IQ and IQ testing probably are revered much more than they should be. Some folks like to present their “IQ score” as some kind of badge of honor, when intellectual ability in an individual is clearly self-evident.
The best use of the IQ score is to predict academic success in school. That is also the reason it is most commonly assessed.
Not sure where that one poster above is going with intelligence or smart some one is as from my understanding IQ was invented to see how well people do in school and not how smart people are or intelligence?
I don’t think the IQ tests or covers to measure intelligence just how well people do in school.
So unless some one here that understand IQ how that works , I don’t think the IQ test measures or tests person how smart or intelligence the person is at all.
And they will have to define intelligence. As that word is subjected to person to person. And book knowledge does not mean the person is intelligence as they can be very knowledgeable about topics but still do silly or stupid things.
Some one in the military ,government or police officer will be more important that person is intelligence than computer programmer, engineer or trades person like plumber or electrician.
So if any thing it be more important to test those people.
This article says that IQ tests stabilize when a child is between the ages of 5 and 8. In our district kids were not identified as gifted until third grades, using testing done in second grade as one of the pieces of the package.
So IQ has nothing to do with how will people are doing in school - note that the claims were they could predict how well students do.
I can’t understand your second to last paragraph at all. Try again?
@Jillwood77, I am also having a bit of trouble understanding you. Might I ask if English is your first language?
OK, going back to your original question, as I understand it…
Increasing IQ, in and of itself, isn’t really what you’re looking for, I don’t think. What you’re looking for, I think, is an answer to, “how can we help people who don’t do well in school do better in school?”
And, as several of us have said (and as you seem to agree, at least in your original post), poverty is a factor that has a large impact on school performance. So, there are things that we have already described which are likely to help:
And, again, no, there’s no magic app that will do this.
The IQ Tests aren’t valid anyway.
There are subgroups of people who intentionally try to boost their IQ. I believe they say they can generally increase by 10-20 points, but part of that is just the fact that practicing IQ tests (to measure your progress) makes you better at taking IQ tests.
One techniquie is to increase working memory with exercises. Things like dual-n-back.
Another tactic is supplements. Certain supplements like creatine or ginkgo biloba. Creatine helps regenerate ADP back into ATP and ginkgo increases blood flow.
I found one study once, having trouble finding it, that showed creatine and ginkgo combined worked better than either one taken individually at improving working memory and scores on the raven progressive matrices. But I’m having trouble finding it right now.
beyond those things though, I’m not sure what really works. if you have a vitamin/mineral deficiency and correct it with supplementation (a deficiency in things like omega 3s, iron, etc) then taking enough to have healthy levels could add a few points. But taking mega doses, to my knowledge, doesn’t help.
Certain drugs like the racetams supposedly improve cognition, and there are combinations or variations some people use, but I’m not sure if ‘improved cognition’ is the same as lasting increases in IQ. Also obviously there can be side effects.
So anyway, I suppose its possible but I don’t know if any of them work long term. And the evidence is mixed.
There is also the fact that you seek to improve your IQ because you want it to translate into real world success in things like academics, career, creativity, etc. But the link between IQ and these things isn’t cut and dried. Plus other character traits like conscientiousness, ability to delay gratification, emotional intelligence, etc also play a role in whether you succeed in these areas or not just as IQ does.
Perhaps the answer is that, if you have environmental or physiological factors that are depressing your ability, fixing these may improve your ability. If you don’t have such factors present, you can’t fix what isn’t broken.
There is perhaps an element of “if you don’t use it you lose it” for some people. Continually challenging your skills may keep them sharp. So there may be wiggle room for people who have spent a decade soaking up reality TV shows as a surrogate for life to improve their skills again. But it is probably unlikely to get them past their original baseline.
But as always: define IQ. Most IQ tests tell you your ability to do IQ tests. They can be useful to determine cognitive deficits, but as to providing a useful metric of high performance in the real world, they are not so hot. Real life problem solving skills come from solving real life problems.
In college, I hung out with some Psych grad students and guinea-pigged for testing. Sometimes I went off the scale, and on the ROTC RQ-5 the recruiters told me I had the second highest score in the history of the university. Which tells me that anyone can learn to score high. My high school record shows a fairly ordinary 125, but a few years later, I went over 150 with a professional tester in the WAIS. I qualify for Oath (99.9%ile) but in their forum, they are no smarter than Dopers.
So I guess a person can learn “test-think” without the commensurate intellect. So above the range of about 120, I don’t the number says anything. Ten points in mid-range probably doesn’t either, it’s just test-taking skill, which is learnable.
All I know is I’m so smart, my brain hurts.
It could be worse, you could be this guy:
Your understanding is wrong. IQ was invented to see how “intelligent” people are. But you are not entirely incorrect in your understanding of what IQ tests actually measure.
But this isn’t accurate either. Telemark’s somewhat glib first reply is quite accurate, IQ-tests measure how well people do on IQ-tests. And you can do well on an IQ test and not do well in school, for many reasons.
There is a science of trying to figure out how to have people get as much out of school as possible, and it involves a lot of fields such as pedagogy, psychology, neurology, sociology etc. But as with so much else involving humans and society there are few easy fixes and no cheap fixes.
I hold no truck with standardized IQ tests. They were first widely administered as one of the racist excuses to deny entry to America for “undesirable” immigrants.
They are still culturally biased, and the fact that they are recalibrated every few years proves that they are not measuring a quantifiable property, excepting the ability to given the answers the test designers want on a standard test.
And, yet…
It’s obvious that in general, people who do well on them are clearly “brighter” than people who do poorly.
So, there must be some nugget of truth in them.
Jillwood77, the subject of I.Q. is complicated. It’s hard to even start to explain it in one SDMB thread. Please read all of this thread and then read all of the thread that LSLGuy links to in the 7th post in this thread. Then read the Wikipedia entry on the Flynn effect that Thudlow_Boink links to in the 4th post of this thread. Then read all the Wikipedia entries that the entry on the Flynn effect links to. Then read some of the many books that have been written about what I.Q. is. I realize that you’re going to say, “I don’t have the time to do that.” The problem is that intelligence is such a complex and controversial subject that it’s hard even for people who’ve made a career of studying it to explain it.
Furthermore, the abilities that we usually think of as intelligence or as the ability to score high on I.Q. tests isn’t even the only sort of mental ability that could be characterized as being that of “superhuman geniuses.” Superhuman Geniuses (Gifted People Documentary) | Real Stories - YouTube is a documentary on five people who the filmmakers want to characterize as “superhuman geniuses.” Of these five people (one an art prodigy, one a music prodigy, one a person who can memorize things incredibly fast, one a person who can also memorize well but who is actually deficient in what is ordinarily thought of as intelligence, and one who is studying chemistry in college at age 7, probably only the chemistry one would score very high on I.Q. tests. There are lots of different mental abilities, only some of which are relevant to I.Q. So understanding the human brain is very difficult, even more so than just understanding I.Q.
Ultimately the OP amounts to:
Poverty is caused by poor education which is caused by people being weakly educatable which is caused by them being dumb which is shown by their low IQ. So by increasing people’s IQs, we’d reverse that causal chain and therefore reduce poverty. So how can we improve IQ?
Which is pretty close to fact-free and is mostly backwards as to the actual causality of the poverty they appear to be most interested in reducing.
We’ve all laid out our pieces on how this thinking is both ill-informed as to facts and logically wrong as to reasoning.
What happens next is up to our OP.
Which is true, but accepting that IQ is largely genetic is very anti-egalitarian and therefore controversial. People don’t like the idea that genetic traits you have no real control over can affect your life outcomes and career prospects.
But as for me, no matter how hard I work at it I would never be anywhere near as good a mathematician as Terence Tao. Or even a decent grad student, I lack the innate talent.
There are a variety of studies devoted to understanding the neurology of intelligence, but I get the impression that much of our intellect is currently unchangeable.
Nick bostrom wrote an interesting article about using embryo selection after we understand the genetic links to intelligence to increase IQ generation to generation. If you combined that with selective breeding I’m sure IQ could go up quite a bit just within a few generations. Granted some people would find that unethical, but point is other than creating a new generation of people hardwired to be smarter than us, IQ is not really changeable much.
It’s much more than “test taking skill”. And an IQ of 125 is hardly ordinary.
Sometimes people tend to throw IQ scores around carelessly (almost always high ones) which detracts from their meaning and usefulness in legal and educational settings.
What I think of as my intelligence is an ability to spot interesting trends and draw interesting inferences from them. That’s not measured by the WAIS. GRE score is a proxy for IQ testing in some situations. I improved my GRE verbal score from beyond excellent to super duper by using the Princeton Review strategy. Because I administered the WAIS frequently, I perform better on it than I would otherwise, even if the test items are substituted so you’re not actually testing my memory. I construe that intelligence (the construct called g) is a combination of nature, nurture (including family SES, education, and access to enrichment), and practice responding to the paradigm being used, not just the information. To this latter point, think about when you learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube quickly, or learned a sudoku-solving or jigsaw puzzle-completing technique, or where to put you feet when you’re the batter. Or even when you learned about Easter Eggs in games, or how to save and replay. Or how to express disagreement with your family member more effectively. There are lots of kinds of intelligence, and what’s on an IQ test is, among other things, a reflection of what the larger culture and the academic/work/forensic/medical culture for which it’s being used as a tool.