The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (32 page)

    
Reading early and often
.
In 2003, a national study reported the positive influence of early parent-to-child reading, regardless of parental education level. In 2006, a similar study again found the same thing about reading, this time ruling out any effects of race, ethnicity, class, gender, birth order, early education, maternal education, maternal verbal ability, and maternal warmth.

Helen Raikes and colleagues write:

A national study of preschool-aged children participating in Head Start demonstrated that, compared with parents who read less frequently, more frequent reading in the fall was associated with both higher concurrent scores on literacy measures and larger gains during the year, even after controlling for parental education level, parental literacy level, and the presence of books in the home. Children of parents who reported reading to them “not at all” or “only once or twice a week” had receptive vocabulary scores that were lower than those of children whose parents reported reading “three to six times a week.” Reading three to six times per week was associated with greater fall-to-spring vocabulary gains than was reading less frequently, and children whose parents reported reading daily had even larger gains. In addition, some research suggests that earlier regular experience with bookreading, beginning as young as 14 months, is particularly beneficial.

In regression analyses to examine relations between reading and child outcomes, we controlled for the variables of race/ethnicity, demographic risk, maternal education and verbal ability, gender, birth order, Early Head Start enrollment, and maternal warmth. In the English-speaking group, at 14 months, reading several times weekly or reading daily was significantly related to vocabulary and comprehension. Findings were similar for vocabulary and MDI scores at 24 months, even after controlling for children’s 14-month vocabulary. A pattern of daily reading over three data points significantly related to child language and cognitive outcomes at 36 months. Reading daily at a minimum of one of the periods predicted language outcomes for Spanish-speaking children. Regression path analyses showed paths from early reading to later reading, early vocabulary to later child language outcomes, and 14-month vocabulary to 24-month reading. Paths for concurrent reading revealed associations with vocabulary at 14 and 24 months. (Raikes et al., “Mother-child bookreading in low-income families,” pp. 940–43.)

    
Nurturance and encouragement
.
Hart and Risley also found that, in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000
more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback; a working-class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements; a welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements.

Hart and Risley write:

But the children’s language experience did not differ just in terms of the number and quality of words heard. We can extrapolate similarly the relative differences the data showed in children’s hourly experience with parent affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions. The average child in a professional family was accumulating 32 affirmatives and five prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 6 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a working-class family was accumulating 12 affirmatives and seven prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 2 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a welfare family, though, was accumulating five affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements. In a 5,200-hour year, that would be 166,000 encouragements to 26,000 discouragements in a professional family, 62,000 encouragements to 36,000 discouragements in a working-class family, and 26,000 encouragements to 57,000 discouragements in a welfare family.

Extrapolated to the first four years of life, the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback, and an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements. But an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more instances of prohibitions than encouragements. By the age of 4, the average child in a welfare family might have had 144,000
fewer
encouragements and 84,000
more
discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a working-class family. Extrapolating the relative differences in children’s hourly experience allows us to estimate children’s cumulative experience in the first four years of life and so glimpse the size of the problem facing intervention. Whatever the inaccuracy of our estimates, it is not by an order of magnitude such that 60,000 words becomes 6,000 or 600,000. Even if our estimates of children’s experience are too high by half, the differences between children by age 4 in amounts of cumulative experience are so great that even the best of intervention programs could only hope to keep the children in families on welfare from falling still further behind the children in the working-class families. (Hart and Risley, “The early catastrophe.”)

    
Setting high expectations
.

Studies validating this finding:

Edmonds, R. “Characteristics of Effective Schools.” In
The School Achievement of Minority Children: New Perspectives
, edited by U. Neisser. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986, pp. 93–104

Rutter, M., B. Maughan, P. Mortimore, J. Ouston, and A. Smith.
Fifteen Thousand Hours
. Harvard University Press, 1979.

Slavin, R., N. Karweit, and N. Madden.
Effective Programs for Students at Risk
. Allyn and Bacon, 1989.

Ellen Winner: “Parents of gifted children typically have high expectations, and also model hard work and high achievement themselves.” (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)

Winner’s Citations

Bloom, B.
Developing Talent in Young People
. Ballantine, 1985.

Csikszentmihályi, Mihály, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen.
Talented Teenagers
. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Gardner, H.
Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi
. Basic Books, 1993.

    
Embracing failure
.

“Deliberate practice does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level which is associated with frequent failures.” (Ericsson et al., “Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance,” pp. 3–56.)

    
Encouraging a “growth mindset
”:
Dweck,
Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success
.

    
phenomenon that we might call “carton calculus
”:
Ceci,
On Intelligence
, p. 33.

    
Halfway around the world, in Kisumu, Kenya, Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg stumbled on exactly the same phenomenon in 2001 when studying the intelligence of Dholuo schoolchildren
.

   Surprisingly, Sternberg found a “significantly negative” correlation between his herbal medicine test and an English language test and no significant correlation between his test and the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices (a multiple-choice IQ test probing abstract reasoning skills). (Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise,” p. 21.)

    
As Robert Sternberg watched studies like these pile up—documenting the unusual, sometimes even untestable intelligence traits of Yup’ik Eskimo children, !Kung San hunters of the Kalahari Desert, Brazilian street youth, American horse handicappers, and Californian grocery shoppers—he realized that the lack of correlation between their expertise and IQ scores demanded nothing less than a whole new definition of intelligence
.

   Sternberg concludes: “Abilities as developing forms of expertise [result from] interaction with the demands of the environment.” This was more than seven decades after Sherman and Key had concluded, “Children develop only as the environment demands development.” (Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise,” p. 21.)

    
!Kung San hunters of the Kalahari Desert
:
Ceci,
On Intelligence
, p. 35.

    
Brazilian street youth
:
Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise,” p. 22.

    
American horse handicappers
.

   In an utterly fascinating study, Stephen Ceci and his colleague Jeff Liker studied expert and nonexpert horse handicappers at a racetrack. There were two extraordinary findings:

1. “Even though the greater use of complex, interactive thinking was causally related to success at the racetrack, there was no relation between such complex thinking and IQ or between IQ and success at estimating odds.”

2. Analysis “was shown to be under the influence of ecological variables such as the sex-role expectations of the task, the physical setting in which the task was performed, the motivational level of the task, and the performance context (game vs. laboratory task).” In other words, environmental variables really mattered. (Ceci,
On Intelligence
, pp. 41–44)

    
Californian grocery shoppers
:
Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise,” p. 22.

    
He saw another problem, too, that reinforced this conclusion
:
the increasingly flimsy distinction between “intelligence” tests and so-called achievement tests like the SAT II. The more Sternberg compared the two, the harder it was for him to find any real difference between them.

Some choice quotes from Sternberg:

  There is no qualitative distinction between various kinds of assessments. The main thing that distinguishes ability tests from achievement tests is not the tests themselves, but rather how psychologists, educators, and others
interpret
the scores on these tests. (Italics mine.)

  Conventional tests of intelligence and related abilities measure achievement that individuals should have accomplished several years back. In other words, the tests are measuring competencies at a somewhat less developed level. Tests such as vocabulary, reading comprehension, verbal analogies, arithmetic problem solving, and the like, are all, in part, tests of achievement. Even abstract reasoning tests measure achievement in dealing with geometric symbols taught in Western schools. One might as well use academic performance to predict ability test scores. The conventional view infers some kind of causation (abilities cause achievement) from correlation, but the inference is not justified from the correlational data.

  There is nothing mystical or privileged about the intelligence tests. One could as easily use, say, academic or job performance to predict intelligence-related scores and vice-versa. (Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise.”)