More Schooling Might Raise IQ
Intelligence quotient isn't fixed at birth, and can increase with education, study suggests.
TUESDAY, December. 27, 2011 (Health Day News) — Children who have more schooling may raise
their IQ and improve, latest study found
Though time spent in school has been linked with IQ, earlier
studies did not rule out the possibility that people with higher IQs might
simply be likelier to get more education than others, the researchers noted.
Now, however,
"there is good evidence to support the notion that schooling does make you
'smarter' in some general relevant way as measured by IQ tests," said
study author Taryn Galloway, a researcher at Statistics Norway in Oslo.
In
1955, Norway began extending compulsory middle school education by two years.
Galloway and her colleague Christian Brinch, from the department of economics
at the University of Oslo, analyzed how this additional schooling might affect
IQ.
Findings from the
large-scale study appear in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
IQ, or intelligence
quotient, is a widely accepted measure of intelligence. The IQ score comes from
several combined, standardized tests.
"The size of
the effect was quite large," she said. Comparing IQ scores before and
after the education reform, the average increased by 0.6 points, which
correlated with an increase in IQ of 3.7 points for an addition year of schooling,
Galloway said.
Using data on men
born between 1950 and 1958, the researchers looked at the level of schooling by
age 30. They also looked at IQ scores of the men when they were 19.
"We are only
able to study men, because we use data on IQ from the Norwegian military's
draft assessment, which basically all men undergo around the age of 19. Women
are not included in the draft," she explained.
"Cognitive
skills are, in turn, related to a large range of social and economic outcomes. A large part of the
relevance of the study derives from the fact that there has been some
controversy related to the question of whether education has an independent
effect on IQ or whether people with higher IQs simply choose, or are better
able, to attain higher levels of education," Galloway said.
Education has lasting
effects on cognitive skills, such as those broadly measured by IQ tests,
Galloway said.
By looking at a
reform which increased mandatory schooling and prevented people from dropping
out of school after the 7th grade, it is fairly certain that the effects seen
are an effect of schooling on IQ, not vice versa, she explained.
Robert Sternberg, a
professor of psychology and provost at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater,
said that "these results — that schooling has a substantial effect on IQ —
replicate those of other, perhaps not quite as well-controlled, studies."
The findings suggest
that education as late as the middle teenage years may have a sizeable effect
on IQ, but do not challenge the well-documented importance of early childhood
experiences on cognitive development, according to the authors.
"I am aware of
no serious studies that show the opposite result," he added.
"The results of
this study are problematical for the chorus of psychologists and educators
still locked in century-old thinking that IQ is genetic, stable and
non-modifiable," Sternberg said. "As, for these individuals, the
belief in the stability of IQ is more a matter of religious faith than of
scientific inference, I doubt they will be persuaded."
He said the results are also consistent with the huge
literature on the so-called Flynn effect showing that IQ's are modifiable across
as well as within generations and have been rising since the beginning of the
20th century.
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