British teenagers have lower IQ scores than a generation ago, new study reveals

By Laura Clark for the Daily Mail
Updated: 17:51 EDT, 8 February 2009

Middle-class teenagers are less intelligent than a generation ago due to the dumbing down of youth culture and school tests, a new study suggests.

IQ tests show that scores for the average 14-year-old have dropped by more than two points between 1980 and 2008.

For those in the upper half of the intelligence scale - a group typically dominated by the children of middle-class families - average IQ scores were six points down on 28 years ago.

The authority on IQ testing who conducted the study said the demands made on teenagers' brainpower by today's youth culture may be 'stagnating'.

Brainpower drain: Teenagers use their leisure time to watch TV or play computer games instead of reading or conversing with others

Leisure time is increasingly taken up with playing computer games and watching TV instead of reading and holding conversations, he said.

Education experts said a growing tendency in schools to 'teach to the test' was affecting youngsters' ability to think laterally.

For the study, Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, analysed UK children's scores in IQ tests over time.

He found that IQs increased among children aged between five and 10 over the 28-year-period, at the rate of up to half a point a year.

He believes these gains are linked to changes to the home environment children experience when they are young, with parents increasingly providing stimulating activities.

But Professor Flynn also found that teenagers' scores had dipped slightly over the past generation.

It is the first time IQ scores have fallen for any age group during the past century, his research suggests.

Professor Flynn discovered the 'Flynn effect' which holds that IQ scores have been consistently rising, among all age groups and in most industrialised countries.

'It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers,' Professor Flynn told the Sunday Telegraph.

'While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched.

'Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents' influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age.

'Up until the age of nine and ten, the home has a really powerful influence, so we can assume parents have been providing their children with a more cognitive challenging environment in the past 30 years.

'After that age the children become more autonomous and they gravitate to peer groups that set the cognitive environment.

'What we know is that youth culture is more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations.'

He said previous studies have tended to show IQ increasing as teenagers move into adulthood, entering university or starting work.

Professor Flynn added that he believes the larger drop in IQ among the upper half of the ability range could be due to effects of social class.

He said: 'IQ gains are typically correlated by class, but the results in this case are very mixed. Maybe the rebellious peer culture of the lower half of British society has invaded the peer culture of the upper half.

'It could be the classes in the upper half were insulated from this rebellious peer culture for a time, but now it is universal.'

IQ, or intelligence quotient, is normally expressed as a single numerical score, with 100 being the average.

Previous studies have claimed that using text messages and email can temporarily reduce IQ by causing concentration to drop, while smoking marijuana has also been linked with a decline in IQ.

Professor Flynn's study, published in the journal of Economics and Human Biology, was conducted using a IQ test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, where questions involve matching a series of patterns and sequences, so that even people with no education can take the test.

Dr Richard House, a senior lecturer in therapeutic education at Roehampton University and a researcher into the effects of television on children, said: 'Taking these findings at face value, it appears that there is something happening to teenagers.

'Computer games and computer culture has led to a decrease in reading books. The tendency for teachers to now 'teach to the test' has also led to a decrease in the capacity to think in lateral ways.'