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Whatever the
question is,
intelligence is the
answer
David Didau
Fest iva l o f Educat ion
Fr iday 23 rd June 2017
What do we want?
• Everyone wants children to be happy,
healthy, safe, conscientious, creative,
critical thinkers, problem solvers etc.
• Intelligence is the answer.
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
Intelligence is general
IQ tests measure:
• Reasoning ability
• Working memory
• Vocabulary
• General knowledge
• Spatial ability
• Processing speed
• All these capacities correlate together.
What is a correlation?
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
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
What happens as we age
Tucker-Drob, 2009
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.
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.
The IQ bell curve
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
The Flynn effect
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?
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
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)
@DavidDidaulearningspy.co.uk
There’s nothing good or bad but
thinking makes it so.
