The cognitive impact of the education revolution: A possible cause of the Flynn Effect on population IQ

A Review of Screeners to Identify Risk of Developmental Language Disorder

PURPOSE

This review aims to comprehensively summarize, compare, and evaluate screeners used to identify risk for developmental language disorder (DLD), a common learning disability that is underidentified. Screening for DLD is a cost-effective way to identify children in need of further assessment and, in turn, provides much needed supports.

METHOD

We identified 15 commercially available English language DLD screeners in North America. We then characterized each screener on 27 aspects in three domains, including (a) accessibility information (acronym, subtest, website, cost, materials included, publish year, examiner qualification, age range, administration time, and administration format), (b) usability features (dialect compatibility, progress monitoring function, actionable follow-up instruction, group assessment capability, and online administration availability), and (c) technical standards (the availability of a technical manual, conceptual definition, the sample size used in classification accuracy calculation, sample distribution, year of sample collection, outcome measure, sample base rate, cutoff score, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value).

RESULTS

We obtained sufficient accessibility information from 14 out of 15 (93%) screeners. In contrast, none of the screeners (0%) included comprehensive usability features. Ten screeners (67%) included a range of classification accuracy (70%-100% sensitivity and 68%-90% specificity). We provided areas of strength and weakness for each screener as a quick reference for users and generated screener recommendations for five practical scenarios.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings presented some DLD screeners that meet most standards and highlight numerous areas for improvement, including improving classification accuracy and clarifying follow-up instructions for children who are identified with DLD risk. Screening for DLD is critical to provide timely early identification, intervention, and classroom support, which in turn facilitates student outcomes.

Systematic Human Learning and Generalization From a Brief Tutorial With Explanatory Feedback

We investigate human adults' ability to learn an abstract reasoning task quickly and to generalize outside of the range of training examples. Using a task based on a solution strategy in Sudoku, we provide Sudoku-naive participants with a brief instructional tutorial with explanatory feedback using a narrow range of training examples. We find that most participants who master the task do so within 10 practice trials and generalize well to puzzles outside of the training range. We also find that most of those who master the task can describe a valid solution strategy, and such participants perform better on transfer puzzles than those whose strategy descriptions are vague or incomplete. Interestingly, fewer than half of our human participants were successful in acquiring a valid solution strategy, and this ability was associated with completion of high school algebra and geometry. We consider the implications of these findings for understanding human systematic reasoning, as well as the challenges these findings pose for building computational models that capture all aspects of our findings, and we point toward a role for learning from instructions and explanations to support rapid learning and generalization.

Describing and explaining age, period, and cohort trends in Americans' vocabulary knowledge

For a quarter of a century researchers have been documenting and trying to explain trends in Americans' vocabulary knowledge using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and its WORDSUM test. Trends in Americans' vocabulary knowledge have important practical implications-for example, for educational policy and practice-and speak to the American workforce's competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. We contribute to this debate by analyzing 1978-2018 GSS data using an improved analytical approach that is consistent with theoretical notions of cohort effects and that permits simultaneously estimating inter-cohort average differences and intra-cohort life-course changes. We find that WORDSUM scores peak around age 35 and gradually decline in older ages; the scores were significantly lower in the 1980s and higher in the late 2000s and 2010s; and the 1940-1954 birth cohorts and the 1965 and later birth cohorts had notably higher and lower scores, respectively, than the expectation based on age and period main effects. We provide new evidence that such cohort differences tend to persist over the life course. Interestingly, the effects of increasing educational attainment and decreasing reading behaviors seemed to cancel out, leading to a relatively flat overall period trend. Trends in television viewing and word obsolescence did not appear to affect age, period, or cohort trends in WORDSUM scores.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-023-09771-5.

It Runs in the Family: Testing for Longitudinal Family Flynn Effects

The Flynn effect refers to increases over time in measured (particularly fluid) intelligence of approximately 3 IQ points per decade. We define the Flynn effect at the family level, using longitudinal data and two new family-level cohort definitions. Multilevel growth curve analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data showed that children in families with later-born mothers had higher average PIAT math scores, and lower average reading comprehension scores and growth, in young and middle childhood. Children in families where the first child was born later had higher average PIAT math, reading recognition, and reading comprehension scores, as well as larger developmental growth. The latter family-level Flynn effects were of higher magnitudes than the usual individual-level Flynn effect found in previous studies. Our results, showing family level-intercept and slope Flynn effects for both maternal birthyear and first child birthyear, have implications for research aiming to explain the Flynn effect.

Multi-Round Trust Game Quantifies Inter-Individual Differences in Social Exchange from Adolescence to Adulthood

Investing in strangers in a socio-economic exchange is risky, as we may be uncertain whether they will reciprocate. Nevertheless, the potential rewards for cooperating can be great. Here, we used a cross sectional sample (n = 784) to study how the challenges of cooperation versus defection are negotiated across an important period of the lifespan: from adolescence to young adulthood (ages 14 to 25). We quantified social behaviour using a multi round investor-trustee task, phenotyping individuals using a validated model whose parameters characterise patterns of real exchange and constitute latent social characteristics. We found highly significant differences in investment behaviour according to age, sex, socio-economic status and IQ. Consistent with the literature, we showed an overall trend towards higher trust from adolescence to young adulthood but, in a novel finding, we characterized key cognitive mechanisms explaining this, especially regarding socio-economic risk aversion. Males showed lower risk-aversion, associated with greater investments. We also found that inequality aversion was higher in females and, in a novel relation, that socio-economic deprivation was associated with more risk averse play.

Risk of recurrent hepatic encephalopathy in patients with liver cirrhosis: a German registry study

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Patients with hepatic encephalopathy (HE) show low quality of life, recurrent hospitalizations and an increased mortality. We aimed to assess the natural course of patients after a recent episode of overt HE and to identify risk factors for HE recurrence in Germany.

METHODS

Fifteen sites took part in a prospective, observational study including patients with liver cirrhosis who had been hospitalized for HE within 3 months before recruitment. Clinical data, psychometric hepatic encephalopathy score (PHES) and critical flicker frequency were assessed quarterly for 1 year. Primary endpoint was HE recurrence requiring hospitalization, all-cause-mortality was treated as a competing risk factor.

RESULTS

From January 2014 to March 2016, a total of 115 patients were recruited. Overall 14 premature deaths were documented. For 78 subjects follow-up data were available in accordance with the protocol. After a median of 118 days, more than half of the per-protocol cohort was readmitted to hospital due to HE (N = 34) or died (N = 11). The risk for hospitalization was significantly increased in patients who had been recruited by liver transplant centers (P = 0.003), had had frequent HE relapses prior to recruitment (P = <0.0001) or an abnormal PHES result of <-4 (P = 0.044). Abnormal PHES results barely missed level of significance as an independent risk factor for re-hospitalization in a multivariable competing risk model (P = 0.093).

CONCLUSION

Patients with a history of HE are at high risk for the development of recurrent overt HE demanding hospitalization. The PHES test may aid in detection, monitoring and risk stratification of recurrent HE.

Changes in the Intelligence Levels and Structure in Russia: An ANOVA Method Based on Discretization and Grouping of Factors

In the present paper, we investigate how the general intelligence quotient (IQ) and its subtests changed for students from Russian University from 1991 to 2013. This study of the effect of such factors as gender, department, and year on the IQ response is carried out using the ANOVA model. Given the unevenness of the initial sample by years and departments, and consequently, heterogeneity of variances when divided by the original natural categories, we decided to aggregate the values of explanatory variables to build an adequate model. The paper proposes and investigates an algorithm for joint discretization and grouping, which uses the procedure of partial screening of solutions. It is an intermediate option between the greedy algorithm and exhaustive search. As a goodness function (an optimality criterion), we investigate 26 intermediate options between the AIC and BIC criteria. The BIC turned out to be the most informative and the most acceptable criterion for interpretation, which penalizes the complexity of the model, due to some decrease in accuracy. The resulting partition of the explanatory variables values into categories is used to interpret the modeling results and to arrive at the final conclusions of the data analysis. As a result, it is revealed that the observed features of the IQ dynamics are caused by changes in the education system and the socio-economic status of the family that occurred in Russia during the period of restructuring the society and intensive development of information technologies.

Association of life course socioeconomic status and adult height with cognitive functioning of older adults in India and China

BACKGROUND

Cognitive functioning is an important measure of intrinsic capacity. In this study, we examine the association of life course socioeconomic status (SES) and height with cognitive functioning among older adults (50+) in India and China. The age pattern of cognitive functioning with measures of life course socioeconomic status has also been examined.

METHODS

Cross-sectional comparative analysis was conducted using the WHO's Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) data for India and China. Multilevel mixed-effect linear regression analysis was used to examine the association of life course socioeconomic status and adult height with cognitive functioning.

RESULTS

In both India and China, parental education as a measure of childhood socioeconomic status was positively associated with cognitive functioning. The association between adult socioeconomic status and cognitive functioning was positive and significant. Height was significantly and positively associated with improved cognitive functioning of older adults in India and China. Furthermore, the age-related decline in cognitive functioning score was higher among older adults whose parents had no schooling, particularly in China. The cognitive functioning score with age was much lower among less-educated older adults than those with higher levels of education in China. Wealthier older adults in India had higher cognitive functioning in middle ages, however, wealth differences narrowed with age.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study suggest a significant association of lifetime socioeconomic status and cumulative net nutrition on later-life cognitive functioning in middle-income settings.

School performance and mortality: The mediating role of educational attainment and work and family trajectories across the life course

Evidence of a strong negative correlation between adolescent academic performance and mortality points to the importance of not only cognitive, but also non-cognitive, skills in predicting survival. We integrated two bodies of research to evaluate expectations regarding the role of educational attainment and trajectories of employment and marriage experience in mediating relationships between high school class rank and longevity. In particular, we used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (n = 9,232) to fit parametric mortality models from age 55 to age 77. Multiple mediator models allowed for quantification of the degree to which the association between high school class rank and mortality is mediated by life trajectories and educational attainment. Our results show that high school class rank is a statistically significant and substantively meaningful predictor of survival beyond age 55 and that this relationship is partially, but not fully, mediated by trajectories of employment and marriage experience across the life course. Higher educational attainment also mediates a substantial part of the relationship, but to varying degrees for men and women.

Education and Cognitive Functioning Across the Life Span

Cognitive abilities are important predictors of educational and occupational performance, socioeconomic attainment, health, and longevity. Declines in cognitive abilities are linked to impairments in older adults' everyday functions, but people differ from one another in their rates of cognitive decline over the course of adulthood and old age. Hence, identifying factors that protect against compromised late-life cognition is of great societal interest. The number of years of formal education completed by individuals is positively correlated with their cognitive function throughout adulthood and predicts lower risk of dementia late in life. These observations have led to the propositions that prolonging education might (a) affect cognitive ability and (b) attenuate aging-associated declines in cognition. We evaluate these propositions by reviewing the literature on educational attainment and cognitive aging, including recent analyses of data harmonized across multiple longitudinal cohort studies and related meta-analyses. In line with the first proposition, the evidence indicates that educational attainment has positive effects on cognitive function. We also find evidence that cognitive abilities are associated with selection into longer durations of education and that there are common factors (e.g., parental socioeconomic resources) that affect both educational attainment and cognitive development. There is likely reciprocal interplay among these factors, and among cognitive abilities, during development. Education-cognitive ability associations are apparent across the entire adult life span and across the full range of education levels, including (to some degree) tertiary education. However, contrary to the second proposition, we find that associations between education and aging-associated cognitive declines are negligible and that a threshold model of dementia can account for the association between educational attainment and late-life dementia risk. We conclude that educational attainment exerts its influences on late-life cognitive function primarily by contributing to individual differences in cognitive skills that emerge in early adulthood but persist into older age. We also note that the widespread absence of educational influences on rates of cognitive decline puts constraints on theoretical notions of cognitive aging, such as the concepts of cognitive reserve and brain maintenance. Improving the conditions that shape development during the first decades of life carries great potential for improving cognitive ability in early adulthood and for reducing public-health burdens related to cognitive aging and dementia.

Coding in Primary Grades Boosts Children's Executive Functions

Several programs have been developed worldwide to improve children’s executive functions (EFs). Yet, the role played in EF development by learning activities embedded in the school curriculum has received scarce attention. With two studies, we recently tested the effects of computational thinking (CT) and coding—a new element of the primary school curriculum—on the development of children’s EFs. CT stimulates the ability to define a clear and orderly sequence of simple and well-specified steps to solve a complex problem. We conjecture that CT skills are associated to such EF processes as response inhibition and planning. In a first between-group cluster-randomized controlled trial, we tested the effects of 1-month coding activities on 76 first graders’ planning and response inhibition against those of 1-month standard STEM activities of a control group. In a second study, we tested the effects of 1-month coding activities of 17 second graders in two ways: within group (longitudinally), against 7 months of standard activities experienced by the same children (experimental group); and between groups, in comparison to the effects of standard STEM activities in a control group of 19 second graders. The results of the two studies show significant benefits of learning to code: children exposed to coding improved significantly more in planning and inhibition tasks than control children did. The longitudinal data showed that improvements in planning and inhibition skills after 1 month of coding activities (eight lessons) were equivalent to or greater than the improvement attained after 7 months of standard activities. These findings support the hypothesis that learning CT via coding can significantly boost children’s spontaneous development of EFs.

The malleability of executive function in early childhood: Effects of schooling and targeted training

Executive function (EF), its importance for scholastic achievement and the question of whether or not EF is malleable, have become a topic of intense interest. Education or schooling is often seen as effective approaches to enhance EF due to the specific school-related requirements as compared to kindergarten or pre-school. However, no study to date has investigated whether targeted training focusing on those domains might be comparable with regular schooling in improving EF and fluid intelligence (Gf). The aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the previously demonstrated schooling effects on EF by using a school-cutoff design, and to further investigate whether a theoretically motivated intervention targeting specific EF, i.e., working memory (WM) or inhibitory control (IC), could achieve comparable effects with schooling in both, WM and IC, as well as Gf. 91 6-year-old kindergarteners and first-graders with similar chronological age participated the study. We compared the performance of a first-grade schooling group with that of two kindergarten training groups as well as a business-as-usual kindergarten control group. Participants were assessed in WM, IC and Gf at baseline, immediately after the intervention (posttest), as well as 3 months after training completion (follow-up). The results showed that the schooling group indeed outperformed the kindergarten groups at baseline in several cognitive tasks. Furthermore, both the WM and IC training showed pronounced gains in the trained tasks, as well as varying degrees of improvement in non-trained outcome measures. Most importantly, both training groups achieved comparable performance with the schooling group, which was especially apparent in Gf at follow-up. Our findings provide further evidence for the malleability of EF demonstrating that both, long-term and short-term interventions can facilitate the acquisition of those important skills, and as such, our work has important implications for educational practice.

The Population Education Transition Curve: Education Gradients Across Population Exposure to New Health Risks

The salutary effect of formal education on health-risk behaviors and mortality is extensively documented: ceteris paribus, greater educational attainment leads to healthier lives and longevity. Even though the epidemiological evidence has strongly indicated formal education as a leading "social vaccine," there is intermittent reporting of counter-education gradients for health-risk behavior and associated outcomes for certain populations during specific periods. How can education have both beneficial and harmful effects on health, and under which contexts do particular effects emerge? It is useful to conceptualize the influence of education as a process sensitive to the nature, timing of entry, and uniqueness of a new pleasurable and desirable lifestyle and/or product (such as smoking) with initially unclear health risks for populations. Developed herein is a hypothesis that the education gradient comprises multiple potent pathways (material, psychological, cognitive) by which health-risk behaviors are influenced, and that there can be circumstances under which pathways act in opposite directions or are differentially suppressed and enhanced. We propose the population education transition (PET) curve as a unifying functional form to predict shifting education gradients across the onset and course of a population's exposure to new health risks and their associated consequences. Then, we estimate PET curves for cases with prior epidemiological evidence of heterogeneous education gradients with health-risk behaviors related to mass-produced cigarettes in China and the United States; saturated fats, sugar, and processed food diets in Latin America; and HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Each offers speculation on interactions between environmental factors during population exposure and education pathways to health-risk behaviors that could be responsible for the temporal dynamics of PET curves. Past epidemiological studies reporting either negative or positive education gradients may not represent contradictory findings as much as come from analyses unintentionally limited to just one part of the PET process. Last, the PET curve formulation offers richer nuances about educational pathways, macro-historical population dynamics, and the fundamental cause of disease paradigm.

Evidence of a Flynn Effect in Children's Human Figure Drawings (1902-1968)

The Flynn effect is the long-term trend for scores on tests of cognitive ability to increase across cohorts. Several samples of children's human figure drawings, published in 1902, 1926, 1963, and 1968, are examined for evidence of a Flynn effect. Results show that larger percentages of children draw more complete human figures over the course of the 20th century.

Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers

The European Union has seen an increased number of asylum seekers and economic migrants over the past few years. There will be request to assess some of these individuals to see if they have an intellectual disability (ID). If this is to be done using the current internationally recognized definitions of ID, we will need to be confident that the IQ tests we have available are able to accurately measure the IQs of people from developing countries. The literature showing substantial differences in the mean measured IQs of different countries is considered. It is found that, although there are numerous problems with these studies, the overall conclusion that there are substantial differences in mean measured IQ is sound. However, what is not clear is whether there are large differences in true intellectual ability between different countries, how predictive IQ scores are of an individual from a developing country ability to cope, and whether or not an individual's IQ would increase if they go from a developing country to a developed one. Because of these uncertainties, it is suggested that a diagnosis of ID should not be dependent on an IQ cut-off point when assessing people from developing countries.

Secondary education as a predictor of aptitude: Implications for selection in the automotive sector

Orientation: Details of applicants’ secondary education (incorporating subject choice) could be a useful screening tool when processing large applicant pools. Here, the relationships between secondary education (incorporating subject choice) and the reasoning and visual perceptual speed components of the Differential Aptitude Test are explored.Research purpose: The objective of the study was to determine whether type of secondary education (incorporating subject choice) could be used as a substitute for reasoning (verbal and non-verbal) and/or visual perceptual speed aptitudes in the selection of operators for an automotive plant in South Africa.Motivation for the study: The motivation for this study arose from the evident gap in academic literature as well as the selection needs of the automotive industry.Research design, approach and method: This research adopted a quantitative approach. It involved a non-probability convenience quota sample of 2463 work-seeking applicants for an automotive operator position in South Africa. Participants completed a biographical questionnaire and three subtests from the Differential Aptitude Test battery. The Chi-square test was used to determine the relationship between type of secondary education (incorporating subject choice) and selected cognitive aptitudes.Main findings: The study’s findings revealed statistically and practically significant relationships between type of secondary education (incorporating subject choice), verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and visual perceptual speed. Broad performance levels in the three aptitude subtests employed in this study were significantly associated with the type of matriculation certificate held by applicants. The findings specifically indicated that the secondary education types that included the subjects mathematics or both mathematics and science were associated with higher levels of performance in the three aptitudes. This had consequences for these applicants’ success in the screening process which could lead to enhanced chances of employability.Practical and managerial implications: Applicants’ type of secondary education (incorporating subject choice) could be regarded as a key criterion in human resource selection and be instructive in the screening process. This could reduce the candidate pool prior to more costly psychometric assessments.Contribution or value-add: The findings are specifically relevant to the South African automotive industry in terms of their human resource selection practices. The insights gained from the findings may also be used as a guide to human resource practitioners in the selection of similar level employees in other working contexts. The study makes a case for a multiple-hurdle approach to selection.