During the many years I spent traveling to schools in the US and Canada and observing instruction in classes at all socioeconomic scales, I was able to see why so many teachers suffer burnout. Teaching children can be a rewarding experience, but when combined with behavioural issues, parental involvement, administrative demands and unrelenting efforts to …
Why is US Education failing to meet international standards? Read More »
Between birth and early adulthood, the brain passes through significant periods of neural growth and pruning in which new neuronal connections are produced and those not used are pruned. Throughout this development, you might expect that your IQ would remain relatively stable, because IQ is a measure of intelligence relative to others of the same age. …
Yes, twins can have different personalities. Identical twins (monozygotic twins) have identical genes because they emerge from a single fertilized egg that splits into two embryos. However, they are not identical personality traits and behavioral tendencies. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, who develop from two separate eggs fertilized by different sperm, are no more …
“Percentage error” would be difficult to calculate for IQ tests, because it would require a measurement of the discrepancy between the “exact intelligence” and the measured IQ. Since, there is no way to determine the ”exact intelligence” of a person, calculation of a “percentage error” is not possible. However, to estimate the “accuracy” of an …
In 2011, a large group of researchers published the results of a genome-wide analysis of 549,692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) involving 3511 unrelated adults. (An SNP represents a difference in a single DNA building block, called a nucleotide.) (See: Davies, G., A. Tenesa, A. Payton, J. Yang, S.E. Harris, D. Liewald, et al. 2011. “Genome-wide …
Can parents of average IQ have a child of IQ 160? Read More »
Many people who visit Quora ask how to distinguish highly intelligent people from the average. There are a lot of different perspectives on this, but one that I have found particularly reliable is to observe what people do in their spare time. Those who highly intelligent are usually actively engaged in acquiring information about things …
A few years ago, a school board discovered that there was a positive correlation between a student’s shoe size and a student’s intelligence. Those with larger shoe sizes had higher IQ scores than those of smaller shoe size. The school board administrators, having little knowledge of statistics, assumed that there was some kind of causal …
What are examples of variables that are positively correlated by not causally related? Read More »
It would be impossible for the proportions of intelligent and unintelligent people to be unequal, because IQ scores are normed so that half the people are above average intelligence and half are below. (For the same reason, the number of short people is the same as the number of tall people, provided height is normally …
Do Most people believe there are more unintelligent than intelligent people? Read More »
Identical twins (monozygotic twins) develop from a single fertilized egg that splits into two embryos. Therefore the twins share 100% of their alleles, meaning that they are genetically identical. Consequently, their fluid intelligence (brain structure and neural efficiency) will be similar. Any difference in their IQs will be a result of different environmental effects that …
The concept of IQ emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, but formal IQ tests such as WAIS (the Weschler test) did not emerge until the 1950’s. (You can visit this site for a brief history of their development: Why were IQ tests developed originally?) Consequently, we don’t have IQ measures for the greatest leaders …
