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 Is it possible for people's IQ to change over time? 
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I was very intrigued by what Dr. Turner said today in class. She basically said, "Children's IQ's are not set in stone." At first, I was thought, "Well haven't we all be told that after the third grade (I think that's right), your IQ is set for life?" But then, as I listened, it made more sense. If a third grade child has a low IQ, maybe he can be "socialized," "cultured," or "educated" to foster a higher aptitude. If more time was taken to help that student grow academically, emotionally, and socially, his IQ could reach higher levels. This would take time and would have to be seen over many years, but I believe that it is true. We have to have some kind of hope as teachers! We shouldn't just give up on a child because of what a psychologist or a test says. Even if a child's IQ does not increase because their disability is too serious, at least we know we have tried. That should be our hope and goal: bettering humanity, or at least trying. Even so, how to we know that the IQ tests are really measuring the right thing in the correct way? What if a child's IQ did increase, but we are not measuring it correctly, so we do not know? Are there multiple ways to do this? If not, there should be.

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Heather Holland Crow


Tue Oct 14, 2008 4:00 pm
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I am with Dr. Turner when she says, "Children's IQ's are not set in stone." I have always thought that the mind is continuing to grow everyday so I never understood how people could say that once you reach a certain grade level, not even a certain age, that you could not increase your IQ. If that were true then the world would be filled with some low performing people. Like Heather said we should never give up on a child because someone who met them for an hour or so says that the child cannot learn anymore.

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Tracy Gardo


Tue Oct 14, 2008 6:55 pm
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I agree with Tracy. I feel like the mind is something that continues growing even after school. I think people learn new things everyday. I think the more interaction we have with people of different backgrounds and the more we further our education, the higher our IQ will become. I also agree with Heather and Tracy that we should never give up on our students. We may be the only positive influence that our students have!

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Jessica Mundy


Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:08 pm
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In general, I don't want to know what my students' IQ scores are. I do not really want past teachers telling me what great and/or horrible students I have. I want to learn for myself. Any past or previous knowledge I have of my students may distort my image of them. I do not want that to happen.
I hope IQ scores can change, but maybe they cannot. I really do not know the answer. It would be awesome, but with the same token it would be scary. We base so much of our schooling on testing. What are we really testing? If we are testing the wrong things, we need to fix it and fix it fast. However, I do not know how to do that, do you?

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Lianna Denise Beard


Tue Oct 14, 2008 11:47 pm
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I agree with you, Lianna, that I wouldn't want to know what my students' test scores are from previous years. I don't know if you guys learned about it in ed psyc, but in my class we learned that an experiment was done regarding scores. The teachers were told that the low achieving students were the high achieving ones and vice versa. Therefore, the teachers in this case showed more attention to the low-achieving students because they thought they were the higher achieving ones. When it came to test time, the real higher-achieving students stayed at the same rate, or a little above the previous year, while the true low-achieving students' scores jumped significantly because of the attention paid them throughout the year.

This experiment causes me to think that I wouldn't want to know my students' scores ahead of time, but to evaluate for myself, like Lianna said, and work from there.

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Anna F. Gay


Wed Oct 15, 2008 7:10 am
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I have actually never heard that a child's IQ is set in stone after a certain grade, so this took me by surprise. I'm not sure why anyone would think their IQ is set for life, unless they plan to separate themselves from the rest of the world. I feel like no matter what a person does, as long as they continue learning, their IQ is going to be affected. It's like our parents told us, "You learn something new every day!"

Maybe I'm looking at IQ in the wrong way...but it still feels wrong to say that someone's IQ is set in stone.

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Kimberly Smith

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Thu Oct 16, 2008 9:32 pm
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According to some "IQ Experts" the human IQ isn't supposed to be able to go up, just down; however I strongly disagree with this theory. I think the intelligence of a person expands with their continued learning and experience. A problem I have with the IQ testing is the fact that some people truly do believe an IQ is set in stone and unchangeable, which causes a teacher to hold the student back in a way (through lowered expectations/less attention). It almost seems as though the IQ test has become counterproductive.

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Jennifer Nicole Redmond


Fri Oct 17, 2008 4:07 pm
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Post IQ
I truly believe that the IQ can be raised. I believe that there is a way to socialize/culture and teach a human being so that their IQ level can increase. I would like to believe that with constant and consistent learning, a person can increase their IQ if they want to, and work hard to. I don't think that I can condone holding a student back from learning at a level appropriate to them, especially if their learning habits and/or abilities have changed, just because someone doesn't think that their IQ can increase. That seems completely ridiculous to me, but it unfortunately seems to happen all of the time.

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Brynne Pulver, Music Education/Vocal Performance


Tue Oct 21, 2008 8:56 am
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I am on the same page as Lianna here when she says she does not know what to do!? I too hope and would like to think IQ test can be changed, but it goes completley against what I have learned in school all along. I have always been taught IQ test are a one time deal, which will always stay constant. I also agree that I do not want to know my students IQ test scores because even if a child scores low I would not want to shut them out as someone who is unteachable.

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katielewis


Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:31 am
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I would have to think that an individuals IQ can increase over time. Not just because someone has studied and increased their knowledge capacity. I feel if someone has a complete change in their lifestyle and their environment that they are in their IQ can also be affected. If intelligence is how you solve problems and the way you look at deciphering out things then I strongly believe that over time your intelligence can increase by the changes that have occurred in your life. If you can learn to look at a problem in a whole new perspective then you can increase your probability of correctly solving the problem. I may be off a bit here in my interpretation of the whole IQ testing deal and what it actually measures but this is how I feel in regards to this question.

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Clay Moore


Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:43 pm
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Clay has made a critical point here. If a child is being raised in a frightening, chaotic environment, I think it would be rare that this child's intelligence would develop in the same way as it might blossom in a more supportive, enriched environment.

This is why I felt it was so important to tell you about the completely suspect data utilized by Sir Cyril Burt in his seminal twin studies.

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Gayle Turner


Tue Oct 21, 2008 1:21 pm
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I think that I'm with everyone who has posted on this discussion. As we were talking about IQ in class, I wondered, how can and IQ really be set in stone? And I guess everyone else was thinking the same thing. I really do not think it is possible, especially for a child, for an IQ to be frozen so to speak after the 3rd grade (or whenever it was). I think in a sense, whoever is making that argument is saying that children stop learning at the age of eight or nine years old. After you look at it that way, the whole IQ thing does seem a little off. We were discussing in our small group in class about IQ and the SAT, and we all seemed to come to the conclusion that neither really show how "smart" you are. I am in the Literacy and Technology class right now, and we have been talking a lot about how students are literate in different things, therefore are smart in different areas, etc. I think that things like IQ and SAT scores merely downplay how smart children really are. How can you use the number score of one test to show how smart someone is? I think that life is all about learning, and we learn as we go. Therefore, our knowledge is ever changing. We can't "set that in stone".

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Paige Kathleen Colbath


Tue Oct 28, 2008 1:44 pm
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