good schools raise IQ, bad schools lower IQ, part 1

from Mind Sculpture by Ian Robertson, pages 154-156

Poor schooling lowers intelligence and handicaps children intellectually for life. In schools that give inadequate education, children may learn so little that they steadily fall behind in academic performance and on tests, when compared to all other children of the same age in their country. In other words, their intelligence is steadily eroded because the synapses in their brain are inadequately tuned and shaped by the planned structured experience that good teachers provide.

This is precisely what happened in some rural school systems in the southern states of America during the 1970s. Education was so poor in some of these systems that intelligence was more badly eroded the longer children stayed in the system. As a result, the IQs of the older children in a family who had been in the school system longer were routinely lower than those of their younger brothers and sisters whose brains had not yet suffered the great synaptic hunger which comes from poor education.

In the 1950s, before desegregation in the southern states of America, poor education of this type was the rule rather than the exception. In one study, black children who had moved from the south to Philadelphia had their IQ scores raised more than half a point for every year they spent in this better school system.

Some prominent academics believe that intelligence is very largely genetically determined. Such a view simply does not fit with this evidence that IQ rises and falls depending upon the type of stimulation to which children’s brains are exposed. But the interactions between genes and environment are so complex that this evidence is not quite conclusive in showing that environment has a major effect on intelligence.

A critical test of the importance of experience and environment would be this. You would have to take babies from poor—low socio-economic status (SES)—families and have them adopted into high SES families. Then you would have to take babies born of high SES families and adopt them into low SES families. In fact, just this study has been done in France, giving the critical piece of evidence to show that intelligence is shaped by environment.

People who argue that genes are the main determinant of intelligence think that poverty and socio-economic status are to a very large extent determined by genetically inherited intelligence. Their prediction for the French adoption study would therefore be that biology should win out in the competition with environment. They would predict that the intelligence of babies born with the ‘good’ genes of the high SES parents would be relatively unaffected by the more impoverished environment provided by the low SES parents adopting them. Similarly, those babies with the ‘less intelligent’ genes would not in their view, benefit particularly from the greater opportunities, stimulation and learning offered in the high SES families.

The French researchers studied two groups of children at around the age of fourteen who fell precisely into these two critical categories—namely, poor natural parents and well-off adoptive parents versus well-off natural parents and poor adoptive parents. In support of the geneticists’ view of things, children of well-off natural parents had a higher IQ at the age of fourteen than those of low SES natural parents.

However, in support of the brain-sculpture environmentalist view, an equally large difference appeared between children reared in well-off versus poor adoptive families—a very significant 12 IQ points. In other words, environment had as big an effect on intelligence as did inherited biology.

[snip]

Think for a moment … about the 10 million words per year spoken to the average middle-class baby for the first three years of life. Contrast this with the 3 million or so words spoken to the average child from the family on welfare. Multiply this number of brain-changing interactions by the number of years of childhood, and you are faced with a staggering shortfall in stimulation to the brain.

[snip]

According to research on teaching methods, individual tutoring produces hugely better academic performance than does general teaching by standard classroom methods.

In fact, the average individually tutored student performs better than 98 per cent of students who are given standard teaching—and this has little to do with prior ability. In the tutored group, what determined success was practice and training, with the pre-existing academic abilities playing a relatively small part. Only when training was rather poor—as is the case in most standard classroom teaching—did prior abilities play a part in predicting who achieved well and who achieved badly.

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of this fact. Take any school subject—algebra, geography, English, for instance. Put 100 children into the standard classroom and measure their achievement after a course of normal classroom teaching. Now take another 100 children of the same average range of abilities and intelligence and give them individual tutoring in the subject. No matter what their abilities at the beginning of the course, the average individually tutored pupil will be better than ninety-eight of the children in the standard classroom group. [ed.: "I should have homeschooled"]

What then is the importance of pre-existing abilities in this kind of tuition? Trivial, according to the researchers. This isn’t terribly good news for parents who think they can sit back and let their children’s genes lift them to high achievement! [ed.: a core belief in my own district] While good genes help, the type of training and teaching a child gets has a huge impact on the development of mental abilities. So what is one supposed to do to unlock this potential?

Robertson is also the author of Unilateral Neglect: Brain Damage, Behaviour, and Cognition.

A couple of points.

Robertson works in the fields of rehabilitation and brain plasticity. Obviously specialists in brain plasticity, roughly defined as the ability of the brain to change, develop, repair itself and so on, take a far less deteriministic view of genes and IQ than do people working in genetics and twin studies.

In public debates over IQ, we rarely hear from these people. Instead the claim that IQ can be entirely or substantially affected by environment is invariably put forth as a liberal ideological position that leads directly to "liberal" ("liberal" in the ed-school sense of the word "liberal") efforts to define away differences in intellectual ability through appeals to multiple intelligences, the "leveling" of curriculum, and the like.

The fact is, however, that there exist at least two schools of thought and peer-reviewed research* which hold that the brain is plastic and talent and intellect are the result of expert teaching and practice:

• researchers studying brain injuries, rehabilitation, and brain plasticity

• resarchers who are studying expertise, such as K. Anders Ericsson

Ericsson is the editor of the 900-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, which I have, and which I am, in theory, reading. Wish me luck.



Deliberate Practice and Expert Performance

"Deliberate Practice and Expert Performance," published in 1993, seems to be the central text for the Ericsson school of thought. The paper's abstract makes clear Ericsson's failure to find much role for innate ability in expert performance of any kind:

The theoretical frameworkpresented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimumof 10years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.

And here, from an update published in 2000:

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents. Although a certain amount of knowledge and training seems necessary, the role of acquired skill for the highest levels of achievement has traditionally been minimized. However, when scientists began measuring the experts' supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no general superiority was found -- the demonstrated superiority was domain specific. For example, the superiority of the chess experts' memory was constrained to regular chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials (Djakow, Petrowski & Rudik, 1927). Not even IQ could distinguish the best among chessplayers (Doll & Mayr, 1987) nor the most successful and creative among artists and scientists (Taylor, 1975). In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.

(quoted by Rebecca Blood on her weblog)

And, finally, here is the freakonomics version:

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Cambridge Handbooks of Expertise and Expert Performance - TOC & introduction

Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance at Cambridge University Press.

Table of Contents (pdf file)

Part 1: Introduction and Perspective by K. Anders Ericsson
(as pdf file)
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good schools raise IQ, bad schools lower IQ, part 1
good schools raise IQ, bad schools lower IQ, part 2
good schools raise IQ, bad schools lower IQ, part 3
Seth Roberts on IQ
fuzzy math makes you smarter
IQ quiz
school raises IQ
intelligence is verbal, perceptual, and image rotation
math isn't English

Aztecs versus Greeks, by Charles Murray
What's Wrong with Vocational School? by Charles Murray
Intelligence in the Classroom by Charles Murray

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* there may be others, of course; these are the fields of which I'm aware