A new controversial study is claiming that American children are getting smarter and that girls are catching up with boys when it comes to mathematics.
Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina tackled the age old debate of ‘nature versus nurture’ in their study by investigating rising IQ scores over the past few decades.
They also looked at why the gap between the sexes seems to be closing in areas that were once reserved for male excellence, such as mathematics.
Using data supplied by Duke’s Talent Identification Programme (TIP), Jonathan Wai, Martha Putallaz and Matthew Makel, were able to make their conclusions based on a group of exceptionally gifted students.
The 1.7million children examined scored within the top five percent of SAT, EXLORE and ACT exams despite being younger than other examinees.
The researchers findings support a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect that suggests environment, or ‘nurture’, affects intelligence as evidenced by consistently rising IQ scores.
According to the Flynn theory, the average IQ rates around the world have been increasing by 0.3 points a year for the last eighty years.
The Duke team saw that this boost was true in their group of brightest children, and especially in the mathematical arena.
Boys have always been known to have the edge on girls in maths while girls surpassed their male counterparts in tests of verbal reasoning.
But the recent study shows how between 1981 and 2010, the ratio of boys to girls in the top 0.01% of maths scores in the Scholastic Aptitude Test at high school (SATs) dropped from 13 to 1, to 4 to 1 in the Nineties before plateauing.
The Economist pointed out potential holes in the study’s accuracy with regard to the changes between the sexes. That it only focusses on the SAT exam and a particular group of children may not yield the most accurate results.
But that there has been a rise in scores is indisputable and why this is few can say with authority.
Some theories range from better nutrition to television and other media outlets to the reduction of lead in petrol and paint.
Jordan Shepherd | Elite.
