This Is How Education And Training Influence Your Intelligence
There are still those who say that intelligence is a trait you are born with and is completely impervious to change As if it were the color of your eyes, the height or the shape of your hair.
If this were really the case, there would be no differences between people who have received education and people who have never gone to school, or people who have grown up in stimulating environments and people who have grown up in poverty.
We know that intelligence is housed in the most malleable and changing organ of all. It is to be expected, then, that the intellect has the same properties and is susceptible to being trained and enhanced in various aspects.
The models that theorize the composition of intelligence or intelligences are so many that we will not stop to examine them. But it is important to keep in mind that there is no single unifying theory, although they all talk more or less about the same thing and refer to the same psychological phenomenon.
When we talk about intelligence we talk about the ability of our mind to face and adapt with the greatest speed and efficiency to the demands of the environment. These demands can be of all kinds, mathematical, linguistic, kinetic, musical, etc. Perhaps there is a single intelligence that manifests itself through these skills to a greater or lesser extent depending on the person, or perhaps there are separate intelligences that are used to successfully tackle different types of tasks. For the purpose of this article We are going to stay with the general definition of intelligence as a capacity
Through twin studies, we know that there is a strong correlation between the IQs of monozygotic twins separated at birth, while the correlation of the IQs of genetically non-identical blood siblings is not as strong. Furthermore, when we take families with adopted children, we see that The IQ of adopted children correlates more with their biological parents than with their current ones
Thus, we know that intelligence, or at least the IQ we obtain by measuring it, is largely determined by DNA. Some here would shelve the development of intelligence and be content with this explanation. Fortunately the issue is more complex.
The trained intelligence
Just because someone is born with a certain ability does not mean that they will keep it forever for free You can be born with genetics that allow you to develop athlete’s legs and end up atrophying them after spending hours and hours sitting. Something similar happens with intelligence: those who do not train it end up stagnating it.
Environments rich in stimulation such as books or interactive games promote the intellectual development of children. We know this through adoption studies, where children who come from very impoverished environments, by receiving stimulation in adoptive families with a higher purchasing power and more stimulation, manage to reach IQ levels well above average. Not only do families play a fundamental role in intellectual development, schooling, the type of methodology that teachers use decisively influences children’s intelligence.
At this point someone will wonder: if the environment is such a powerful force, Can’t we optimize the teaching methodology of schools to improve the intelligence of students? The truth is that it is possible and a multitude of projects have been developed over the last 30 years under this same premise.
An example is found in the Venezuela Intelligence Project This is a program from the 1980s aimed at improving students’ thinking skills and detecting how both the way of teaching and the teaching material itself could be optimized. Units in this program include lessons on reasoning, language comprehension, verbal reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and inventive thinking.
What is innovative about the program is not only its content, but the way in which it is taught to students. Moving away from the traditional approach that considers learning to be only the transmission of knowledge, the program is groundbreaking because it sees learning as a process of preparation and encouragement to manage one’s own personal development.
The results after the implementation of this program were positive. Teachers noted changes in academic performance, especially those who applied knowledge learned about other subjects. Furthermore, due to the more affective relationship that is generated between students and teachers, changes occur at a behavioral and affective level in the students. This closer relationship between teacher and student has a facilitating impact on learning.
The North Carolina Alphabet Project
This project developed by the University of North Carolina in the 70s aims to produce long-term positive effects on children’s intellectual development through high-quality education, placing emphasis on early interventions that cushion the disadvantages of children who come from poor backgrounds.
It is a project that applies from birth to the age of five. In this program, children go five days a week to a center where they receive high-quality educational care that addresses the children’s intellectual needs through language and conversation activities, close care, and educational games.
Not all children participate in the same games, the game assignment is personalized. These interactive games between child and adult include some traditional ones, such as “cucutrás” or “peek-a-boo” in English, and as their development progresses, others more focused on specific concepts and skills are added.
Children who go through this program have greater proficiency in reading, mathematics, and a slight increase in IQ. Likewise, these children have a better school adjustment understood as a longer period of schooling, a lower school dropout rate, a higher percentage of children who complete the university period and less probability of being teenage parents.
Although the results should be interpreted with caution, in general It seems that this is a beneficial program for children’s intelligence that translates into greater academic competence and a better job prospect in adult life.
These programs shed light on the relationship between training, both early and throughout schooling, and greater intellectual competencies. The old vision of intelligence as an immovable monolith is discarded, since we now know that it is malleable and susceptible to change depending on how we educate it.
