More Schooling Might Raise IQ

December 27th, 2011

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

MONDAY, Dec. 26 (HealthDay News) — Children who have more schooling
may see their IQ improve, Norwegian researchers have found.

Although 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

Education has lasting effects on cognitive skills, such as those
broadly measured by IQ tests, Galloway said.

“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.

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.

“One subtle point of our findings is that we use IQ measures at roughly
age 19, which is three to four years after the additional education
generally was received. Thus, we are not simply picking up a short-lived
effect that peters out shortly after people leave school,” Galloway
said.

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.

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.”

“I am aware of no serious studies that show the opposite result,” he
added.

He said the results are also consistent with the huge literature on the
so-called Flynn effect showing that IQs are modifiable across as well as
within generations and have been rising since the beginning of the 20th
century.

“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.”

More information

For more about IQ, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.