachers. It has been extensively revised since it was uploaded here a few months ago.

I have no doubt that education increases intelligence. There are some pitfalls though. Our biggest limitation in life is in what we believe is possible or not. The human mind is probably infused with these limiting thoughts by how we respond to our circumstance, education and the educators themselves, enforcing on the students their own ideas of what is possible or not.

My personal belief is that most ideas are probably possible (with the exception of perpetual motion), many of them are not feasible and much is controlled by the corporate world e.g. try doing research in an area that goes agains the likes of the oil industry.

To get back to the point, people with no education will fare badly in intelligence tests, e.g. reading, writing, maths etc. As we learn these skills, the intelligence scores improves. The scores are, to some extent, a test of how well someone has been educated. Comparing peers in these groups will show some with higher intelligence than other, which we will generally consider as more intelligent. There could be external factors that impedes a person's intelligence (educational) development e.g. malnutrition, socio/economic, health etc issues.

It is a complex and challenging topic. I cannot even start to suggest how to compensate for two people, with exacly the same genetic potential and different socio-economic bacground, who will have completely different IQ scores for that reason. Then one has to include other things such e.g oppression (bad self image), abuse, belief systems, support system, peer pressure and genetics to name a few.

It is not exactly like that. There is extensive research on the intelligence of genetically identical persons who grow appart in different environments. The intelligence of these persons does not differ in the way you assume. It is very similar. Having said this, the questions remains about how the intelligence of each person (technically, the ability for abstraction, knowledge acquisition and handling in the sake of successfully dealing with novelty) can be raised. The answer may vary from a biologically based answer (e.g., improving these processes by changing the brain related structures and processes) to a functionally based answer (e.g., improving the very processes directly by education or in the lab). Or a combination of the two. This is our challenge.

There seems to be a confusion here between absolute and relative measures of intelligence. As a child gets older, scores on mental tasks improve (ie raw scores on WISC tests). IQs are relative scores, giving the standing of the child relative to other children. If IQs increased by 2 points per year of schooling, all that would mean is that the test was not marked correctly, that the mean IQ for each age had not been set to 100. Behavior genetic studies clearly show that the effects of common environment (schooling, SES, etc) are largest in early childhood but wash out, probably completely, by adulthood. If anyone knows of any proven long-term effect of schooling on intelligence, could they please provide a reference? There are several well-known celebrities with very high IQs (eg Joanna Lumley, a street boy who won a Nobel Prize) who managed fine with very little schooling.

I fully agree. Intelligence is not a matter of formal education. It is a matter of the capacity of the brain to process, represent, and surpass information through inference in the sake of current problem solving needs--what these are. But the capacity to process, represent and surpass information changes with age (reflected in cognitive developmental levels) and with experience (including education) as the brain is an experience-handling tool. A paper one might look, that discusses the relations between development and individual differences in intelligence, is: Demetriou, A., Spanoudis, G., Shayer, M., Mouyi, A., Kazi, S., & Platsidou, M. (2013). Cycles in speed-working memory-G relations: Towards a developmental-differential theory of mind. Intelligence, 41, 34-50. This paper is discussed by several other papers in Intelligence (i.e., (1) Coyle, T. R. (in press). Effects of processing speed on intelligence may be underestimated: Comment on Demetriou et al. (2013). Intelligence. (2) Kail, R. V. (in press). Developmental analyses of individual differences in intelligence: Comments on Demetriou, Spanoudis, Shayer, Mouyi, Kazi, and Platsidou (2013). Intelligence. (3) Pascual-Leone, J. (in press). Can we model organismic causes of working memory, efficiency and fluid intelligence? A meta-subjective perspective. Intelligence. (4) Deetriou et al., (in press). Developmental Intelligence: From Empirical to Hidden Constructs. Intelligence)). Answers are given about the relations between development and individual differences in intelligence and questions that are still open are extensively discussed.

I would expect that an education which is broad, that include multiple art forms, that includes multiple sports and physical activities, that includes history of everything, that introduce everything in a way that the student almost has to invent it as it was invented in the past, an education where learning is almost inventing; in an environment where everybody is totally overwelme by this adventure of living education as if everything is created now and much more is expected, yes I would expected great things for such lucky children.

Nobody would disagree with this. But the question of raising intelligence is more specific: what specific interventions will cause specific results according to individual needs.

Real intelligence is real creativity which is something that cannot be defined but only observed.

Fairclough says that intelligence is the result of exposure. Some students in inner city and undeserved communities in the world come from communities where they are not exposed to academic strategies. I believe that teachers can make a difference among their students. Read Mike Rose's book on how his teachers made a difference in students. Intelligence can thus be enhanced and elevated in school environments.

Louis:

Intelligence and creativity are related but not identical and both can be defined and studied. There is a long history in the study of both and very large literature. In fact, there are even journals of very high status in the scientific community that bear these terms in their title, such as the journal INTELLIGENCE and the journal THINKING SKILLS AND CREATIVITY.

Jose:

Thanks for the suggestion.

"One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts." —Albert Einstein

"While Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He knew intuitively what we can now show with data—what it takes to function at your cognitive best. In essence: What doesn’t kill you makes you smarter.

Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn’t have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. He explained that efforts made to raise the intelligence of children (through programs like Head Start, for example) had limited success while they were in practice, and furthermore, once the "training" stopped, they went right back to their previously low cognitive levels. Indeed, the data did show that , and he (along with many other intelligence researchers) concluded that intelligence could not be improved—at least not to create a lasting change.

Well, I disagreed."

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You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential, By Andrea Kuszewski | March 7, 2011, Scientific American

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/07/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/

Intelligence can be raised. However, there is a lot of research, including the Head Start program, showing that the results of interventions are slim and transient. This does not necessarily imply that raising intelligence is not possible. It may only imply that the methods used were not appropriate. In fact this is the case, in my view, because at that time our understanding of intelligence was crude. Now we have better understanding of how intelligence is organized and how it works at different phases of development. I believe that to be succcessful, any systematic attempt to raise intelligence must be tuned to the cognitive developmental milestone of the developmental phase it is addressed to. For instance, systematically handling representations in the preschool years, handling underlying conceptual relations in the primary school years, and handling abstract-formal relations in adolescence (see Demetriou et al., Educating the developing mind, Educational Psychology Review, 2011). To have a long-lasting effect in adulthood education must be organized on this pattern throughtout. We do not have a single system anywhere that meets these requirements.

Thanks for the information. I was aware of this paper. There are a few more recent papers showing that working memory training does not generalize to intelligence, although it is feasible.

"I was told by a professor of mine that you didn’t have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. "

I am sure this is not what your professor said. I have been unable to find any reseacher or scientist who believes in genetic determinism -- see my RG question on this. Genes do not act in a fixed, inflexible way, and it is only those who are afraid of genetics who pretend that there are those who believe that genes are deterministic (in its strict sense) rather than probabilistic. If anyone can name such a believer in genetic determinism, can they supply this name please?

This past week I challenged students to tell me what the idea of a short story in English was. I gave them all the short story. I also played the story using a free audiobok that I downloaded from the internet. I only played the first page.

It should be noted that all my students are high school teachers but only one of them was able to say what the main idea was. The rest provided me with thirteen supporting ideas only.

In a global world, I believe that an individual should be alble to indicate verbally what the main idea of a short story is for instance. Thus if high school teachers ccould not tell what the main idea of a one page text was, I conclude that their students won´t be able to do either. These teachers will perpetuate the low academic levels of a third world country where its rulers talk about access but little is said about how to ask intelligent questions. Then is telliengece something inherited or socially transmitted? I believe it is related to both.

What you are describing is an abstraction processes that we will integrate across pieces in the story and express (metarepresent) them into a single mental unit. This is the core of fluid intelligence. It is both, inherited and trainable, to a large extent. There is recent research showing that the most culturally trainable aspects of intelligence are the most highly inherited!

I beleive in education but I do not beleive in IQ. Any human should receive a good education for at least the first 23 or 25 years of their life. After that they can learn the rest of their life. Education is as important for human development as food. We can debate about what should be the emphasis on a good education, but it is certainly not in my mind an emphasis on IQ.

I agree in some respects and disagree in others. I fully agree with what you say about education. Education is an individual right and a state obligation that should be delivered (free of charge) at the highest and best possible level for EACH individual. IQ is a scientific construct that indexes CERTAIN (but many) learning and understanding possibilities. Although plagued by many political disputes, it was a success in the history of human science. Through the years, since it started in France, proved very useful for the individuation of education. In our times it may be useful, if properly coupled with developmental cognitive science and modern technology to improve education further. If we use the new knowledge about intelligence and intellectual development--not necessarily associated with the psychometric and the IQ tradition, what you want for education may become even more efficient for the sake of leading EACH individual to the full of its potential. Thanks for the comments!

"I beleive in education but I do not beleive in IQ."

The facts dictate otherwise, however -- see this abstract. A correlation coefficient of 1.0 cannot be so lightly dismissed.

National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations

Richard Lynn, Gerhard Meisenberg

We estimate the validity of the national IQs presented by Lynn and Vanhanen (2002, 2006) by examining whether they are consistent with the educational attainment of school students in math, science and reading comprehension in 108 countries and provinces. The educational attainment scores in a number of studies are integrated to give EAs (educational attainments) 86 countries and provinces that have measured IQs. The correlation of EA with measured IQ (N=86 countries) is .917, and with measured+estimated IQ (N=108 countries) is .907. Corrected for attenuation, r=1.0. The quality of the data is evaluated, and the discrepancy between IQ and EA was greater for countries with low data quality, especially low quality of the EA data. There are no major anomalies in the relationship between IQ and EA in individual world regions. To some extent IQ and EA predict each other even within world regions. These results show that national IQs have a high degree of validity.

I am aware of the research referred to by Antony and endorse Antony's statement. The other side of the coin is that education does alter IQ. We have evidence indicating that individuals gain betwee 2-4 points of IQ for each aditional year in education. In fact the Flynn effect (an average rise of about 10 points of IQ for each period of 30 years in the 20th century) is related to the expansion of education in the west.

In my opinion the Flynn effect is caused by improved infant feeding, as also shown by the large decrease in infant mortality. Be that as it may, the FE cannot be due to educational improvement for the reason given below:

What has caused the Flynn effect? Secular increases in the Development Quotients of infants

Richard Lynn

ABSTRACT Results of five studies show that during the second half of the twentieth century there were increases in the Development Quotients (DQs) of infants in the first two years of life. These gains were obtained for the Bayley Scales in the United States and Australia, and for the Griffiths Test in Britain. The average of 19 data points is a DQ gain of approximately 3.7 DQ points per decade. Similar gains of approximately 3.9 IQ points per decade have been present among preschool children aged 4–6 years. These gains are about the same as the IQ gains of school age students and adults on the Wechsler and Binet tests. This suggests that the same factor has been responsible for all these secular gains. This rules out improvements in education, greater test sophistication, etc. and most of the other factors that have been proposed to explain the Flynn effect. It is proposed that the most probable factor has been improvements in pre-natal and early post-natal nutrition.

Well, improvement in various health and nutrition factors is part of the equation. But the environment has become increasingly abstract and symbolic as well, not only becuase of education. For instance, soup operas in the 60s required to follow much fewer stories 2-3 stories as compared to more than 4 in the recent years. This causes people to abstract relations and ccordinate dimensions to a larger scale than before. This is the substance of what IQ tests require.

intelligence is linked with both genetics and experience that is gained through a conducive environment for learning. So, it can be develop...