The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures (Apa Science Volumes)

...written by leading experts in psychology, sociology, psychometrics, and nutrition...discusses the environmental and social factors that affect IQ, the upward trend in IQ scores worldwide, and much more. For a long time now, intelligence and achievement tests have been cast as the bearers of bad news. In The Bell Curve, R. Herrnstein and C. Murray (see record 1994-98748-000) argued that there are sharp limits on the intelligence of most of the population; they also noted that the test scores of several minority groups have been chronically low. But the trends documented here tell a different story. The authors show that intelligence test scores are going up everywhere in the world; what's more, the Black-White gap in the school achievement of American children has closed substantially in recent years. Authors from the fields of psychology, sociology, psychometrics, and nutrition present and defend different interpretations of these findings. Do the IQ gains reflect genuine gains in intelligence? Are they due to cultural changes, better schools, increased test sophistication, or improved diet and health? Were the government programs established during the "War on Poverty" partly responsible for the school gains of minority children in the 1970s. The final section addresses the issue : Will the different birth rates of different social classes inevitably produce a "dysgenic trend," as Herrnstein and Murray have claimed? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved) Amidst worries that our educational standards are slipping, psychometricans have discovered a fascinating trend: an astonishing rise in IQ scores over the past fifty years. Also, scores between white and minority students are converging. This books draws together the latest findings from leading researchers in psychometrics and sociology as well as cognitive, social and developmental psychology to discuss the causes and the implicatioins of the rising curve. Psychometricians have discovered a trend showing that IQ scores in children have shown a significant rise over the past 50 years, and scores between white and minority students are converging. This trend is the focus of this book.