I read an interesting guest column in the New York Times today.
The writer talked about a study which seems to indicate that environment has a much larger impact on a person's IQ than previously thought.
She talks about the Flynn effect; there is a phenomena that, she says "is too rapid to be explained by natural selection." The scores of standardized IQ tests are rising as much as three points per decade in many countries, she reports. Some are increasing even more rapidly. Scientists have singled out working memory as a possible cause for the increase.
Working memory (as I understand it) is the ability to retain information while actively manipulating it to solve a problem. For example, you might learn a new vocab word, and then use that word to answer a question (I have noticed that is how many of my students workbooks function). In tests conducted by researchers, adults who actively (and it seems, rather intensely) trained their working memory saw an increase in IQ.
The researchers saw a direct relationship between training and performance. As an athlete and a coach, this sounds very familiar. I wonder if your brain functions in the same way that your muscles do? You develop muscle memory through repeated exercises. The amount of training you do has a direct correlation to your performance.
However, with muscles, you must sustain a minimum amount of training to maintain your ability to perform. I wonder if the same is true with IQ? Does your IQ decrease if you don't actively train your brain? Or does it simply remain stagnant? We know that people who do activities like crossword puzzles and Sudoku seem to stave off the cognitive impairments of the aging process. It seems just as likely that with lack of sustained training (even in the form of everyday problem solving issues at work), young, healthy adults may lose some of their intelligence.
I suppose that would explain the phenomena on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" that adults (presumably having learned this information at some point in their lives) do not remember the answers to questions that 5th graders find simple.
Of course, I'm not a scientist, so I can't prove that. But, I think it would be a worthwhile research project.
It would be especially interesting to study in the context of children and adolescents. Working memory and multitasking are huge realities of student life(you don’t just take one class at a time, after all). Does being in school and engaging in a learning environment raise a student's IQ? Or does the student excel in the environment because s/he has a high IQ?
Problem solving and abstract reasoning are two skills which most of my students struggle with. (These skills are the ones that apparently enhanced by training working memory). I’m not quite sure if this is a cognitive inability or an unwillingness to put the work into solving the problem (many students will ask for help immediately, rather than try to work through it). Either may be true.
Nevertheless, the results may be interesting when we consider students who have learning disabilities or students who seem to be unable to remember information for tests. Rather than medicating the student, should we take an alternate route and focus more on brain training outside of class?
It would also be interesting to see how people perform on these tests after they have stopped training. Does IQ function like muscles which atrophy with disuse over time? I know I often feel less articulate and intelligent after having been out of college. I feel like it is harder for me to remember what I have read, sometimes. Perhaps that is simply a result of the amount of stress I am under, but maybe I just need to start exercising my brain a bit more.
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