@dwalbert isn't there evidence of IQ decline as a result of the virus, too? And air pollution? And with demographic and cultural changes, IQ may have some inbuilt biases?
@davidmarsden Well, this is what I’m saying. The article blames the lockdowns but there are lots of things to speculate about. Everyone can use this sort of finding to ride their favorite hobbyhorse.
@JohnBrady Have crows’ intelligence declined since 2012, I wonder? That would help to rule out environmental factors. :)
@timapple The study measured change between 2012 and 2020. Not "since the 1960s." Not a slow decline but a falling off a cliff. (The decline between 2002 and 2012, by contrast, was only one point.) You have to point the finger at something that changed equally dramatically within that time frame. High-fructose corn syrup isn't it.
@JohnBrady ...and then I had this mental image of crows up on a line staring at their phones. Seriously, though—I'm thinking, too, that we have already lost some kinds of intelligence due to our reliance on technology, only we call those intelligences "skills" and say we don't need them anymore. So it wouldn't surprise me, either.
@dwalbert I agree it's likely more complex.
@Omrrc shared something earlier which questions teaching and testing for knowledge but not understanding.
@davidmarsden A number of years ago I worked with a math ed professor who was trying to establish a middle-school math curriculum based entirely on problem solving. He started by demonstrating that students getting As in algebra were at sea when you gave them problems that didn't look like the ones on the test. And he was right, of course, and when he demonstrated the teaching methods, they worked great. The trouble was that the real-world middle-school math teachers weren't good enough at real math to teach that way. It was memorized procedures all the way up. (This was about 2002. It's old news. Still memorable, though. Math education is one of those topics on which I should not get started.)
@dwalbert I remember at school Maths (and English Language) were my favourite subjects because I didn't have to practice or revise for them. That worked fine until I got to a level where I no longer understood the concepts (and maybe neither did my teachers).
I also remember starting at university and noticing how the mostly self-directed learning there contrasted with school's teacher-led accumulation of facts.
That was back in the 80s!
@dwalbert Then again, according to this study, "Many studies indicate that children who do not attend school for one reason or another score lower on the tests than their regularly attending peers. One especially unfortunate example of that principle appeared in the 1960s, when some Virginia counties closed their public schools to avoid racial integration. Compensatory private schooling was available only for white children. On average, the African-American children who received no formal education during that period fell back at a rate of about six IQ points per year." So the 2020 results' being due specifically to school closures would be consistent with the findings of other studies. Still I'd be happier if the baseline was 2019 rather than 2012.
@tinyroofnail Well, there apparently is a correlation between quantity of nanoplastics in brain tissue and dementia, and one assumes having plastic embedded in one's brain can't be doing anything particularly good. I've already started using that as an excuse for not being able to think of something.
@tinyroofnail Actually, if you want to know how plastics affect the brain, just watch this. Explains everything.
@dwalbert That's so interesting and something that I think about as an Primary (Elementary) school teacher. Funny because this popped up in my feed this week > "Students can excel at mental math in marketplace jobs but struggle with formal math in the classroom, and vice versa".
@Omrrc I missed this over the weekend. Very interesting! I find this with woodworking as well, especially historically — to design and build a piece of furniture requires "artisan geometry," much of it mental, none of it anything like Euclid. Clearly there are different ways of being "good at math."
Though I notice that the explanation of how market kids multiply two-digit numbers is precisely the algorithm I learned in third grade! So maybe it's like the difference between learning a vernacular by immersion and studying a language at school, and nothing to do with math specifically at all?
