Studying Intelligence In The 20th Century Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Studying Intelligence In The 20th Century - Essay Example and each generation scores higher on IQ tests because each is better educated James Flynn, a political scientist working in New Zealand, observed in the 1980's that the scores of different groups of people on standard intelligence tests had consistently augmented over the past decades. Earlier researchers had failed to pay attention to that trend, because IQ scores are always calculated with respect to the average score for the present group. By definition, the average is set to 100. Someone who scores 20% more than the average would therefore get an IQ of 120. But if that person's score would be compared with the average for the corresponding group, tested one generation earlier, the final score would be about 130. Flynn was the first to systematically make such cross-generational comparisons. Since then, the so-called "Flynn effect" has been confirmed by numerous studies. The same pattern, an average increase of over three IQ points per decade, was found for virtually every type of intelligence test, delivered to virtually every type of group. (Sholomskas , 1983) This study investigated the group and individual broad ability profiles of children with mental retardation (MR) and a matched sample of children with average achieveme