IQ can change in teenage years

[EdithWeston]

And perhaps is not really fixed at any time in life.

BBC article here.

This seems plausible to me - it echoes "Bounce" in terms of purposeful practice improving performance.

I was wondering what others made of this - and whether changeability is sufficiently allowed for in schools.

I don't think that's a new concept and it also makes sense that you can acquire wisdom with age and experience. I know plenty of people that would describe themselves as a 'late starter', finally stopping messing about at school and knuckling down or going in for adult learning courses later on. I think it's recognised in schools as well, especially in the comprehensive system

If it's that well known, why is the BBC reporting it as news?

But my apologies for taking up space in starting a useless thread.

They're reporting a study published in Nature.... have to fill the website with something. :) And I don't think it's 'useless' info exactly, just confirming what many have noticed in practice.

can't say I'm terribly surpised

may well be that IQ changes - but besides it is only measurable through IQ tests and those depend on factors like willingness to concentrate and cooperate with the intentions of the test-setter; not at all surprised if some people do that less well as teens than as pre-teens (fluffy teen brains and perhaps sometimes a wish to be a cleverclogs and find other ways of answering a question)

then again, some people will have got more confident with a test situation as they grow older

It is news because it a. provides evidence for what some teachers have long suspected b. suggests our education policies - options at 14 and all that - may need to be revised and c. lots of people (including some policy makers) had no idea. There's a widespread assumption that you can tell who is bright and who is 'non-academic' at quite an early age.

Might also explain why I was considered very bright at primary but am now, sometimes, quite thick! (Except when I post on MN, where obviously I'm always, right... )

See, I'd never have put a comma in the wrong place when I was writing an essay at school... am sure I've lost dozens of points on the IQ scale over the past 20 years!

I think you CAN tell who is bright and who isn't at an early age. I used to help for many years in a reception/Y1 class.The teacher separated the children from reception onwards into groups by how bright she perceived them to be.There was an almost perfect correlation between her groupings and those who passed the 11+ in Y6 ,In our area they test on verbal and non verbal reasoning and the top 28% pass.
I think academic potential is fixed, but academic attainment can move within this constraint.

IMO It's a dangerous teacher that has that rather out-moded idea spiderpig. Overt or covert ability labeling at 5 or 6 isn't helpful and more common that many realise. It's that sort of fixed mindset that paves the way to self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's a whole raft of research out there now and new developments in cognitive science show things aren't quite as cut and dried as we once thought, 'cells that glow together, grow together' brain plasticity etc.

Look at Matthew Syed's webchat on here, interesting.

spiderpig, i am afraid that this could simply be driven by the fact that labelling matters. Those thought of as bright in year 1 were stimulated more than the others

Matthew Syed from the webchat:

I think the 'God put in' view is resilient because it seems to be based on our wider views about heredity. We inherit eye colour and hair colour from our parents, why not intelligence, too?

The reason is that with highly complex traits, environment overwhelms genetic variation due to the transformation that occurs at a neural level with hard work. Our brains, to put it another way, are highly transformable. And to answer your question on drive and ambition, the strongest approach is to instill the 'growth mindset'. Get kids to understand that hard work is transformative; that their abilities are not fixed in genetic stone; that effort is the means of personal growth.

'IMO It's a dangerous teacher that has that rather out-moded idea spiderpig. Overt or covert ability labeling at 5 or 6 isn't helpful and more common that many realise. It's that sort of fixed mindset that paves the way to self-fulfilling prophecy.'

..but aren't teachers required to differentiate work?

There's differentiating and keeping an open mind (having a growth mindset) and there's labeling- deciding 'you can't get out what God didn't put in' about a 5 year old & effectively making permanent judgements about the quick and slow, bright and dim very early on.