IQ, neuroscience and other useless concepts

Well, in the classroom at least

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There are some people out there who really don’t like researchED. I think this is because unlike most of the education sector, researchED prioritises empirical evidence, a practice derided as ‘positivism’ by many education academics. Prioritising evidence is inconvenient because lots of cherished educationally progressivist ideas are not supported by evidence. So, this evidence needs to be dismissed, advocacy for it requires a pejorative name and researchED has to have its legitimacy attacked.

The latest flare-up on Twitter/X has involved a couple of extraordinary and false claims. Firstly, it was claimed that the researchED ‘community’ has an obsession with neuroscience. This was followed by the claim that the same community, ‘draw heavily on IQ based theory around links between brains, intelligence and race/class.’ Both claims are baseless and accordingly, no evidence is provided to support them. It is hard to know how willful such mistakes are, but they are wrong in an interesting way.

As I noted in response on Twitter/X, I have been involved in organising or speaking at around ten researchED conferences, mostly in Australia but also in the UK. I cannot recall a discussion of neuroscience or IQ at any of these conferences, on the conference programs or in any of the submissions I have reviewed from people who would like to speak. In the many thousands of talks that have taken place over the years, these topics may have arisen and may have even been the subject of a few, but they are clearly not central. In contrast, the results of educational psychology research have been far more prominent—think of presentations on retrieval practice, spaced practice, motivation, behaviour, worked examples and so on.

So what is going on and why does a practical conference intended to help teachers be more effective have so little to discuss about neuroscience and IQ?

Neuroscience

It is easy to simply confuse neuroscience and educational psychology. The terms tend to shapeshift a little and this had not been helped by the uptake of the broader term, cognitive science, that can include both. The key distinction is that educational psychology makes claims based on abstract models such as self-determination theory or cognitive load theory, whereas neuroscience makes claims about physical brains.

Neuroscience is very interesting, but it currently has little value in the classroom. If, for example, I told you that when students complete a maths word problem, blood flow increases in a specific part of their brain, how would you use that as a teacher? Dylan Wiliam puts it this way:

And it gets worse. Say, for instance, we stuck all our students in scanners and saw a deficiency in blood flow in the supposed maths-word-problem area of the brain for a particular student. The brain is incredibly malleable and so the best solution may not be to try to rectify this—if we even knew how—but to develop a workaround. Jeffrey Bowers has written an excellent paper making this argument. As he states in the abstract:

“…regarding the assessment of instruction, the only relevant issue is whether the child learns, as reflected in behavior. Evidence that the brain changed in response to instruction [is] irrelevant.”

It is therefore little surprise that an education conference for teachers does not focus on neuroscience.

Confusingly, some who joined in with the bashing of researchED paradoxically claimed that it should focus more on neuroscience. Why?

Maybe it is possible to draw authority from neuroscience to support educationally progressivist theories about the nature of children and how schools should operate. For example, we might claim that childhood trauma irreversibly changes the brain or that some aspect of neuroscience demonstrates that some children are not in control of their behaviour. The aura of neuroscience may make this seem convincing.

However, the problem for teachers remains. What are we to do with students who have suffered trauma? How does this knowledge of the brain inform us how to teach them? Whether a child is in control of their behaviour or not, how are we to best manage it? In these cases, the argument is little more than a new gloss on the old idea—usually coming from outside the teaching profession—that if only teachers cared more and made more of an effort to understand their students then a miracle would happen and everything would be fine.

And on a final note, it is worth highlighting that many of the errors that Professor Jo Boaler has made in recent years stem from misguided attempts to apply lessons from neuroscience to education. That should be a warning to us all.

IQ

Why don’t researchED presenters spend more time talking about IQ? Again, the question is, to what end?

IQ tests are an attempt to measure general intelligence and I am not going to deny they have predictive power. Clearly, people are born with the potential to develop different levels of general intelligence and no doubt some of this is hereditary. However, an IQ score is not the same thing as general intelligence. Instead, we ask subjects in these tests to complete a series of tasks under the assumption that performance on these tasks can be used as a proxy for general intelligence.

At his recent keynote at the 2024 cognitive load theory conference, John Sweller made the point that such tests don’t capture all aspects of intelligence or ways it may be expressed. For example, Australia’s first peoples often learn advancing tracking skills and tracking is a cognitively complex task. However, an IQ test will not assess this because it has no questions relating to it. Instead, such tests exist in a specific cultural setting—one based on Western European norms.

Alexander Luria interviewed peasants in the 1930s in remote areas of the then Soviet Union that had yet to undergo modernisation. His research included the following exchange:

“Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Zovaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?

A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.

Q: What do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.”

This is usually interpreted in terms of the development of abstract thinking. However, another way to view this exchange is that the peasant does not understand the rules of the game Luria is asking him to play.

Anyone who has had a formal education knows there are questions they will be asked about hypothetical situations where the information needed to answer the question is included within it. Apart from a few key concepts that are the subject of instruction, we know we are not expected to independently reason outside the confines of the question. For instance, imagine a problem about a boy called Jay who is sharing pizzas with his friends after football practice that asks how many slices each friend gets. We are not expected to respond that Jay might not share his pizzas because he’s probably very hungry. Yet inhibiting such a response and learning the rules of the question-and-answer game is not necessarily something that comes naturally.

Luria’s peasant could be extremely intelligent in ways that mattered in 1930s Uzbekistan or Kirghizia but this will not show up on IQ tests based on the games of Western European formal education.

It is a reliance on schooling that could account for the Flynn effect—the phenomenon that over time, average scores on IQ tests tend to rise. A plausible explanation of this could be the expansion and extension of formal education, perhaps coupled with improved nutrition and a lifestyle that requires us to engage more with abstraction and hypotheticals.

As eluded to in the baseless criticism of researchED, IQ scores have been used by some to declare innate differences between groups based on class or race. I am deeply sceptical of such arguments because I think they require too much faith that these tests are a direct and objective measure of intelligence.

If everyone within a given test sample has had a similar education, similar nutrition and lives a similar lifestyle, perhaps with a similar career, IQ scores may be a good proxy for variations in general intelligence. In reality, this won’t hold true and so they will be a weaker proxy. Still, they should have some degree of predictive power.

What are teachers to use this for?

I’m not sure. I remember asking students in the UK to complete something approaching an IQ test but we didn’t do a great deal with that. If a student was scoring low academically but had high scores on this test, we might investigate why, but we usually wouldn’t come up with much.

If I am a classroom teacher teaching, say, science, what information does an IQ test give me? Whatever it is, it’s not as helpful as information from a science test relevant to the topic I am about to teach. And even that is not as helpful to me as a student’s mini whiteboard answer to a question I have just asked them in class.

Some claim we could use scores like this to filter children into different forms of education. However, that has been tried and is not an unqualified success. It is hard to know what limitations a low score places on potential and the extent to which a lack of ‘fluid’ intelligence or raw processing power can be mitigated by ‘crystallised’ intelligence or the miracle that is human long-term memory.

Like neuroscience, IQ is interesting, but not of great practical concern to the teachers who attend researchED conferences.

Power play

Given the fact that neuroscience and IQ are not big topics of conversation at researchED and the reasons why these concepts are of limited value to teachers, what are we to make of mischaracterisations of researchED as a hotbed of both?

Some of it must arise from a lack of knowledge. It is likely that the distinction between neuroscience and psychology is not well understood and if you haven’t attended many researchED conferences, you may not be aware of what they involve.

Holding up evidence and sciencey-sounding things as a bogeyman may be perplexing to the neutral bystander but probably has rhetorical power with educational academics who have built an ecosystem in which this can be described as ‘positivist’ and therefore bad.

Finally, slurring researchED with ideas about IQ and race may be a long bow to draw, but it is an extremely toxic accusation that, if successful, furthers the aim of discrediting the movement.

It won’t work.