Experts Ponder What’s Lowering IQ Scores – IOTW Report

Experts Ponder What’s Lowering IQ Scores

Neuroscience

“There’s debate about what’s causing it, but not every domain is going down; one of them is going up,” [study author Elizabeth] Dworak said. “If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that’s not the case. We need to do more to dig into it.” 

To that end, Dworak and her colleagues are currently trying to access a dataset that contains 40 years of data to conduct a follow-up study.

A shift in perceived values in society also might have affected scores, Dworak said.

“If you’re thinking about what society cares about and what it’s emphasizing and reinforcing every day, there’s a possibility of that being reflected in performance on an ability test,” Dworak said. 

She gave the example that there’s been more emphasis on STEM education in recent decades, but does that mean other areas, like abstract reasoning, are receiving less attention in schools?

Another factor could be due to a decline in motivation, Dworak said. Because the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the test may be more engaged with sections related to measuring temperament and less engaged with sections that are seemingly unrelated to personality. More

For nearly a half century researchers have attributed improvements in IQ testing to something called the Flynn Effect. Here

Whatever the reason for the improvement in IQ testing averages during the 20th Century, they are now trending downward. Maybe it’s regression to the mean, maybe we’re getting stupider, personal observation supports the later not the former. – Dr. Tar.

38 Comments on Experts Ponder What’s Lowering IQ Scores

  1. Decline in motivation is certainly an issue. But a lack of curiosity is more to blame.

    Remember when we were younger and when first introduced to a foreign object or a device, the first thing that we would think about is how does this work? The same with being introduced to a fact that did not make sense, we would wonder why is that?

    Nobody asked those questions anymore. That, and any real pursuit of wisdom. A good example of this would be to ask anyone under 30 now if they ever read books anymore. My generation and even the generation after that consumed books regularly.

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  2. If improvements in IQ testing in the 20th century were attributed to improvements in education (Flynn effect), then the opposite would seem true. But I’m sure the researchers would never broach that subject for fear of being cancelled.

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  3. Might be related to schools switching from reading, writing, and arithmetic taught largely by straight married women to racial and gender navel gazing too, taught by the most clincally insane Communists the school boards can find.

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  4. The remaining stupid, un and over-educated dregs of the Democrats!…I mean…You know. Have loved Truman and JFK. But there is no resemblance today.

    Today’s Democrat Party is the last the world will ever know. All that is left are mostly the dregs. Good memories made bad by a political criminal crime cartel that has taken over the Democrat Party via Gramsci. This political body has been dead since Obama.

    Good Riddance!
    Let History remember the real Democrat Americans who came before the rot.

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  5. The human brain is “plastic”, in the sense it’s flexiable and grows new neurons in response to new learning. It also rots when leftist and prog bullshit public schools is most of what is injected into it. So what’s the surprise ?

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  6. What’s lowering IQ scores?
    “Smart” phone addiction;
    Lack of discipline in schools;
    Lack of discipline at home;
    Complete individual lack of initiative and self-control;

    I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

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  7. In the Tacoma Public School System I noticed that STEM is now STEAM. The idea behind STEM focused students not having to deal with a bunch of halfwits dragging them down.

    I fixed that problem on my own by not going to school except to take the tests. That was in the 1970s when the public school system first went to shit. My brother and I just studied on our own and went to school to take the tests.

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  8. Intelligence is a survival trait and modern society has removed stupidity from its historical effect on participation in the gene pool.

    In other words, stupid people are being protected from dying from their own stupid actions long enough to pass on their stupidity genes to the next generation.

    We might reverse this trend by doing away with crosswalks (especially in school zones), air bags, bicycle and motorcycle helmets, narcan, and those signs on ladders telling people not to stand on the very top.

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  9. Everything everyone already said PLUS:

    Medicating children when they are being children. Now they are zombies.

    Processed foods with all kinds of non-nutritious chemicals. Foods (soy) that lower men’s testosterone. Food, drugs and other consumables from China with who-know-what in them.

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  10. Calculators, cell phones, and technology has dumb down society. Add to that teachers are teaching the whole class to the lowest common denominator. I had Physics, Calculus, 3 years of French, Animal Husbandry, Horticulture, Forestry/Land Management, Civics along with the state and national history classes in high school. My mother graduated from the same high school and got a similar education but also had Latin. We had the same math teacher.

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  11. democRATz dragging everything down to its lowest level of suck! Whutz in the White House these days could give the average kumquat a run for the money in an IQ test!

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  12. Current IQ testing depends fundamentally on knowing how to read. The more facility with written information the better the results. Synthesizing bits of information is much easier when awareness of the whole is larger as well, which is more likely with a greater facility with and use of reading.

    Let’s do a new test, like disassemble-reassemble a Glock 21. Or ‘which cartridge goes to which pistol’. Or the best route back to your crib after the robbery, or ‘identify the cut in this dope’. How about ‘how to get whitey to pay for those kids’? The possibilities are endless and the improvement will be enormous if they just test real life challenges.

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  13. I wonder how long it will be before Leftists blame global warming, er, climate change, er, man made climate change. Oh wait, it’s back to global warming.

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