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Intelligence quotient

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Intelligence quotient
One kind of IQ test item, modelled after items in the Raven's Progressive Matrices test
ICD-10-PCS	Z01.8
ICD-9-CM	94.01

An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardised tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests at University of Breslau he advocated in a 1912 book.

Historically, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. For modern IQ tests, the raw score is transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. This results in approximately two-thirds of the population scoring between IQ 85 and IQ 115 and about 2 percent each above 130 and below 70.

Scores from intelligence tests are estimates of intelligence. Unlike, for example, distance and mass, a concrete measure of intelligence cannot be achieved given the abstract nature of the concept of "intelligence". IQ scores have been shown to be associated with such factors as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity and mortality, parental social status, and perinatal environment. While the heritability of IQ has been investigated for nearly a century, there is still debate about the significance of heritability estimates and the mechanisms of inheritance.

IQ scores are used for educational placement, assessment of intellectual disability, and evaluating job applicants. In research contexts, they have been studied as predictors of job performance and income. They are also used to study distributions of psychometric intelligence in populations and the correlations between it and other variables. Raw scores on IQ tests for many populations have been rising at an average rate that scales to three IQ points per decade since the early 20th century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect. Investigation of different patterns of increases in subtest scores can also inform current research on human intelligence.

History

Precursors to IQ testing

Historically, even before IQ tests were devised, there were attempts to classify people into intelligence categories by observing their behavior in daily life. Those other forms of behavioral observation are still important for validating classifications based primarily on IQ test scores. Both intelligence classification by observation of behavior outside the testing room and classification by IQ testing depend on the definition of "intelligence" used in a particular case and on the reliability and error of estimation in the classification procedure.

The English statistician Francis Galton (1822–1911) made the first attempt at creating a standardized test for rating a person's intelligence. A pioneer of psychometrics and the application of statistical methods to the study of human diversity and the study of inheritance of human traits, he believed that intelligence was largely a product of heredity (by which he did not mean genes, although he did develop several pre-Mendelian theories of particulate inheritance). He hypothesized that there should exist a correlation between intelligence and other observable traits such as reflexes, muscle grip, and head size. He set up the first mental testing center in the world in 1882 and he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development" in 1883, in which he set out his theories. After gathering data on a variety of physical variables, he was unable to show any such correlation, and he eventually abandoned this research.

French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with Victor Henri and Théodore Simon, had more success in 1905, when they published the Binet–Simon test, which focused on verbal abilities. It was intended to identify "mental retardation" in school children, but in specific contradistinction to claims made by psychiatrists that these children were "sick" (not "slow") and should therefore be removed from school and cared for in asylums. The score on the Binet–Simon scale would reveal the child's mental age. For example, a six-year-old child who passed all the tasks usually passed by six-year-olds—but nothing beyond—would have a mental age that matched his chronological age, 6.0. (Fancher, 1985). Binet thought that intelligence was multifaceted, but came under the control of practical judgment.

In Binet's view, there were limitations with the scale and he stressed what he saw as the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures (White, 2000). American psychologist Henry H. Goddard published a translation of it in 1910. American psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford University revised the Binet–Simon scale, which resulted in the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales (1916). It became the most popular test in the United States for decades.

General factor (g)

The many different kinds of IQ tests include a wide variety of item content. Some test items are visual, while many are verbal. Test items vary from being based on abstract-reasoning problems to concentrating on arithmetic, vocabulary, or general knowledge.

The British psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904 made the first formal factor analysis of correlations between the tests. He observed that children's school grades across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated, and reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general mental ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tests. He suggested that all mental performance could be conceptualized in terms of a single general ability factor and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors. Spearman named it g for "general factor" and labeled the specific factors or abilities for specific tasks s. In any collection of test items that make up an IQ test, the score that best measures g is the composite score that has the highest correlations with all the item scores. Typically, the "g-loaded" composite score of an IQ test battery appears to involve a common strength in abstract reasoning across the test's item content.

United States military selection in World War I

During World War I, the Army needed a way to evaluate and assign recruits to appropriate tasks. This led to the development of several mental tests by Robert Yerkes, who worked with major hereditarians of American psychometrics—including Terman, Goddard—to write the test. The testing generated controversy and much public debate in the United States. Nonverbal or "performance" tests were developed for those who could not speak English or were suspected of malingering. Based on Goddard's translation of the Binet–Simon test, the tests had an impact in screening men for officer training:

...the tests did have a strong impact in some areas, particularly in screening men for officer training. At the start of the war, the army and national guard maintained nine thousand officers. By the end, two hundred thousand officers presided, and two- thirds of them had started their careers in training camps where the tests were applied. In some camps, no man scoring below C could be considered for officer training.

In total 1.75 million men were tested, making the results the first mass-produced written tests of intelligence, though considered dubious and non-usable, for reasons including high variability of test implementation throughout different camps and questions testing for familiarity with American culture rather than intelligence. After the war, positive publicity promoted by army psychologists helped to make psychology a respected field. Subsequently, there was an increase in jobs and funding in psychology in the United States. Group intelligence tests were developed and became widely used in schools and industry.

The results of these tests, which at the time reaffirmed contemporary racism and nationalism, are considered controversial and dubious, having rested on certain contested assumptions: that intelligence was heritable, innate, and could be relegated to a single number, the tests were enacted systematically, and test questions actually tested for innate intelligence rather than subsuming environmental factors. The tests also allowed for the bolstering of jingoist narratives in the context of increased immigration, which may have influenced the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.

L.L. Thurstone argued for a model of intelligence that included seven unrelated factors (verbal comprehension, word fluency, number facility, spatial visualization, associative memory, perceptual speed, reasoning, and induction). While not widely used, Thurstone's model influenced later theories.

David Wechsler produced the first version of his test in 1939. It gradually became more popular and overtook the Stanford–Binet in the 1960s. It has been revised several times, as is common for IQ tests, to incorporate new research. One explanation is that psychologists and educators wanted more information than the single score from the Binet. Wechsler's ten or more subtests provided this. Another is that the Stanford–Binet test reflected mostly verbal abilities, while the Wechsler test also reflected nonverbal abilities. The Stanford–Binet has also been revised several times and is now similar to the Wechsler in several aspects, but the Wechsler continues to be the most popular test in the United States.

IQ testing and the eugenics movement in the United States

Eugenics, a set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States during the Progressive Era, from the late 19th century until US involvement in World War II.

The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of the British Scientist Sir Francis Galton. In 1883, Galton first used the word eugenics to describe the biological improvement of human genes and the concept of being "well-born". He believed that differences in a person's ability were acquired primarily through genetics and that eugenics could be implemented through selective breeding in order for the human race to improve in its overall quality, therefore allowing for humans to direct their own evolution.

Henry H. Goddard was a eugenicist. In 1908, he published his own version, The Binet and Simon Test of Intellectual Capacity, and cordially promoted the test. He quickly extended the use of the scale to the public schools (1913), to immigration (Ellis Island, 1914) and to a court of law (1914).

Unlike Galton, who promoted eugenics through selective breeding for positive traits, Goddard went with the US eugenics movement to eliminate "undesirable" traits. Goddard used the term "feeble-minded" to refer to people who did not perform well on the test. He argued that "feeble-mindedness" was caused by heredity, and thus feeble-minded people should be prevented from giving birth, either by institutional isolation or sterilization surgeries. At first, sterilization targeted the disabled, but was later extended to poor people. Goddard's intelligence test was endorsed by the eugenicists to push for laws for forced sterilization. Different states adopted the sterilization laws at different paces. These laws, whose constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in their 1927 ruling Buck v. Bell, forced over 60,000 people to go through sterilization in the United States.

California's sterilization program was so effective that the Nazis turned to the government for advice on how to prevent the birth of the "unfit". While the US eugenics movement lost much of its momentum in the 1940s in view of the horrors of Nazi Germany, advocates of eugenics (including Nazi geneticist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer) continued to work and promote their ideas in the United States. In later decades, some eugenic principles have made a resurgence as a voluntary means of selective reproduction, with some calling them "new eugenics". As it becomes possible to test for and correlate genes with IQ (and its proxies), ethicists and embryonic genetic testing companies are attempting to understand the ways in which the technology can be ethically deployed.

Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory

Raymond Cattell (1941) proposed two types of cognitive abilities in a revision of Spearman's concept of general intelligence. Fluid intelligence (Gf) was hypothesized as the ability to solve novel problems by using reasoning, and crystallized intelligence (Gc) was hypothesized as a knowledge-based ability that was very dependent on education and experience. In addition, fluid intelligence was hypothesized to decline with age, while crystallized intelligence was largely resistant to the effects of aging. The theory was almost forgotten, but was revived by his student John L. Horn (1966) who later argued Gf and Gc were only two among several factors, and who eventually identified nine or ten broad abilities. The theory continued to be called Gf-Gc theory.

John B. Carroll (1993), after a comprehensive reanalysis of earlier data, proposed the three stratum theory, which is a hierarchical model with three levels. The bottom stratum consists of narrow abilities that are highly specialized (e.g., induction, spelling ability). The second stratum consists of broad abilities. Carroll identified eight second-stratum abilities. Carroll accepted Spearman's concept of general intelligence, for the most part, as a representation of the uppermost, third stratum.

In 1999, a merging of the Gf-Gc theory of Cattell and Horn with Carroll's Three-Stratum theory has led to the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory (CHC Theory), with g as the top of the hierarchy, ten broad abilities below, and further subdivided into seventy narrow abilities on the third stratum. CHC Theory has greatly influenced many of the current broad IQ tests.

Modern tests do not necessarily measure all of these broad abilities. For example, quantitative knowledge and reading & writing ability may be seen as measures of school achievement and not IQ. Decision speed may be difficult to measure without special equipment. g was earlier often subdivided into only Gf and Gc, which were thought to correspond to the nonverbal or performance subtests and verbal subtests in earlier versions of the popular Wechsler IQ test. More recent research has shown the situation to be more complex. Modern comprehensive IQ tests do not stop at reporting a single IQ score. Although they still give an overall score, they now also give scores for many of these more restricted abilities, identifying particular strengths and weaknesses of an individual.

Other theories

An alternative to standard IQ tests, meant to test the proximal development of children, originated in the writings of psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) during his last two years of his life. According to Vygotsky, the maximum level of complexity and difficulty of problems that a child is capable to solve under some guidance indicates their level of potential development. The difference between this level of potential and the lower level of unassisted performance indicates the child's zone of proximal development. Combination of the two indexes—the level of actual and the zone of the proximal development—according to Vygotsky, provides a significantly more informative indicator of psychological development than the assessment of the level of actual development alone. His ideas on the zone of development were later developed in a number of psychological and educational theories and practices, most notably under the banner of dynamic assessment, which seeks to measure developmental potential (for instance, in the work of Reuven Feuerstein and his associates, who has criticized standard IQ testing for its putative assumption or acceptance of "fixed and immutable" characteristics of intelligence or cognitive functioning). Dynamic assessment has been further elaborated in the work of Ann Brown, and John D. Bransford and in theories of multiple intelligences authored by Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg.

J.P. Guilford's Structure of Intellect (1967) model of intelligence used three dimensions, which, when combined, yielded a total of 120 types of intelligence. It was popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, but faded owing to both practical problems and theoretical criticisms.

Alexander Luria's earlier work on neuropsychological processes led to the PASS theory (1997). It argued that only looking at one general factor was inadequate for researchers and clinicians who worked with learning disabilities, attention disorders, intellectual disability, and interventions for such disabilities. The PASS model covers four kinds of processes (planning process, attention/arousal process, simultaneous processing, and successive processing). The planning processes involve decision making, problem solving, and performing activities and require goal setting and self-monitoring.

The attention/arousal process involves selectively attending to a particular stimulus, ignoring distractions, and maintaining vigilance. Simultaneous processing involves the integration of stimuli into a group and requires the observation of relationships. Successive processing involves the integration of stimuli into serial order. The planning and attention/arousal components comes from structures located in the frontal lobe, and the simultaneous and successive processes come from structures located in the posterior region of the cortex. It has influenced some recent IQ tests, and been seen as a complement to the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory described above.

Current tests

There are a variety of individually administered IQ tests in use in the English-speaking world.The most commonly used individual IQ test series is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) for adults and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) for school-age test-takers. Other commonly used individual IQ tests (some of which do not label their standard scores as "IQ" scores) include the current versions of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, the Cognitive Assessment System, and the Differential Ability Scales.

There are various other IQ tests, including:

IQ scales are ordinally scaled. The raw score of the norming sample is usually (rank order) transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. While one standard deviation is 15 points, and two SDs are 30 points, and so on, this does not imply that mental ability is linearly related to IQ, such that IQ 50 would mean half the cognitive ability of IQ 100. In particular, IQ points are not percentage points.

Reliability and validity

IQ scores can differ to some degree for the same person on different IQ tests, so a person does not always belong to the same IQ score range each time the person is tested. (IQ score table data and pupil pseudonyms adapted from description of KABC-II norming study cited in Kaufman (2009).)
Pupil	KABC-II	WISC-III	WJ-III
A	90	95	111
B	125	110	105
C	100	93	101
D	116	127	118
E	93	105	93
F	106	105	105
G	95	100	90
H	112	113	103
I	104	96	97
J	101	99	86
K	81	78	75
L	116	124	102

Reliability

Psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability. Reliability represents the measurement consistency of a test. A reliable test produces similar scores upon repetition. On aggregate, IQ tests exhibit high reliability, although test-takers may have varying scores when taking the same test on differing occasions, and may have varying scores when taking different IQ tests at the same age. Like all statistical quantities, any particular estimate of IQ has an associated standard error that measures uncertainty about the estimate. For modern tests, the confidence interval can be approximately 10 points and reported standard error of measurement can be as low as about three points. Reported standard error may be an underestimate, as it does not account for all sources of error.

Outside influences such as low motivation or high anxiety can occasionally lower a person's IQ test score. For individuals with very low scores, the 95% confidence interval may be greater than 40 points, potentially complicating the accuracy of diagnoses of intellectual disability. By the same token, high IQ scores are also significantly less reliable than those near to the population median. Reports of IQ scores much higher than 160 are considered dubious.

Validity as a measure of intelligence

Reliability and validity are very different concepts. While reliability reflects reproducibility, validity refers to whether the test measures what it purports to measure. While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated. According to Weiten, "IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable."

Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981, expanded edition 1996), evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould compared IQ testing with the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence via craniometry, arguing that both are based on the fallacy of reification, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities". Gould's argument sparked a great deal of debate, and the book is listed as one of Discover Magazine's "25 Greatest Science Books of All Time".

Along these same lines, critics such as Keith Stanovich do not dispute the capacity of IQ test scores to predict some kinds of achievement, but argue that basing a concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone neglects other important aspects of mental ability. Robert Sternberg, another significant critic of IQ as the main measure of human cognitive abilities, argued that reducing the concept of intelligence to the measure of g does not fully account for the different skills and knowledge types that produce success in human society.

Despite these objections, clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes.

Test bias or differential item functioning

Differential item functioning (DIF), sometimes referred to as measurement bias, is a phenomenon when participants from different groups (e.g. gender, race, disability) with the same latent abilities give different answers to specific questions on the same IQ test. DIF analysis measures such specific items on a test alongside measuring participants' latent abilities on other similar questions. A consistent different group response to a specific question among similar types of questions can indicate an effect of DIF. It does not count as differential item functioning if both groups have an equally valid chance of giving different responses to the same questions. Such bias can be a result of culture, educational level and other factors that are independent of group traits. DIF is only considered if test-takers from different groups with the same underlying latent ability level have a different chance of giving specific responses. Such questions are usually removed in order to make the test equally fair for both groups. Common techniques for analyzing DIF are item response theory (IRT) based methods, Mantel-Haenszel, and logistic regression.

A 2005 study found that "differential validity in prediction suggests that the WAIS-R test may contain cultural influences that reduce the validity of the WAIS-R as a measure of cognitive ability for Mexican American students," indicating a weaker positive correlation relative to sampled white students. Other recent studies have questioned the culture-fairness of IQ tests when used in South Africa. Standard intelligence tests, such as the Stanford–Binet, are often inappropriate for autistic children; the alternative of using developmental or adaptive skills measures are relatively poor measures of intelligence in autistic children, and may have resulted in incorrect claims that a majority of autistic children are of low intelligence.

Flynn effect

Since the early 20th century, raw scores on IQ tests have increased in most parts of the world. When a new version of an IQ test is normed, the standard scoring is set so performance at the population median results in a score of IQ 100. The phenomenon of rising raw score performance means if test-takers are scored by a constant standard scoring rule, IQ test scores have been rising at an average rate of around three IQ points per decade. This phenomenon was named the Flynn effect in the book The Bell Curve after James R. Flynn, the author who did the most to bring this phenomenon to the attention of psychologists.

Researchers have been exploring the issue of whether the Flynn effect is equally strong on performance of all kinds of IQ test items, whether the effect may have ended in some developed nations, whether there are social subgroup differences in the effect, and what possible causes of the effect might be. A 2011 textbook, IQ and Human Intelligence, by N. J. Mackintosh, noted the Flynn effect demolishes the fears that IQ would be decreased. He also asks whether it represents a real increase in intelligence beyond IQ scores. A 2011 psychology textbook, lead authored by Harvard Psychologist Professor Daniel Schacter, noted that humans' inherited intelligence could be going down while acquired intelligence goes up.

Research has suggested that the Flynn effect has slowed or reversed course in some Western countries beginning in the late 20th century. The phenomenon has been termed the negative Flynn effect. A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be environmental rather than genetic.

Age

IQ can change to some degree over the course of childhood. In one longitudinal study, the mean IQ scores of tests at ages 17 and 18 were correlated at r=0.86 with the mean scores of tests at ages five, six, and seven and at r=0.96 with the mean scores of tests at ages 11, 12, and 13.

For decades, practitioners' handbooks and textbooks on IQ testing have reported IQ declines with age after the beginning of adulthood. However, later researchers pointed out this phenomenon is related to the Flynn effect and is in part a cohort effect rather than a true aging effect. A variety of studies of IQ and aging have been conducted since the norming of the first Wechsler Intelligence Scale drew attention to IQ differences in different age groups of adults. The current consensus is that fluid intelligence generally declines with age after early adulthood, while crystallized intelligence remains intact. Both cohort effects (the birth year of the test-takers) and practice effects (test-takers taking the same form of IQ test more than once) must be controlled to gain accurate data. It is unclear whether any lifestyle intervention can preserve fluid intelligence into older ages.

The exact peak age of fluid intelligence or crystallized intelligence remains elusive. Cross-sectional studies usually show that especially fluid intelligence peaks at a relatively young age (often in the early adulthood) while longitudinal data mostly show that intelligence is stable until mid-adulthood or later. Subsequently, intelligence seems to decline slowly.

Genetics and environment

Environmental and genetic factors play a role in determining IQ. Their relative importance has been the subject of much research and debate.

Heritability

The general figure for the heritability of IQ, according to an American Psychological Association report, is 0.45 for children, and rises to around 0.75 for late adolescents and adults. Heritability measures for g factor in infancy are as low as 0.2, around 0.4 in middle childhood, and as high as 0.9 in adulthood. One proposed explanation is that people with different genes tend to reinforce the effects of those genes, for example by seeking out different environments.

Shared family environment

Family members have aspects of environments in common (for example, characteristics of the home). This shared family environment accounts for 0.25–0.35 of the variation in IQ in childhood. By late adolescence, it is quite low (zero in some studies). The effect for several other psychological traits is similar. These studies have not looked at the effects of extreme environments, such as in abusive families.

Non-shared family environment and environment outside the family

Although parents treat their children differently, such differential treatment explains only a small amount of nonshared environmental influence. One suggestion is that children react differently to the same environment because of different genes. More likely influences may be the impact of peers and other experiences outside the family.

Individual genes

A very large proportion of the over 17,000 human genes are thought to have an effect on the development and functionality of the brain. While a number of individual genes have been reported to be associated with IQ, none have a strong effect. Deary and colleagues (2009) reported that no finding of a strong single gene effect on IQ has been replicated. Recent findings of gene associations with normally varying intellectual differences in adults and children continue to show weak effects for any one gene.

Gene-environment interaction

David Rowe reported an interaction of genetic effects with socioeconomic status, such that the heritability was high in high-SES families, but much lower in low-SES families. In the US, this has been replicated in infants, children, adolescents, and adults. Outside the US, studies show no link between heritability and SES. Some effects may even reverse sign outside the US.

Dickens and Flynn (2001) have argued that genes for high IQ initiate an environment-shaping feedback cycle, with genetic effects causing bright children to seek out more stimulating environments that then further increase their IQ. In Dickens' model, environment effects are modeled as decaying over time. In this model, the Flynn effect can be explained by an increase in environmental stimulation independent of it being sought out by individuals. The authors suggest that programs aiming to increase IQ would be most likely to produce long-term IQ gains if they enduringly raised children's drive to seek out cognitively demanding experiences.

Interventions

In general, educational interventions, as those described below, have shown short-term effects on IQ, but long-term follow-up is often missing. For example, in the US, very large intervention programs such as the Head Start Program have not produced lasting gains in IQ scores. Even when students improve their scores on standardized tests, they do not always improve their cognitive abilities, such as memory, attention and speed. More intensive, but much smaller projects, such as the Abecedarian Project, have reported lasting effects, often on socioeconomic status variables, rather than IQ.

Recent studies have shown that training in using one's working memory may increase IQ. A study on young adults published in April 2008 by a team from the Universities of Michigan and Bern supports the possibility of the transfer of fluid intelligence from specifically designed working memory training. Further research will be needed to determine nature, extent and duration of the proposed transfer. Among other questions, it remains to be seen whether the results extend to other kinds of fluid intelligence tests than the matrix test used in the study, and if so, whether, after training, fluid intelligence measures retain their correlation with educational and occupational achievement or if the value of fluid intelligence for predicting performance on other tasks changes. It is also unclear whether the training is durable for extended periods of time.

Music

Musical training in childhood correlates with higher than average IQ. However, a study of 10,500 twins found no effects on IQ, suggesting that the correlation was caused by genetic confounders. A meta-analysis concluded that "Music training does not reliably enhance children and young adolescents' cognitive or academic skills, and that previous positive findings were probably due to confounding variables."

It is popularly thought that listening to classical music raises IQ. However, multiple attempted replications (e.g.) have shown that this is at best a short-term effect (lasting no longer than 10 to 15 minutes), and is not related to IQ-increase.

Brain anatomy

Several neurophysiological factors have been correlated with intelligence in humans, including the ratio of brain weight to body weight and the size, shape, and activity level of different parts of the brain. Specific features that may affect IQ include the size and shape of the frontal lobes, the amount of blood and chemical activity in the frontal lobes, the total amount of gray matter in the brain, the overall thickness of the cortex, and the glucose metabolic rate.

Health

Health is important in understanding differences in IQ test scores and other measures of cognitive ability. Several factors can lead to significant cognitive impairment, particularly if they occur during pregnancy and childhood when the brain is growing and the blood–brain barrier is less effective. Such impairment may sometimes be permanent, or sometimes be partially or wholly compensated for by later growth.

Since about 2010, researchers such as Eppig, Hassel, and MacKenzie have found a very close and consistent link between IQ scores and infectious diseases, especially in the infant and preschool populations and the mothers of these children. They have postulated that fighting infectious diseases strains the child's metabolism and prevents full brain development. Hassel postulated that it is by far the most important factor in determining population IQ. However, they also found that subsequent factors such as good nutrition and regular quality schooling can offset early negative effects to some extent.

Developed nations have implemented several health policies regarding nutrients and toxins known to influence cognitive function. These include laws requiring fortification of certain food products and laws establishing safe levels of pollutants (e.g. lead, mercury, and organochlorides). Improvements in nutrition, and in public policy in general, have been implicated in worldwide IQ increases.

Cognitive epidemiology is a field of research that examines the associations between intelligence test scores and health. Researchers in the field argue that intelligence measured at an early age is an important predictor of later health and mortality differences.

Social correlations

School performance

The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns states that wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. The correlation between IQ scores and grades is about .50. This means that the explained variance is 25%. Achieving good grades depends on many factors other than IQ, such as "persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study" (p. 81).

It has been found that the correlation of IQ scores with school performance depends on the IQ measurement used. For undergraduate students, the Verbal IQ as measured by WAIS-R has been found to correlate significantly (0.53) with the grade point average (GPA) of the last 60 hours (credits). In contrast, Performance IQ correlation with the same GPA was only 0.22 in the same study.

Some measures of educational aptitude correlate highly with IQ tests – for instance, Frey & Detterman (2004) reported a correlation of 0.82 between g (general intelligence factor) and SAT scores; another research found a correlation of 0.81 between g and GCSE scores, with the explained variance ranging "from 58.6% in Mathematics and 48% in English to 18.1% in Art and Design".

Job performance

According to Schmidt and Hunter, "for hiring employees without previous experience in the job the most valid predictor of future performance is general mental ability." The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. The correlations were higher when the unreliability of measurement methods was controlled for. While IQ is more strongly correlated with reasoning and less so with motor function, IQ-test scores predict performance ratings in all occupations.

That said, for highly qualified activities (research, management) low IQ scores are more likely to be a barrier to adequate performance, whereas for minimally-skilled activities, athletic strength (manual strength, speed, stamina, and coordination) is more likely to influence performance. The prevailing view among academics is that it is largely through the quicker acquisition of job-relevant knowledge that higher IQ mediates job performance. This view has been challenged by Byington & Felps (2010), who argued that "the current applications of IQ-reflective tests allow individuals with high IQ scores to receive greater access to developmental resources, enabling them to acquire additional capabilities over time, and ultimately perform their jobs better."

Newer studies find that the effects of IQ on job performance have been greatly overestimated. The current estimates of the correlation between job performance and IQ are about 0.23 correcting for unreliability and range restriction.

In establishing a causal direction to the link between IQ and work performance, longitudinal studies by Watkins and others suggest that IQ exerts a causal influence on future academic achievement, whereas academic achievement does not substantially influence future IQ scores. Treena Eileen Rohde and Lee Anne Thompson write that general cognitive ability, but not specific ability scores, predict academic achievement, with the exception that processing speed and spatial ability predict performance on the SAT math beyond the effect of general cognitive ability.

However, large-scale longitudinal studies indicate an increase in IQ translates into an increase in performance at all levels of IQ: i.e. ability and job performance are monotonically linked at all IQ levels.

Income

It has been suggested that "in economic terms it appears that the IQ score measures something with decreasing marginal value" and it "is important to have enough of it, but having lots and lots does not buy you that much".

The link from IQ to wealth is much less strong than that from IQ to job performance. Some studies indicate that IQ is unrelated to net worth. The American Psychological Association's 1995 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that IQ scores accounted for about a quarter of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance. Statistical controls for parental SES eliminate about a quarter of this predictive power. Psychometric intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes. Charles Murray (1998) showed a more substantial effect of IQ on income independent of family background. In a meta-analysis, Strenze (2006) reviewed much of the literature and estimated the correlation between IQ and income to be about 0.23.

Some studies assert that IQ only accounts for (explains) a sixth of the variation in income because many studies are based on young adults, many of whom have not yet reached their peak earning capacity, or even their education. On pg 568 of The g Factor, Arthur Jensen says that although the correlation between IQ and income averages a moderate 0.4 (one-sixth or 16% of the variance), the relationship increases with age, and peaks at middle age when people have reached their maximum career potential. In the book, A Question of Intelligence, Daniel Seligman cites an IQ income correlation of 0.5 (25% of the variance).

A 2002 study further examined the impact of non-IQ factors on income and concluded that an individual's location, inherited wealth, race, and schooling are more important as factors in determining income than IQ.

Crime

The American Psychological Association's 1995 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that the correlation between IQ and crime was −0.2. This association is generally regarded as small and prone to disappearance or a substantial reduction after controlling for the proper covariates, being much smaller than typical sociological correlates. It was −0.19 between IQ scores and the number of juvenile offenses in a large Danish sample; with social class controlled for, the correlation dropped to −0.17. A correlation of 0.20 means that the explained variance accounts for 4% of the total variance. The causal links between psychometric ability and social outcomes may be indirect. Children with poor scholastic performance may feel alienated. Consequently, they may be more likely to engage in delinquent behavior, compared to other children who do well.

In his book The g Factor (1998), Arthur Jensen cited data which showed that, regardless of race, people with IQs between 70 and 90 have higher crime rates than people with IQs below or above this range, with the peak range being between 80 and 90.

The 2009 Handbook of Crime Correlates stated that reviews have found that around eight IQ points, or 0.5 SD, separate criminals from the general population, especially for persistent serious offenders. It has been suggested that this simply reflects that "only dumb ones get caught" but there is similarly a negative relation between IQ and self-reported offending. That children with conduct disorder have lower IQ than their peers "strongly argues" for the theory.

A study of the relationship between US county-level IQ and US county-level crime rates found that higher average IQs were very weakly associated with lower levels of property crime, burglary, larceny rate, motor vehicle theft, violent crime, robbery, and aggravated assault. These results were "not confounded by a measure of concentrated disadvantage that captures the effects of race, poverty, and other social disadvantages of the county." However, this study is limited in that it extrapolated Add Health estimates to the respondent's counties, and as the dataset was not designed to be representative on the state or county level, it may not be generalizable.

It has also been shown that the effect of IQ is heavily dependent on socioeconomic status and that it cannot be easily controlled away, with many methodological considerations being at play. Indeed, there is evidence that the small relationship is mediated by well-being, substance abuse, and other confounding factors that prohibit simple causal interpretation. A recent meta-analysis has shown that the relationship is only observed in higher risk populations such as those in poverty without direct effect, but without any causal interpretation. A nationally representative longitudinal study has shown that this relationship is entirely mediated by school performance.

Health and mortality

Multiple studies conducted in Scotland have found that higher IQs in early life are associated with lower mortality and morbidity rates later in life.

Other accomplishments

Average adult combined IQs associated with real-life accomplishments by various tests:
Accomplishment	IQ	Test/study	Year
MDs, JDs, and PhDs	125	WAIS-R	1987
College graduates	112	KAIT	2000
	112	K-BIT	1992
	115	WAIS-R
1–3 years of college	104	KAIT
	104	K-BIT
	105–110	WAIS-R
Clerical and sales workers	100–105
High school graduates, skilled workers (e.g., electricians, cabinetmakers)	100	KAIT
	100	WAIS-R
	97	K-BIT
1–3 years of high school (completed 9–11 years of school)	94	KAIT
	90	K-BIT
	95	WAIS-R
Semi-skilled workers (e.g. truck drivers, factory workers)	90–95
Elementary school graduates (completed eighth grade)	90
Elementary school dropouts (completed 0–7 years of school)	80–85
Have 50/50 chance of reaching high school	75

Average IQ of various occupational groups:
Accomplishment	IQ	Test/study	Year
Professional and technical	112
Managers and administrators	104
Clerical workers, sales workers, skilled workers, craftsmen, and foremen	101
Semi-skilled workers (operatives, service workers, including private household)	92
Unskilled workers	87

Type of work that can be accomplished:
Accomplishment	IQ	Test/study	Year
Adults can harvest vegetables, repair furniture	60
Adults can do domestic work	50

There is considerable variation within and overlap among these categories. People with high IQs are found at all levels of education and occupational categories. The biggest difference occurs for low IQs with only an occasional college graduate or professional scoring below 90.

Group differences

Among the most controversial issues related to the study of intelligence is the observation that IQ scores vary on average between ethnic and racial groups, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. While there is little scholarly debate about the continued existence of some of these differences, the current scientific consensus is that they stem from environmental rather than genetic causes. The existence of differences in IQ between the sexes has been debated, and largely depends on which tests are performed.

Race

While the concept of "race" is a social construct, discussions of a purported relationship between race and intelligence, as well as claims of genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines, have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced. Despite the tremendous amount of research done on the topic, no scientific evidence has emerged that the average IQ scores of different population groups can be attributed to genetic differences between those groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap.

A 1996 task force investigation on intelligence sponsored by the American Psychological Association concluded that there were significant variations in IQ across races. However, a systematic analysis by William Dickens and James Flynn (2006) showed the gap between black and white Americans to have closed dramatically during the period between 1972 and 2002, suggesting that, in their words, the "constancy of the Black–White IQ gap is a myth".

The problem of determining the causes underlying racial variation has been discussed at length as a classic question of "nature versus nurture", for instance by Alan S. Kaufman and Nathan Brody. Researchers such as statistician Bernie Devlin have argued that there are insufficient data to conclude that the black–white gap is due to genetic influences. Dickens and Flynn argued more positively that their results refute the possibility of a genetic origin, concluding that "the environment has been responsible" for observed differences. A review article published in 2012 by leading scholars on human intelligence reached a similar conclusion, after reviewing the prior research literature, that group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. More recently, geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell has argued, on the basis of basic principles of population genetics, that "systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations" are "inherently and deeply implausible".

The effects of stereotype threat have been proposed as an explanation for differences in IQ test performance between racial groups, as have issues related to cultural difference and access to education.

Sex

With the advent of the concept of g or general intelligence, many researchers have found that there are no significant sex differences in general intelligence, though ability in particular types of intelligence does vary. Thus, while some test batteries show slightly greater intelligence in males, others show greater intelligence in females. In particular, studies have shown female subjects performing better on tasks related to verbal ability, and males performing better on tasks related to rotation of objects in space, often categorized as spatial ability. These differences remain, as Hunt (2011) observes, "even though men and women are essentially equal in general intelligence".

Some research indicates that male advantages on some cognitive tests are minimized when controlling for socioeconomic factors. Other research has concluded that there is slightly larger variability in male scores in certain areas compared to female scores, which results in slightly more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution.

The existence of differences between male and female performance on math-related tests is contested, and a meta-analysis focusing on average gender differences in math performance found nearly identical performance for boys and girls. Currently, most IQ tests, including popular batteries such as the WAIS and the WISC-R, are constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males.

Public policy

In the United States, certain public policies and laws regarding military service, education, public benefits, capital punishment, and employment incorporate an individual's IQ into their decisions. However, in the case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. in 1971, for the purpose of minimizing employment practices that disparately impacted racial minorities, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the use of IQ tests in employment, except when linked to job performance via a job analysis. Internationally, certain public policies, such as improving nutrition and prohibiting neurotoxins, have as one of their goals raising, or preventing a decline in, intelligence.

A diagnosis of intellectual disability is in part based on the results of IQ testing. Borderline intellectual functioning is the categorization of individuals of below-average cognitive ability (an IQ of 71–85), although not as low as those with an intellectual disability (70 or below).

In the United Kingdom, the eleven plus exam which incorporated an intelligence test has been used from 1945 to decide, at eleven years of age, which type of school a child should go to. They have been much less used since the widespread introduction of comprehensive schools.

Classification

IQ classification is the practice used by IQ test publishers for designating IQ score ranges into various categories with labels such as "superior" or "average". IQ classification was preceded historically by attempts to classify human beings by general ability based on other forms of behavioral observation. Those other forms of behavioral observation are still important for validating classifications based on IQ tests.

High-IQ societies

There are social organizations, some international, which limit membership to people who have scores as high as or higher than the 98th percentile (two standard deviations above the mean) on some IQ test or equivalent. Mensa International is perhaps the best known of these. The largest 99.9th percentile (three standard deviations above the mean) society is the Triple Nine Society.

Education

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education

Education is a wide phenomenon that applies to all age groups and covers formal education (top row) as well as non-formal and informal education (bottom row).

Education is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits. Its precise definition is disputed and there are disagreements about what the aims of education are and to what extent education is different from indoctrination by fostering critical thinking. These disagreements affect how to identify, measure, and improve forms of education. The term "education" can also refer to the mental states and qualities of educated people and the academic field studying educational phenomena.

There are many types of education. Formal education happens in a complex institutional framework, like public schools. Non-formal education is also structured but takes place outside the formal schooling system. Informal education is unstructured learning through daily experiences. Formal and non-formal education are divided into levels. They include early childhood education, primary education, secondary education, and tertiary education. Other classifications focus on the teaching method, like teacher-centered and student-centered education. Forms of education can also be distinguished by subject, like science education, language education, and physical education.

Education socializes children into society by teaching cultural values and norms. It equips them with the skills needed to become productive members of society. This way, it stimulates economic growth and raises awareness of local and global problems. Organized institutions affect many aspects of education. For example, governments set education policies to determine when school classes happen, what is taught, and who can or must attend. International organizations, like UNESCO, have been influential in promoting primary education for all children.

Many factors influence whether education is successful. Psychological factors include motivation, intelligence, and personality. Social factors, like socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender, are often linked to discrimination. Further factors include access to educational technology, teacher quality, and parent involvement.

The main field investigating education is called education studies. It examines what education is, what aims and effects it has, and how to improve it. Education studies has many subfields, like philosophy of education, psychology of education, sociology of education, economics of education, and comparative education. It also discusses the history of education. In prehistory, education happened informally through oral communication and imitation. With the rise of ancient civilizations, writing was invented, and the amount of knowledge grew. This caused a shift from informal to formal education. Initially, formal education was mainly available to elites and religious groups. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century made books more widely available. This increased general literacy. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, public education became more important. It led to the worldwide process of making primary education available to all, free of charge, and compulsory up to a certain age.

Definitions

The definition of education has been explored by theorists from various fields. Many agree that education is a purposeful activity aimed at achieving goals like the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits. However, there is extensive debate regarding its exact nature beyond these general features. One approach is to view education as a process that occurs during educational events such as schooling, teaching, and learning. Another outlook understands education not as a process but as the product resulting from this process. It emphasizes the mental states and dispositions of educated persons. Additionally, the term may also refer to the academic field that studies the methods, processes, and social institutions involved in teaching and learning. Having a clear idea of what the term means is important to correctly identify educational phenomena. It also matters when trying to measure or improve them. The term "education" is derived from the Latin words educare, meaning "to bring up, rear, educate" in relation to the mind, and educere, meaning "to bring out, lead forth" in reference to the bodily level.

Some theorists provide precise definitions by identifying the specific features that are exclusive to all forms of education. Education theorist R. S. Peters, for instance, outlines three essential features of education:

It is concerned with the transmission of knowledge and understanding.
This transmission is worthwhile.
It is done in a morally appropriate manner in tune with the student's interests.

Such precise definitions often succeed at characterizing the most typical forms of education. But they are criticized because there are counterexamples. This problem can be avoided by offering less precise definitions based on family resemblance. This means that all the forms of education are similar to each other. But they need not share a set of essential features that all of them have in common. According to one view, the term "education" is context-dependent. This implies that its meaning varies depending on the situation in which it is used.

There is disagreement in the academic literature on whether education is an evaluative concept. Thick definitions of education affirm this. They state that it is part of the nature of education that it is beneficial to the student or leads to some kind of improvement. Different thick definitions disagree about what kind of improvement is involved. They contrast with thin definitions, which provide a value-neutral explanation of education. A closely related distinction is between descriptive and prescriptive conceptions of education. Descriptive conceptions discuss how the term is actually used by regular speakers. Prescriptive conceptions express what good education is or how education should be practiced. Many thick and prescriptive conceptions hold that education is an activity that tries to achieve certain aims. Some concentrate on epistemic aims, like knowledge and understanding. Others give more emphasis to the development of skills, like rationality and critical thinking, and character traits, like kindness and honesty.

One approach is to focus on a single overarching purpose of education and see the more specific aims as means to this end. According to one suggestion, socialization is the aim of education. It is realized by transmitting accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next. This process helps the student to function in society as a regular citizen. More person-centered definitions focus on the well-being of the student instead. For them, education is a process that helps them lead a good life or the life they wish to lead. Various scholars stress the role of critical thinking to distinguish education from indoctrination. They state that mere indoctrination is only interested in instilling beliefs in the student, independent of whether they are rational. Education, by contrast, also fosters the rational ability to critically reflect on and question those beliefs, according to this position. However, it is not universally accepted that these two phenomena can be clearly distinguished. One reason for this view is that some forms of indoctrination may be necessary in the early stages of education while the child's mind is not yet sufficiently developed.

Education can be characterized from the teacher's or the student's perspective. Teacher-centered definitions focus on the perspective and role of the teacher. They tend to see education as the transmission of knowledge and skills in a morally appropriate way. Student-centered definitions analyze education from the student's involvement in the learning process. They may define it as a process that transforms and enriches their subsequent experience. Definitions taking both perspectives into account are also possible. This can take the form of describing the process as the shared experience of a common world. In the shared experience, different aspects of the world are discovered and problems are posed and solved.

Types

There are many classifications of education. It depends on the institutional framework whether education is formal, non-formal, or informal. Levels of education are distinguished based on factors like the student's age and the complexity of the content. Some classifications focus on the learner or the topic. Others rely on the teaching method, the medium used, or the funding.

Formal, non-formal, and informal

Tutoring is an example of non-formal education, while learning how to cook from one's parents belongs to informal education.

The most common division is between formal, non-formal, and informal education. Formal education happens in a complex institutional framework. Such frameworks have a chronological and hierarchical order: the modern schooling system has classes based on the student's age and progress, extending all the way from primary school to university. Formal education is usually controlled and guided by the government. It tends to be compulsory up to a certain age.

Non-formal and informal education take place outside the formal schooling system. Non-formal education is a middle ground. Like formal education, it is organized, systematic, and carried out with a clear purpose in mind. Examples are tutoring, fitness classes, and the scouting movement. Informal education happens in an unsystematic way through daily experiences and exposure to the environment. Unlike formal and non-formal education, there is usually no designated authority figure responsible for teaching. Informal education is present in many settings. It happens throughout one's life, mostly in a spontaneous way. This is how children learn their mother tongue from their parents or how people learn to prepare a dish by cooking together.

Some theorists distinguish the three types based on the location of learning. Formal education takes place in school. Informal education occurs in places of everyday routines. Non-formal education happens in places that are occasionally visited. There are also differences in the source of motivation. Formal education tends to be driven by extrinsic motivation for external rewards. Non-formal and informal education are closely linked to intrinsic motivation because the learning itself is enjoyed. The distinction between the three types is normally clear for the typical cases. However, some forms of education do not easily fall into one category.

Formal education plays a central role in modern civilization. But in primitive cultures, most of the education happened on the informal level. This usually meant that there is no distinction between activities focused on education and other activities. Instead, the whole environment acted as a form of school and most adults acted as teachers. However, informal education is often not efficient enough to pass on large quantities of knowledge. To do so, a formal setting and well-trained teachers are usually required. This was one of the reasons why in the course of history, formal education became more and more important. In this process, the experience of education became more abstract and removed from daily life. More emphasis was put on grasping general patterns instead of observing and imitating particular forms of behavior.

Levels

Types of education are often divided into levels or stages. The most influential framework is the International Standard Classification of Education. It is maintained by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It covers both formal and non-formal education. It distinguishes levels based on the student's age, the duration of learning, and the complexity of the discussed content. Further criteria include entry requirements, teacher qualifications, and the intended outcome of successful completion. The levels are grouped into early childhood education (level 0), primary education (level 1), secondary education (levels 2–3), post-secondary non-tertiary education (level 4), and tertiary education (levels 5–8).

Early childhood education is also known as preschool education or nursery education. It is the stage of education that begins with birth and lasts until the start of primary school. It follows the holistic aim of fostering early child development at the physical, mental, and social levels. It plays a key role in socialization and personality development. It includes various basic skills in the areas of communication, learning, and problem-solving. This way, it prepares children for their entry into primary education.

Primary (or elementary) education usually starts at the age of five to seven and lasts for four to seven years. It does not have any further entry requirements. Its main goal is to teach the basic skills in the fields of reading, writing, and mathematics. But it also covers the core knowledge in other fields, like history, geography, the sciences, music, and art. A further aim is to foster personal development. Today, primary education is compulsory in almost all countries. Over 90% of all primary-school-age children worldwide attend primary school.

Secondary education is the stage of education following primary education. It usually covers the ages of 12 to 18 years. It is commonly divided into lower secondary education (middle school or junior high school) and upper secondary education (high school, senior high school, or college depending on the country). Lower secondary education normally has the completion of primary school as its entry requirement. It aims to extend and deepen the learning outcomes. It is more focused on subject-specific curricula and teachers are specialized in only one or a few specific subjects. One of its aims is to familiarize students with the basic theoretical concepts in the different subjects. This helps create a solid basis for lifelong learning. In some cases, it also includes basic forms of vocational training. In many countries, it is the last stage of compulsory education.

Upper secondary education aims to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed for employment or tertiary education. Its requirement is usually the completion of lower secondary education. Its subjects are more varied and complex. The students can often choose between a few subjects. Its successful completion is commonly tied to a formal qualification in the form of a high school diploma. There are some types of education after secondary education that do not belong to tertiary education. They are categorized as post-secondary non-tertiary education and are similar in complexity to secondary education. However, they tend to focus more on vocational training to prepare students for the job market.

In some countries, tertiary education is used as a synonym of higher education while in others, tertiary education is the wider term. It expands upon the foundations of secondary education but has a more narrow and in-depth focus on a specific field or subject. Its completion leads to an academic degree. It can be divided into four levels: short-cycle tertiary, Bachelor's, Master's, and doctoral level education. They often form a hierarchical structure with later levels depending on the completion of previous levels.

Short-cycle tertiary education focuses on practical matters. It includes advanced vocational and professional training to prepare students for the job market in specialized professions. Bachelor's level education is also referred to as undergraduate education. It tends to be longer than short-cycle tertiary education. It is usually offered by universities and results in an intermediary academic certification in the form of a bachelor's degree. Master's level education is more specialized than undergraduate education. Many programs require independent research in the form of a master's thesis as a requirement for successful completion. Doctoral level education leads to an advanced research qualification, normally in the form of a doctor's degree. It usually requires the submission of a substantial academic work, such as a dissertation.

Others

Many other types of education are discussed in the academic literature, like the distinction between traditional and alternative education. Traditional education concerns long-established and mainstream schooling practices. It uses teacher-centered education and takes place in a well-regulated school environment. Regulations cover many aspects of education, such as the curriculum and the timeframe when classes start and end.

Alternative education is an umbrella term for forms of schooling that differ from the mainstream traditional approach. They may use a different learning environment, teach different subjects, or promote a different teacher-student relationship. Alternative schooling is characterized by voluntary participation, relatively small class and school sizes, and personalized instruction. This often results in a more welcoming and emotionally safe atmosphere. Alternative education encompasses many types like charter schools and special programs for problematic or gifted children. It also includes homeschooling and unschooling. There are many alternative schooling traditions, like Montessori schools, Waldorf schools, Round Square schools, Escuela Nueva schools, free schools, and democratic schools. Alternative education also includes indigenous education. It focuses on the transmission of knowledge and skills from an indigenous heritage. Its methods give more emphasis to narration and storytelling.

Other distinctions between types of education are based on who receives education. Categories by the age of the learner are childhood education, adolescent education, adult education, and elderly education. Special education is education that is specifically adapted to meet the unique needs of students with disabilities. It covers various forms of impairments on the intellectual, social, communicative, and physical levels. It aims to overcome the challenges posed by these impairments. This way, it provides the affected students with access to an appropriate education. When understood in the broadest sense, special education also includes education for very gifted children who need adjusted curricula to reach their fullest potential.

Some classifications focus on the teaching method. In teacher-centered education, the teacher takes center stage in providing students with information. It contrasts with student-centered education, in which students take on a more active and responsible role in shaping classroom activities. For conscious education, learning and teaching happen with a clear purpose in mind. Unconscious education occurs on its own without being consciously planned or guided. This may happen in part through the personality of teachers and adults, which can have indirect effects on the development of the student's personality.

Autodidacticism or self-education is self-directed learning. It happens without the guidance of teachers and institutions. It mainly occurs in adult education. It is characterized by the freedom to choose what and when to study. For this reason, it can be a more fulfilling learning experience. However, the lack of structure and guidance can result in aimless learning. Due to the absence of external feedback, autodidacts may develop false ideas and inaccurately assess their learning progress. Autodidacticism is closely related to lifelong education, which is an ongoing learning process throughout a person's entire life.

Forms of education can also be categorized by the subject and the medium used. Types based on the subject include science education, language education, art education, religious education, and physical education. Special mediums, such as radio or websites, are used in distance education. Examples include e-learning (use of computers), m-learning (use of mobile devices), and online education. They often take the form of open education, in which the courses and materials are made available with a minimal amount of barriers. They contrast with regular classroom or onsite education.

A further distinction is based on the type of funding. Public education is also referred to as state education. It is education funded and controlled by the government. It is available to the general public. It normally does not require tuition fees and is thus a form of free education. It contrasts with private education, which is funded and managed by private institutions. Private schools often have a more selective admission process. Many offer paid education by charging tuition fees. A more detailed classification focuses on the social institution responsible for education. It includes categories for institutions like family, school, civil society, state, and church.

Compulsory education is education that people are legally required to receive. It concerns mainly children who need to visit school up to a certain age. It contrasts with voluntary education, which people pursue by personal choice without a legal requirement.

Evidence-based education uses well-designed scientific studies to determine which methods of education work best. Its goal is to maximize the effectiveness of educational practices and policies. This is achieved by ensuring that they are informed by the best available empirical evidence. It includes evidence-based teaching, evidence-based learning, and school effectiveness research.

Role in society

Education plays various roles in society, including in social, economic, and personal fields. On a social level, education makes it possible to establish and sustain a stable society. It helps people acquire the basic skills needed to interact with their environment and fulfill their needs and desires. In modern society, this involves a wide range of skills like being able to speak, read, and write as well as to solve problems and to perform basic arithmetic tasks. It also includes the ability to handle information and communications technology. Children are socialized into society by acquiring these skills. Another key part of socialization is to learn how to live in social groups and interact with others by coming to understand social and cultural norms and expectations. This requires an understanding of what kinds of behavior are considered appropriate in different contexts. This way, new members are introduced to the culture, norms, and values that are dominant in their society. Socialization happens throughout life but is of special relevance to early childhood education. It enables a form of social cohesion, stability, and peace needed for people to productively engage in their daily business. Education plays a key role in democracies by increasing civic participation in the form of voting and organizing and through its tendency to promote equal opportunity for all.

A further issue is to enable people to become productive members of society by learning how to contribute to it. Through education, individuals acquire the technical and analytical skills needed to pursue their profession, produce goods, and provide services to others. In early societies, there was little specialization and each child would generally learn most of the skills that the community required to function. Modern societies are increasingly complex and many professions are only mastered by relatively few people who receive specialized training in addition to general education. Some of the skills and tendencies learned to function in society may conflict with each other and their value depends on the context of their usage. For example, fostering a questioning mind is necessary to develop the ability of critical thinking but in some cases, obedience to an authority is required to ensure social stability.

By helping people become productive members of society, education stimulates economic growth and reduces poverty. It helps workers become more skilled and thereby increases the quality of the produced goods and services, which in turn leads to prosperity and increased competitiveness. Public education is often understood as a long-term investment to benefit society as a whole. The rate of return is especially high for investments in primary education. Besides increasing economic prosperity, it can also lead to technological and scientific advances as well as decrease unemployment while promoting social equity.

Education can prepare a country to adapt to changes and successfully face new challenges. It can help raise awareness and contribute to the solution of contemporary global problems. Examples are climate change and sustainability as well as the widening inequalities between the rich and the poor. By making students aware of how their lives and actions affect others, it may inspire some to work toward realizing a more sustainable and fair world. This way, education serves not just the purpose of reproducing society as it is but can also be an instrument of development by realizing social transformation to improve society. This applies also to changing circumstances in the economic sector, where technological advances and increased automation may cause many jobs to be lost in the coming decades. This may render currently taught skills and knowledge redundant while shifting the importance to other areas. Education can be used to prepare people for such changes by adjusting the curriculum. This way, subjects involving digital literacy and skills in handling new technologies can be promoted. Another example is online education in the form of massive open online courses.

On a more individual level, education promotes personal development. This can include factors such as learning new skills, developing talents, fostering creativity, and increasing self-knowledge as well as improving problem-solving and decision-making abilities. Education also has positive effects on health and well-being. While education is of high relevance in childhood, it does not end with adulthood and continues throughout life. This form of lifelong learning is of specific significance in contemporary society due to the rapid changes on many levels and the need for people to adjust to them.

The social importance of education is recognized in the annual International Day of Education on January 24. The year 1970 was declared International Education Year.

Role of institutions

Organized institutions play a key role in various aspects of education. Institutions like schools, universities, teacher training institutions, and ministries of education make up the education sector. They interact both with each other and with other stakeholders, such as parents, local communities, and religious groups. Further stakeholders are NGOs, professionals in healthcare, law enforcement, media platforms, and political leaders. Many people are directly involved in the education sector. They include students, teachers, and school principals as well as school nurses and curriculum developers.

Various aspects of formal education are regulated by the policies of governmental institutions. They determine at what age children need to attend school and at what times classes are held as well as issues pertaining to the school environment, like infrastructure. Regulations also cover the exact requirements for teachers and how they are trained. An important aspect of education policy concerns the curriculum used for teaching at schools, colleges, and universities. A curriculum is a planned sequence of instructions or a program of learning that intends to guide the experience of learners to achieve the aims of education. The topics are usually selected based on their importance and depend on the type of school. The goals of public school curricula are usually to offer a comprehensive and well-rounded education while vocational training focuses more on specific practical skills within a field. The curricula also cover various aspects besides the topic to be discussed, such as the teaching method, the objectives to be reached, and the standards for assessing progress. By determining the curricula, governmental institutions have a strong impact on what knowledge and skills are transmitted to the students.

International organizations also play a key role in education. For instance, UNESCO is an intergovernmental organization that promotes education in many ways. One of its activities is to advocate education policies, like the treaty UNCRC, which states that education is a human right of all children and young people. Another was the Education for All initiative. It aimed to offer basic education to all children, adolescents, and adults by the year 2015. It was later replaced by the initiative Sustainable Development Goals as goal 4. Related policies include the Convention against Discrimination in Education and the Futures of Education initiative.

Some influential organizations are not intergovernmental but non-governmental. For example, the International Association of Universities promotes the exchange of colleges and universities around the world while the International Baccalaureate offers international diploma programs. Various institutions, like the Erasmus Programme, facilitate student exchanges between countries.

Factors of educational success

Several factors influence educational achievement. They include psychological factors, which concern the student as an individual, and sociological factors, which pertain to the student's social environment. Further factors are access to educational technology, teacher quality, and parent involvement. Many of these factors overlap and influence each other.

Psychological

On a psychological level, relevant factors include motivation, intelligence, and personality. Motivation is the internal force propelling people to engage in learning. Motivated students are more likely to interact with the content to be learned by participating in classroom activities like discussions. This often results in a deeper understanding of the subject. Motivation can also help students overcome difficulties and setbacks. An important distinction is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsically motivated students are driven by an interest in the subject and the learning experience itself. Extrinsically motivated students seek external rewards. They may strive for good grades and recognition from their peers. Intrinsic motivation tends to be more beneficial by leading to increased creativity and engagement as well as long-term commitment. Educational psychologists try to discover how to increase motivation. This can be achieved by encouraging some competition among students while ensuring a balance of positive and negative feedback in the form of praise and criticism.

Intelligence is another important factor in how people respond to education. It is a mental quality linked to the ability to learn from experience, to understand, and to employ knowledge and skills to solve problems. Those who have higher scores in intelligence metrics tend to perform better at school and go on to higher levels of education. Intelligence is often primarily associated with the so-called IQ, a standardized numerical metric for assessing intelligence. However, it has been argued that there different types of intelligences pertaining to distinct areas. According to psychologist Howard Gardner, they can be distinguished into areas like mathematics, logic, spatial cognition, language, and music. Further types affect how a person interacts with other people and with themselves. These forms are largely independent of each other, meaning that someone may excel at one type while scoring low on another.

A closely related factor concerns learning styles. A learning style is a preferred form of acquiring knowledge and skills. According to proponents of learning style theory, students with an auditory learning style find it easy to follow spoken lectures and discussions while visual learners benefit if information is presented visually in diagrams and videos. For efficient learning, it may be beneficial to include a wide variety of learning modalities. The learner's personality may also affect educational achievement. For example, the features of conscientiousness and openness to experience from the Big Five personality traits are linked to academic success. Further mental factors include self-efficacy, self-esteem, and metacognitive abilities.

Sociological

Sociological factors focus not on psychological attributes of learners but on their environment and position in society. They include socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and cultural background as well as gender. They are of interest to researchers since they are associated with inequality and discrimination. For this reason, they play a key role in policy-making in attempts to mitigate their effects.

Socioeconomic status depends on income but includes other factors as well, such as financial security, social status, and social class as well as quality of life attributes. Low socioeconomic status affects educational success in various ways. It is linked to slower cognitive developments in language and memory and higher dropout rates. Poor families may not have enough money to invest in educational resources like stimulating toys, books, and computers. Additionally, they may be unable to afford tuition at prestigious schools and are more likely to attend schools in poorer areas. Such schools tend to offer lower standards of teaching because of teacher shortages or because they lack educational materials and facilities, like libraries. Poor parents may also be unable to afford private lessons if their children fall behind. Students from an economically disadvantaged background often have less access to information on higher education and may face additional difficulties in securing and repaying student loans. Low socioeconomic status also has many indirect negative effects by being linked to lower physical and mental health. Due to these factors, social inequalities on the level of the parents are often reproduced in the children.

Ethnic background is linked to cultural differences and language barriers, which make it more difficult for students to adapt to the school environment and follow classes. Additional factors are explicit and implicit biases and discrimination toward ethnic minorities. This may affect the students' self-esteem and motivation as well as their access to educational opportunities. For example, teachers may hold stereotypical views even if they are not overtly racist, which can lead them to grade comparable performances differently based on the child's ethnicity.

Historically, gender has been a central factor in education since the roles of males and females were defined differently in many societies. Education tended to strongly favor males, who were expected to provide for the family. Females, by contrast, were expected to manage the household and rear children, which severely hampered the educational opportunities available to them. And while these inequalities have improved in most modern societies, there are still gender differences in education. Among other things, this concerns biases and stereotypes linked to the role of gender in education. They affect subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, which are often presented as male fields. This discourages female students from following them.

One aspect of many social factors is given by the expectations associated with stereotypes. They work both on an external level, based on how other people react to a person belonging to a certain group, and on an internal level, based on how the person internalizes them and acts accordingly. In this sense, the expectations may turn into self-fulfilling prophecies by causing the educational outcomes they anticipate. This can happen both for positive and negative stereotypes.

Technology and others

Technology plays another significant role in educational success. Educational technology is commonly associated with the use of modern digital devices, like computers. But understood in the broadest sense, it involves a wide range of resources and tools for learning, including basic aids that do not involve the use of machines, like regular books and worksheets.

Educational technology can benefit learning in various ways. In the form of media, it often takes the role of the primary supplier of information in the classroom. This means that the teacher can focus their time and energy on other tasks, like planning the lesson and guiding students as well as assessing educational performance. Educational technology can also make information easier to understand by presenting it using graphics and videos rather than through mere text. In this regard, interactive elements may be used to make the learning experience more engaging in the form of educational games. Technology can be employed to make educational materials accessible to many people, like when using online resources. It additionally facilitates collaboration between students and communication with teachers. Lack of educational technology affects developing countries in particular. Many efforts are made to address it, such as the One Laptop per Child initiative.

A closely related issue concerns the effects of school infrastructure. It includes physical aspects of the school, like its location and size as well as the available school facilities and equipment. A healthy and safe environment, well-maintained classrooms, and suitable classroom furniture as well as the availability of a library and a canteen tend to contribute to educational success. The quality of the teacher also has an important impact on student achievement. Skilled teachers know how to motivate and inspire students and are able to adjust their instructions to the students' abilities and needs. Important in this regard are the teacher's own education and training as well as their past teaching experience. A meta-analysis by Engin Karadağ et al. concludes that, compared to other influences, factors related to the school and the teacher have the biggest impact on educational success.

An additional factor to boost student achievement is parent involvement. It can make children more motivated and invested if they are aware that their parents care about their educational efforts. This tends to lead to increased self-esteem, better attendance rates, and more constructive behavior at school. Parent involvement also includes communication with teachers and other school staff to make other parties aware of current issues and how they may be resolved. Further relevant factors sometimes discussed in the academic literature include historical, political, demographic, religious, and legal aspects.

Education studies

Photo of the cover of the title page of John Locke's 1693 book "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" — John Locke's book *Some Thoughts Concerning Education* from 1693 is one of the foundational works of education studies.

The main discipline investigating education is called education studies, also referred to as education sciences. It tries to determine how people transmit and acquire knowledge by studying the methods and forms of education. It is interested in its aims, effects, and value as well as the cultural, societal, governmental, and historical contexts that shape education. Education theorists integrate insights from many other fields of inquiry, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, history, politics, and international relations. Because of these influences, some theorists claim that education studies is not an independent academic discipline like physics or history since its method and subject are not as clearly defined. Education studies differs from regular training programs, such as teacher training, since its focus on academic analysis and critical reflection goes beyond the skills needed to be a good teacher. It is not restricted to the topic of formal education but examines all forms and aspects of education.

Various research methods are used to study educational phenomena. They can roughly be divided into quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. Quantitative research emulates the methods found in the natural sciences by using precise numerical measurements to gather data from many observations and employs statistical tools to analyze it. It aims to arrive at an objective and impersonal understanding. Qualitative research usually has a much smaller sample size and tries to get an in-depth insight into more subjective and personal factors, like how different actors experience the process of education. Mixed-methods research aims to combine data gathered from both approaches to arrive at a balanced and comprehensive understanding. Data can be collected in various ways, like using direct observation or test scores as well as interviews and questionnaires. Some research projects study basic factors affecting all forms of education while others concentrate on one specific application. Some investigations look for solutions to concrete problems while others examine the effectiveness of educational projects and policies.

Subfields

Education studies encompasses various subfields like philosophy of education, pedagogy, psychology of education, sociology of education, economics of education, comparative education, and history of education. The philosophy of education is the branch of applied philosophy that examines many of the basic assumptions underlying the theory and practice of education. It studies education both as a process and as a discipline while trying to provide exact definitions of its nature and how it differs from other phenomena. It further examines the purpose of education, its different types, and how to conceptualize teachers, students, and their relation. It includes educational ethics, which investigates the moral implications of education, for example, what ethical principles underlie it and how teachers should apply them to specific cases. The philosophy of education has a long history and was already discussed in ancient Greek philosophy.

The term "pedagogy" is sometimes used as a synonym for education studies but when understood in a more restricted sense, it refers to the subfield interested in teaching methods. It studies how the aims of education, like the transmission of knowledge or fostering skills and character traits, can be realized. It is interested in the methods and practices used for teaching in regular schools and some definitions restrict it to this domain. But in a wider sense, it covers all types of education, including forms of teaching outside schools. In this general sense, it explores how teachers can bring about experiences in learners to advance their understanding of the studied topic and how the learning itself takes place.

The psychology of education studies how education happens on the mental level, specifically how new knowledge and skills are acquired as well as how personal growth takes place. It examines the factors responsible for successful education and how these factors may differ from person to person. Important factors include intelligence, motivation, and personality. A central topic in this field is the interplay between nature and nurture and how it affects educational success. Influential psychological theories of education are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Closely related fields are the neurology of education and educational neuroscience, which are interested in the neuropsychological processes and changes brought about through learning.

The sociology of education is concerned with how social factors influence education and how it leads to socialization. Often-discussed factors are socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender. The sociology of education studies how these factors, together with the dominant ideology in society, affect what kind of education is available to a person and how successful they are. Closely related questions include how education affects different groups in society and how educational experiences can form someone's personal identity. The sociology of education is specifically interested in aspects that result in inequalities. Its insights are relevant to education policy for trying to identify and mitigate factors that cause inequality. Two influential schools of thought are consensus theory and conflict theory. Consensus theorists hold that education benefits society as a whole by preparing people for their roles. Conflict theories have a more negative outlook on the resulting inequalities and see education as a force used by the ruling class to promote their own agenda.

The economics of education is the field of inquiry studying how education is produced, distributed, and consumed. It tries to determine how resources should be used to improve education. An example is the question to what extent the quality of teachers is increased by raising their salary. Other questions are how smaller class sizes affect educational success and how to invest in new educational technologies. This way, the economics of education helps policy-makers decide how to distribute the limited resources most efficiently to benefit society as a whole. It also tries to understand what long-term role education plays for the economy of a country by providing a highly skilled labor force and increasing its competitiveness. A closely related issue concerns the economic advantages and disadvantages of different systems of education.

Comparative education is the discipline that examines and contrasts systems of education. Comparisons can happen from a general perspective or focus on specific factors, like social, political, or economic aspects. Comparative education is often applied to different countries to assess the similarities and differences of their educational institutions and practices as well as to evaluate the consequences of the distinct approaches. It can be used to learn from other countries which education policies work and how one's own system of education may be improved. This practice is known as policy borrowing. It comes with many difficulties since the success of policies can depend to a large degree on the social and cultural context of students and teachers. A closely related and controversial topic concerns the question of whether the educational systems of developed countries are superior and should be exported to less developed countries. Other key topics are the internationalization of education and the role of education in transitioning from an authoritarian regime to a democracy.

The history of education examines the evolution of educational practices, systems, and institutions. It discusses various key processes, their possible causes and effects, and their relations to each other.

Aims and ideologies

A central topic in education studies concerns questions like why people should be educated and what goals should guide this process. Many aims of education have been suggested. On a basic level, education is about the acquisition of knowledge and skills but may also include personal development and fostering of character traits. Common suggestions encompass features like curiosity, creativity, rationality, and critical thinking as well as the tendency to think, feel, and act morally. Some scholars focus on liberal values linked to freedom, autonomy, and open-mindedness. But others prioritize qualities like obedience to authority, ideological purity, piety, and religious faith. An important discussion in this regard is about the role of critical thinking and the extent to which indoctrination forms part of education. On a social level, it is often stressed that education should socialize people. This way, it turns them into productive members of society while promoting good citizenship and preserving cultural values. A controversial issue concerns who primarily benefits from education: the educated person, society as a whole, or dominant groups within society.

Educational ideologies are systems of basic philosophical assumptions and principles. They cover various additional issues besides the aims of education, like what topics are learned and how the learning activity is structured. Other themes include the role of the teacher and how educational progress should be assessed. They also include claims on how to structure the institutional framework and policies. There are many ideologies and they often overlap in various ways. Teacher-centered ideologies place the main emphasis on the teacher's role in transmitting knowledge to students while student-centered ideologies give a more active role to the students in the process. Process-based ideologies focus on what the processes of teaching and learning should be like. They contrast with product-based ideologies, which discuss education from the perspective of the result to be achieved. Another classification contrasts progressivism with more traditional and conservative ideologies. Further categories are humanism, romanticism, essentialism, encyclopaedism, and pragmatism. There are also distinct types for authoritarian and democratic ideologies.

Learning theories and teaching

Learning theories try to explain how learning happens. Influential theories are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Behaviorism understands learning as a change in behavior in response to environmental stimuli. This happens by presenting the learner with a stimulus, associating this stimulus with the desired response, and solidifying this stimulus-response pair. Cognitivism sees learning as a change in cognitive structures and focuses on the mental processes involved in storing, retrieving, and processing information. According to constructivism, learning is based on the personal experience of each individual. It puts more emphasis on social interactions and how they are interpreted by the learner. These theories have important implications for how to teach. For example, behaviorists tend to focus on drills while cognitivists may advocate the use of mnemonics and constructivists tend to employ collaborative learning strategies.

Various theories suggest that learning is more efficient when it is based on personal experience. An additional factor is to aim at a deeper understanding by connecting new to pre-existing knowledge rather than merely memorizing a list of unrelated facts. An influential developmental theory of learning is proposed by psychologist Jean Piaget. He outlines four stages of learning through which children pass on their way to adulthood. They are the sensorimotor, the pre-operational, the concrete operational, and the formal operational stage. They correspond to different levels of abstraction. Early stages focus more on simple sensory and motor activities. Later stages include more complex internal representations and information processing in the form of logical reasoning.

The teaching method concerns the way the content is presented by the teacher, for example, whether group work is used instead of a focus on individual learning. There are many teaching methods available. Which one is most efficient in a case depends on various factors, like the subject matter as well as the learner's age and competence level. This is reflected in the fact that modern school systems organize students by age, competence, specialization, and native language into different classes to ensure a productive learning process. Different subjects frequently use very different approaches. Language education often focuses on verbal learning while mathematical education is about abstract and symbolic thinking together with deductive reasoning. One central requirement for teaching methodologies is to ensure that the learner remains motivated because of interest and curiosity or through external rewards.

Further aspects of teaching methods include the instructional media used, such as books, worksheets, and audio-visual recordings, and having some form of test or assessment to evaluate the learning progress. An important pedagogical aspect in many forms of modern education is that each lesson is part of a larger educational enterprise governed by a syllabus. It often covers several months or years. According to Herbartianism, teaching is divided into phases. The initial phase consists of preparing the student's mind for new information. Next, new ideas are first presented to the learner and then associated with ideas with which the learner is already familiar. In later phases, the understanding shifts to a more general level behind the specific instances and the ideas are then put into concrete practice.

History

The history of education studies the processes, methods, and institutions involved in teaching and learning. It tries to explain how they have interacted with each other and shaped educational practice until the present day. Education began in prehistory, as adults trained the young in the knowledge and skills deemed necessary in their society. For the most part, there were no specialized teachers and most adults taught the youth, usually informally during everyday activities. Education was achieved through oral communication and imitation. It could take the form of storytelling and singing to pass knowledge, values, and skills from one generation to the next.

The earliest ancient civilizations developed in the period from 3000 to 1500 BCE in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North China. Ancient education was characterized by the invention of writing and the development of formal education. The invention of writing had a significant influence on the history of education as a whole. Through writing, it was possible to store and preserve information and make it accessible to more people. This enabled various subsequent developments, for example, the creation of educational tools, like textbooks, and institutions, like schools.

Another key aspect of ancient education was the establishment of formal education. This became necessary since the amount of knowledge grew as civilizations evolved and informal education proved insufficient to transmit all knowledge from one generation to the next. Teachers would act as specialists to impart knowledge and education became more abstract and further removed from daily life. Formal education was still quite rare in ancient societies and was restricted to the intellectual elites. It happened in the form of training scribes and priests and covered various subjects besides reading and writing, including the humanities, science, medicine, mathematics, law, and astrology. Two often-discussed achievements of ancient education are the establishment of Plato's Academy in Ancient Greece, which is sometimes considered the first institute of higher learning, and the creation of the Great Library of Alexandria in Ancient Egypt as one of the most prestigious libraries of the ancient world.

In the medieval period, religious authorities had a lot of influence over formal education. This applied specifically to the role of the Catholic Church in Europe. But it is also seen in the Muslim world. Education there focused on the study of the Quran and its interpretations but also included knowledge of the sciences and the arts. Additionally, this period saw the establishment of universities as concentrated centers of higher education and research. The first universities were the University of Bologna, the University of Paris, and Oxford University. Another key development was the creation of guilds. Guilds were associations of skilled craftsmen and merchants who controlled the practice of their trades. They were responsible for vocational education and new members had to pass through different stages on their way to masterhood.

The invention and popularization of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century by Johann Gutenberg had a profound impact on general education. It significantly reduced the cost of producing books, which were hand-written before, and thereby augmented the dissemination of written documents, including new forms like newspapers and pamphlets. The increased availability of written media had a significant influence on the general literacy of the population.

These changes prepared the rise of public education in the 18th and 19th centuries. This period saw the establishment of publicly funded schools with the aim of providing education for all. This contrasts with earlier periods when formal education was primarily provided by private schools, religious institutions, and individual tutors. Aztec civilization was an exception in this regard since formal education was mandatory for the youth regardless of social class as early as the 14th century. Closely related changes were to make education compulsory and free of charge for all children up to a certain age. Initiatives to promote public education and universal access to education made significant progress in the 20th and the 21st centuries and were promoted by intergovernmental organizations like the UN. Examples include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Education for All initiative, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Sustainable Development Goals. These efforts resulted in a steady rise of all forms of education but affected primary education in particular. In 1970, 28% of all primary-school-age children worldwide did not attend school while by 2015, this number dropped to 9%.

A side effect of the establishment of public education was the introduction of standardized curricula for public schools as well as standardized tests to assess the students' progress. It also affects teachers by setting in place institutions and norms to guide and oversee teacher training, like certification requirements for teaching at public schools.

A further influence on contemporary education was the emergence of new educational technologies. The widespread availability of computers and the internet dramatically increased access to educational resources and made new types of education possible, such as online education. This was of particular relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools all around the world had to close for extended periods and many offered remote learning through video conferencing or pre-recorded video lessons to continue instruction. A further contemporary factor is the increased globalization and internationalization of education.

Pupil	KABC-II	WISC-III	WJ-III
A	90	95	111
B	125	110	105
C	100	93	101
D	116	127	118
E	93	105	93
F	106	105	105
G	95	100	90
H	112	113	103
I	104	96	97
J	101	99	86
K	81	78	75
L	116	124	102

Pupil	KABC-II	WISC-III	WJ-III
A	90	95	111
B	125	110	105
C	100	93	101
D	116	127	118
E	93	105	93
F	106	105	105
G	95	100	90
H	112	113	103
I	104	96	97
J	101	99	86
K	81	78	75
L	116	124	102

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Thursday, November 2, 2023

Intelligence quotient

History

Precursors to IQ testing

General factor (g)

United States military selection in World War I

IQ testing and the eugenics movement in the United States

Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory

Other theories

Current tests

Reliability and validity

Reliability

Validity as a measure of intelligence

Test bias or differential item functioning

Flynn effect

Age

Genetics and environment

Heritability

Shared family environment

Non-shared family environment and environment outside the family

Individual genes

Gene-environment interaction

Interventions

Music

Brain anatomy

Health

Social correlations

School performance

Job performance

Income

Crime

Health and mortality

Other accomplishments

Group differences

Race

Sex

Public policy

Classification

High-IQ societies

Education

Definitions

Types

Formal, non-formal, and informal

Levels

Others

Role in society

Role of institutions

Factors of educational success

Psychological

Sociological

Technology and others

Education studies

Subfields

Aims and ideologies

Learning theories and teaching

History

Solvent effects

Pupil	KABC-II	WISC-III	WJ-III
A	90	95	111
B	125	110	105
C	100	93	101
D	116	127	118
E	93	105	93
F	106	105	105
G	95	100	90
H	112	113	103
I	104	96	97
J	101	99	86
K	81	78	75
L	116	124	102