The quotation is from Michael Shayer, Professor of Applied Psychology at King's College, University of London, and appears in American Scientist's Smart as We Can Get?. To begin at the beginning:
Psychometricians have long been aware of a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—a widespread and long-standing tendency for scores on certain tests of intelligence to rise over time. … Ever since Flynn published his startling results, psychologists and educators have struggled to figure out whether people really are getting smarter and, if so, why. No clear answer has emerged. And now they have another curiosity to ponder: The tendency for intelligence scores to rise appears to have ended in some places. Indeed, it seems that some countries are experiencing a Flynn effect with a reversed sign.
'a Flynn effect with a reversed sign'. Or, at least, as some of the research from Scandinavia cited by American Scientist has shown, a plateau can be reached.
Back in January, the Guardian carried a lengthy piece about recent research conducted by Shayer:
New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer … concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.
"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer reviewed."
I remember being stopped in my tracks when I read this article. I recommend reading it in full: it goes into some detail about Shayer's distinguished, lifelong contribution to educational research, the attendant debates and controversies.
And Shayer's most recent research, its methodology and conclusions, will be discussed widely and with passion once it is published. Anyone doubting the storm that will break then need only ponder this (Guardian):
Those likely to be particularly discomforted by Shayer's findings are people who swear by the validity of GCSE and Sats results. The idea that most children are achieving the government level 4 targets in maths and science at key stage 2 is clearly anomalous with Shayer's findings, as is the notion that secondary schools are now taking children who are two years behind developmentally and still getting them up to GCSE speed in just five years.
So how does Shayer explain this? "The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority obviously insists that standards haven't dropped," he says, "but this doesn't fit all the evidence. A-level maths and science teachers often report that their students don't know as much as they used to. And some parts of the GCSE science syllabus, such as density, have been dropped. Examiners may well be asking easier questions and marking more leniently. These things can happen unconsciously.
There is some evidence that the extra hour allocated to maths in primary schools under the numeracy initiative has had some impact on Sats scores, but there is greater evidence of teachers teaching to the tests. This means students can perform well in the tests without necessarily understanding the underlying concepts.
… I would suggest that the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice and to make informed judgements about abstract concepts."
American Scientist winds up, saying that 'Flynn himself is much less gloomy about what appears to be happening':
For one, he points out that the situation varies quite a bit from country to country. "All the evidence is that the IQ gains in America are still robust, " he says. And he notes that at the very time that scores were declining in the UK on the Piagetian tests that Shayer examined, British kids were making gains on a test called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children or WISC. Flynn points out that results gathered with two versions of this test (WISC-III, introduced in 1991, and WISC-IV, in 2003) show the usual effect, a rise in raw scores over time. But he also notes that one subtest—on arithmetic reasoning—did show a decline.
Although Flynn cautions against generalizing the recent Danish and Norwegian experiences, he anticipates similar results will crop up elsewhere in the world. But he's not glum about it. Flynn is convinced that the cause of his eponymous effect has to do with changes in the environment that allow children more opportunity to exercise the kinds of skills probed in today's intelligence tests—changes like a shift to smaller family sizes, which allow parents more time to interact with each child, for example, or devotion of an ever-greater portion of kids' leisure time to abstract, mentally demanding games. He points out that in industrialized, middle-class countries (like those of Scandinavia) such influences must be reaching a point of saturation: "You can't really get the family much smaller than one or two kids." And the current craze for Sudoku puzzles not withstanding, as Flynn says, "eventually, people do want to relax."
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