Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer
- 1. Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer David Didau Festival of Education Friday 23rd June 2017
- 2. What do we want? • Everyone wants children to be happy, healthy, safe, conscientious, creative, critical thinkers, problem solvers etc. • Intelligence is the answer.
- 3. What is intelligence? A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do. Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). Mainstream Science on Intelligence
- 4. Intelligence is general IQ tests measure: • Reasoning ability • Working memory • Vocabulary • General knowledge • Spatial ability • Processing speed • All these capacities correlate together.
- 5. What is a correlation?
- 6. Correlation ≠ causation XKCD Correlation
- 7. Intelligence correlates with… • Creativity – 0.4 • Leadership – 0.3 • Conscientiousness – 0.4 – 0.6 • Involvement in violent crime – 0.5 - 0.6 • Happiness – 0.5 • Mental health (schizophrenia) – 0.7 • Longevity – 0.7 • Education outcomes – 0.81 (Grit – 0.18) • Wearing glasses – 0.4 Ritchie, S. (2015) Intelligence: All That Matters
- 8. Can we all get cleverer? • Is the brain “like a muscle”? • Intelligence is made up of fluid & crystallised intelligence – Fluid: the ability to reason and solve problems – Crystallised: the ability to access and utilise information stored in long-term memory
- 9. What happens as we age Tucker-Drob, 2009
- 10. The bell curve • Intelligence is 50-80% heritable, 20-50% environmental • We can’t change students’ genes (Gf & WM) • Gc is (mainly) environmental • Education matters – there’s a 2 way interaction.
- 11. What we need to know about heritability • Heritability explains at least half of the differences between people • Environments change how genes are expressed • Environments correlate with genes • Genetic differences do not determine outcomes.
- 12. The IQ bell curve
- 13. The Flynn effect • IQ tests need to be periodically renormed • Average IQ is increasing by 3 points per decade • An average person 100 years ago would be ‘mentally inadequate’ today
- 14. The Flynn effect
- 15. What’s improving? • “Scientific spectacles” • Hypothetical thinking: – There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg? • Abstract thinking: – What have a horse and a dog got in common?
- 16. What about the ‘gap’? • What sort of gap? (SES, language, culture, Gf) • Two possibilities: 1. We can shift the bell curve to the right 2. We might be able to change the shape of the curve
- 17. Key messages • Working memory/fluid intelligence is fixed • Crystallised intelligence can always be increased • There is no correlation between the ability to memorise and fluid intelligence • The more you know the better you can think • Schools can help to move the bell curve (or change its shape)
- 18. @DavidDidau learningspy.co.uk ddidau@gmail.com There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.