Loss of Applied IQ Among UK Youth?

Baldrson writes "The UK Times Online reports that: 'After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."' 3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73 -- a massive loss of 27 points. Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning, it nevertheless appears to blow 'a gaping hole' in what has been called The Flynn Effect: that IQs have been rising in most parts of the world -- particularly the developed countries."

Wait, I know this one:

Loss of scientific and technical reasoning eh... so folks are saying "I don't care, I just want it to WORK!"

Man, where have I heard that before?

Too many black boxes

When I was a kid (~40 years ago), I had a bunch of technical stuff like steam engines, radios etc that I could take apart and understand (OK they didn't always work again afterwards). The radios had valves (tubes in American) that glowed and you could see stuff happening. I built crystal sets which worked fine with MW radio. Now most things that kids get are electronic gizzmos that are stuffed with ICs. No hope of really learning and understanding anything there.

Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.

Re:Too many black boxes

These toys stuffed with IC's are what make some of us Brit's go into studying Electronics. Me for one. I'm not sure how much water that argument can hold, I just don't think less visible workings stunts curiosity or the mind of an engineer to a great extent.

What it does probably do is stunt the creativity side of things.

Well perhaps we were lucky

Take a record player. You can see how it works. You can pull tricks with it. I remember long before you had those little computer chip greeting cards with a speaker you had small record players with a pin attached to a bit of plastic and you turned the record by hand and you got a sound. Sorta. Anyway you could actually see the science in action. Good luck doing that with a CD player. It is a black box.

Same with a lot of other stuff. I could help out with fixing the car. Well stand by but you could actually see stuff and the adults could actually do things themselves. Todays cars? Black boxes.

I learned a lot about electricity helping out with a model railroad. Pokemon is a nice game but it is played on another black box.

But lets face it, the rot started without especially your generation. YOU are the one raising these 11 year olds and we just don't have the need to get down and dirty anymore.

Odd thing about the sexual revolution? Rather then men learning how to cook as well now nobody learns how to cook. Freaky.

As our tech increases we need less and less knowledge about it. My mom knew how to wire a fuse. I know how to screw in one. My kid knows how to throw a circuit breaker. Wich one of us would be more likely to be able to get a car moving when there is no replacement fuse available?

Maybe parents need to get more involved with their kids. Nah.

So? Live and learn

Perhaps that is one of the reasons practical knowledge is decreasing. To much protection. Summertime we played in the local "river" all the time. Kids where I live now? There is a fence around the pond(?) because some kid might fall in.

A nice dose of 220 through your hand will teach you more about electricity then any classroom lecture.

As for wiring a fuse with say a screwdriver. Sometimes you just got to do stuff that is unsafe. If we only did was what safe we would still be up a tree somewhere in africa. (or for the religious people, inside the garden of eden)

Only a drop of 27 points?

What with Celebrity Big Brother, the Crazy Frog and chav culture, I'm amazed it's that few!

Re:Only a drop of 27 points?

Location: London on a night bus.
Time: Last January
Subjects: A thicket of Chavs.

The one started doing a 'Rap' to impress his 'friends' and the chavettes that were with them. The lines of the end of his rap went like this.

You think you so smart because you went to University.
Well I gots more intelligence than you and me.

I think that sums it up.

Re:Chavs today, punks yesterday.

There's nothing special about the chav "movement" of today. It's much like the punks of the late 1970s. They wear different clothes, but the attitude is still the same.

Chavs are nothing like the punks of the late 1970s.

The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture.

Chavs are just brain-dead zombies. They're apathetic, ignorant, uneducated, and wouldn't know what Politics were if the Sun or News of the World attempted to explain to them. As for culture, they're at the forefront of the establishment of pop culture. Just look at BBC Top of The Pops. Those orange whingers in the top 10 are just what your average(sic) chav is "in to."

Re:Chavs today, punks yesterday.

The problem is that chavs and chavettes in the UK are rewarded for their lives of crime and sponging with nice free handouts from the dole office, cash for their bastard kids, free housing any any other benefits these parasites can grab. Thus, they have plenty of time to spawn more idiot children than intelligent people, holding down jobs to pay for this vermin. Since the idiots are spawning idiot sprogs much faster than intelligent people are producing normal offspring, it drags the average IQ down.

I think everyone who is able to work should receive no money whatsoever from the government until they've worked continuously for at least 5 years. Give them food and clothes plus shelter for the night, but that's it. It's time the culture of laziness, expecting people to bail them out was over.

Re:Only a drop of 27 points?

What was that about primary school homework? My wife and I recall there being no homework while we were at primary school (1969 onwards) while our children appear to receive quite a lot. ian

Misleading

We're not stupid... We're advanced.

That obselete test just fails to keep up with modern applications of science and math. Like manipulating them to support your point, or redefining them for political reasons.

From the links below the article

From the links below the article.

Also in this section:

• Brain or bimbo?
• Bad girl
• Confessions of a middle-class pole dancer: 'It's permission to be sexy'

Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.

Cheers,
Ian

Correlation: Food vs. IQ?

As the population has grown, humankind has resorted to increasing use of pesticides, cow-based feed (for other cows), and other extreme measures to grow the food supply. When I say, "cow-based feed", I am referring to rendering cow carcasses into foodstuffs that is fed to other cows. Some scientists suspect that cow-based feed may be the catalyst behind mad-cow disease.

Also, "other extreme measures" include farming fish, like salmon, in confined ponds where heavy metals and other chemicals can accumulate because the farmer does not bother to clean the water. Numerous government studies show that farmed salmon had much higher concentrations of toxic metals and chemicals than wild salmon like that in Alaska.

The key question is whether there is a correlation between the increasing contamination of our food and the behavior of the brain. Has anyone noticed the increasing amounts of psychotherapeutic drugs consumed by people in developed countries? What is happening to our brains? Did people in 1850 need to consume Prozac just to cope with their own lives?

Re:Correlation: Food vs. IQ?

Did people in 1850 need to consume Prozac just to cope with their own lives?

No, they had other problems that kept them from thinking of those things:

• Starving to death
• Cholera
• Freezing during the winter
• Smallpox

People during those times were depressed too, they just used alcohol (that's what most medicines were then anyway) People who were rich enough that they didn't have to worry about the things listed above had the same 'problems' you allude to the general population having today. It is only that now enough people are well off enough to sit around and worry about such higher level problems.

Rise of technology...

The internet is a vast information resource available to a large portion of the civilized world, but I don't think kids today are interested in learning anything. As parents (and people in general, I think) have become more selfish as time goes by, this is the only behavior our children see, leading them to behavior that isn't interested in learning. All they really want is to be entertained. In this regard, the electronic age might be our worst enemy. Instead of using computers and the internet as a tool to expand thier world, they use them as a crutch -- for entertainment when needed, and to do the thinking for them when presented with things like math problems, spelling and grammar. If being smart is no longer 'cool', what's the incentive to learning anything? Money in the form of 'future income' is not enough of an incentive for many kids -- Future income means future work, and many of these kids will settle for a job at a fast food restaurant (despite those jobs being incredibly stressful and low-wage) because they don't want to put forth the effort to learn anything and/or find another job.

I'm stunned

This guy really had to study 25,000 kids to determine that people are getting dumber at a worrying rate? All he had to do was turn on MTV for a half hour and watch what they consider entertainment nowadays.

Re:It's not just MTV.

I take it you've never tried browsing here at -1. It's certainly not for the faint-hearted.

standards in the UK

Speaking as a parent in the UK I have to agree with the general sentiment of the article, though I can't speak about the percentages, not being in possession of the statistics. One only has to listen to the Universities saying "we now have to set basic literacy and numeracy tests for all 18 year olds as part of the entrance process" to know that something is very wrong.
It's the "all shall have prizes" culture where children aren't told "that's wrong, go and do it again" lest we scar them for life and someone brings a law suit.

Re:standards in the UK

Let me give you an example. When I was in college (Computer Studies), we had what I can only describe as a remedial course in maths. This stuff was taught in secondary school to all thirteen year-olds, I don't know how people got out of school without learning it or why it was the college's job to catch them up at the expense of everybody else's time and money. Very few people paid attention in the classes. We got to the end-of-year exams, and three or four of us got 90%+ for this particular module. The pass rate was 40%. Everybody else got 30-40%.

So these imbeciles, who have shown themselves incapable of learning basic maths not once but twice, should have to resit the exams or fail the course, yes? No. Because it was very unlikely that they could pass, and because failing them would mean cancelling the second year of the course and screwing the rest of us, the pass rate was lowered so that everybody passed.

I finished college, and went on to university. Guess what? A huge part of the first year was dedicated to repeating stuff that I had spent the last two years sitting in classes for. Why? Because half the people on my course (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence) had never written a program before in their life. And you know what? By the end of the year, they still hadn't. Not even Hello World. In all our programming assignments, we were given complete programs and told to change a couple of things ("make it print the numbers 1 to 20 instead of 1 to 10"). These people have degrees now.

I left school at thirteen years old due to illness, so I skipped a huge amount of school. And yet most people I meet seem to be way behind me when it comes to education. That's not my opinion, I think I'm average, but everybody else thinks of me as a bit of a genius. The majority of people I know haven't read a book since school unless they were forced to for work.

So how I can do way better than average with moderate effort, even though I'm at a huge disadvantage? Because most people are completely apathetic. And yet they get free passes anyway. At every point in my education, I've felt that you have to be exceptionally bad to fail at anything.

Maybe the just have bigger genitals.

CNN recently reported about a study [cnn.com] that found that bat species with larger testes have smaller brains, and vice versa. Maybe these kids just have extremely large gonads, and that's why they're morons.

A general downturn in the western world?

I think that any American Slashdotter who has spent time in the general public knows that the falling average IQ is not just a problem in the UK.

I'd be curious to see the rate of IQ change amongst various western countries. Has the common "easy" life stopped working in our favor and started working against us? So many things we had to do before are now done automatically (or not at all,) and so our minds don't have to work nearly as hard to get stuff to happen. Granted, modern life has allowed us to focus more on things lik science and mechanics, but the lack of necessity is keeping many from allowing themselves to be educated.

I also blame America's increasing "stupid" problem partly on the parents that let their kids do whatever they please, with little in the way of punishment. The lack of respect I see everyday from my generation (I'm 20) is just appaling.

er...

3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73

That's unpossible!

Re:Flynn (whover he is) is an idiot

Don't mistake a "drop" in IQ with rising IQs elsewhere.

Recall that places like India and China have, for various reasons, not been the best places to foster intellect in recent times (the last two or three hundred years). The people there are just as intellectually capable as anyone from a Western nation, but did not have many of the advantages that Western society was able to offer due to its better economic position, and so forth.

But times have changed, and education is far more available in places like India and China, in addition to many other developing countries. So it's no wonder that the comparative IQ gap between Western and Eastern cultures is closing, and closing quickly. It's not because people in the Western world are becoming stupider; it's because the people in the East are now able to take advantage of better educational opportunities.

Re:IQ is linear with age?

No, standard IQ is calculated based on the rarity of a score on a test in a population that is assumed to have normally distributed scores using a mean of 100 and a 15-point standard deviation. IQ is not a constant or absolute measure of ability. It is on roughly an equal-interval scale, but in the tails of the distribution it closer to a ordinal scale since the actual distribution of abiliity is closer to log-normal.

Three years difference in scores is likely going to be substantially less than 27 IQ points. Figuring it out precisely is difficult because there is a huge spurt and then dropoff in the rate of increase in intelligence on a ratio (Rasch-based SB5 CSS score) scale from about 8 to 12, peaking at age 10. Testing would be a more accurate way of finding out the IQ equivalent of 3 years difference at that age in that population than attempting to calculate it anyway.

Re:Fair?

Why is IQ judged only on the basis of science & technical application?

Because artists don't conduct scientific studies of IQ. Ponder that for a while...