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The Flynn Effect in IQ Testing: Why It's Important to African Americans
IMAGINE THAT SOMEBODY -- perhaps a teacher or a school psychologist -- has decided to measure your child's "intelligence." He or she will do so by administering a standardized intelligence test, one that produces an "IQ" score. The tests are standardized in such a way that the average child will obtain an IQ score of 100. Let's suppose that your child's IQ tums out to be 85. You are told that about 84 percent of American children have IQ scores higher than 85. Your child appears to be considerably less smart than the average child. If he or she has not been making satisfactory progress in school, you'll probably be told that, granted the low IQ score, nothing more could realistically be expected.
Would you like to raise your child's IQ score? There is a quick and easy way to do so, and I will let you in on the secret. The secret involves a well-documented and powerful phenomenon known to psychologists as the "Flynn Effect." The tester, assuming that he or she is professionally competent, has employed a recently standardized IQ test. But now insist that your child be tested with an earlier version of the same IQ test, one standardized some 40 or 50 years ago. Your child's IQ, as measured by this earlier test, will now leap to just about 100. The Flynn Effect, named after the New Zealand political scientist who first called attention to it, refers to the fact that throughout the world average IQ test scores have been increasing steadily over time. In the United States, large samples of children given both recent and earlier versions of such widely used tests as the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler have invariably gotten higher scores on the earlier versions than on the later. Flynn has shown that over a 46-year period American IQ scores have been increasing at a rate of about one third of an IQ point a year. That increase is hidden by the procedure of restandardizing the most recent version of a test so that...