Warning on PISA: Intelligence may be involved

 

Late in the day, I have developed an early warning system to detect when an intelligence related story is entering the public domain: politicians start accusing each other of having fouled up the public education system. The exchange of insults indicates that a set of exam results is coming out, and politicians are playing the blame game. This has now become relatively sophisticated, as these things go, because it includes reference to lagged indicators, and estimates of representativeness and error terms. For example, if current UK 15 year olds are scholastically weak by international standards, is that the fault of the current administration (responsible for the last two years) or the previous administration (responsible for the last 13 years)? Or can we trace the fundamental errors back to the 1870 Education Act? Is our political and journalistic class becoming even more sophisticated? There’s a thesis in that for somebody.

Anyway, last week there was a ritual exchange of insults about the United Kingdom education system which, it was intimated, would shortly be shown by an international study to be “stagnating”. Today the story came out, as trailed, with the PISA results showing that the UK is 26th in the world. League tables seem to have more impact than anything else in British culture, a reference to sport, apparently. Makes it hard to see that a whole bunch of countries are “stagnating” together, within the usual error terms. This is the snapshot most people will see on the news. A more detailed look might follow later.

Here is the BBC graphic:

 

Attention centres on Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong who are way ahead, and South Korea, Vietnam and Japan which also do well, but the discussion is all about the methods of education. At no stage in the discussions is it mentioned that, from the point of view of intelligence, these results are entirely predictable.

For example, here are a list of relevant international intelligence test results, based on the comparison group of white Europeans having a “Greenwich Mean” IQ of 100, sd 15. The columns refer to country, age range of people tested, numbers tested, test used, IQ result corrected for Flynn effect as estimated by Richard Lynn (one of the discoverers of the effect), and the name of the author and date of publication. (I am working on getting these into one easily accessible list).

China	6/16	660	WISC-R	107	Dan et al., 1990
China	5/15	5,108	SPM	101	Lynn, 1991
China	14/15	297	Various	103	Li et al., 1996
China	6/12	269	SPM	104	Geary et al., 1997
China	4	60	Arithmetic	109	Ginsberg et al., 1997
China	6/13	463	DAM	103	Cox et al., 1998
China	6/8	160	SPM	107	Goa et al., 1998
China	17	218	SPM	103	Geary et al., 1999
China	19	218	SPM	113	Geary et al., 1999
China	6/8	300	BTBC-R	107	Zhou & Boehm, 2001
China: median				105.5

Hong Kong	9/11	1,007	CCT	105	Godman, 1964
Hong Kong	16	5,209	AH4	106	Vernon, 1982
Hong Kong	10	1,000	SPM	109	Chan & Vernon, 1988
Hong Kong	6/13	13,822	SPM	103	Lynn, Pagliari & Chan, 1988
Hong Kong	6/15	4,500	SPM	110	Lynn, Pagliari & Chan, 1988
Hong Kong	10	197	SPM	108	Lynn, Pagliari & Chan, 1988
Hong Kong	9	376	CCF	104	Lynn, Hampson & Lee, 1988
Hong Kong	9	479	SPM	122	Chan et al., 1991
Hong Kong	15	341	APM	120	Lynn & Chan, 2003
Hong Kong: median				106

Singapore	13	337	SPM	103	Lynn, 1977b
Singapore	15	459	APM	114	Lim, 1994
Singapore: mean				108.5

Korea: South	2/12	440	KABC	113	Moon, 1988
Korea: South	9	107	SPM	109	Lynn & Song, 1994
Korea: South	4	56	Arith	103	Ginsburg et al., 1997
Korea: South	6-16	2,231	WISC-3	100	Georgas et al., 2003
Korea: South: median				106

Japan	5/15	1,070	WISC	102	Lynn, 1977a
Japan	35	316	WAIS	102	Lynn, 1977a
Japan	5/10	760	MFFT	107	Salkind et al., 1978
Japan	10	212	Kyoto	106	Lynn & Dziobon, 1980
Japan	8/11	97	WRAT	108	Tarnopol & Tarnopol, 1980
Japan	9	223	CEFT	112	Bagley et al., 1983
Japan	4/9	347	CMMS	107	Misawa et al., 1984
Japan	6/11	480	Various	105	Stevenson et al., 1985
Japan	6/16	1,100	WISC-R	103	Lynn & Hampson, 1986
Japan	4/6	600	WPPSI	105	Lynn & Hampson, 1987
Japan	14	2,100	Kyoto	104	Lynn et al., 1987a
Japan	13/15	178	DAT	104	Lynn et al., 1987b
Japan	2/8	548	McCarthy	103	Ishikuma et al., 1988
Japan	6/12	142	KABC	101	Kaufman et al., 1989
Japan	16	175	AMM	113	Mann et al., 1990
Japan	9	444	SPM	110	Shigehisa & Lynn, 1991
Japan	5/7	454	CCAT	109	Takeuchi & Scott, 1992
Japan	6/12	451	MAT	105	Tamaoka et al., 1993
Japan	14/15	239	Various	103	Li et al., 1996
Japan	6/17	93	Gen Info	100	Chen et al., 1996
Japan	19	72	GMRT	102	Flaherty, 1997
Japan	7/11	60	DAM	102	Cox et al., 2001
Japan	17	1,119	Gen Info	105	Evans et al. 2002
Japan: median				105

 

So, even if we just consider an IQ test to be a “school far” test (testing things which anyone should know who has been brought up in a particular society), and a scholastic test to be a “school near” test (testing things that are taught at most schools in a particular society) then it is clear that we can test ability early in the life cycle, and use that to predict  scholastic outcomes at 15. If you accept that people vary in intelligence, and that some societies are composed of people who are brighter than people in other societies, then intelligence is part of the mix to be considered when doing international comparisons of scholastic attainments.

And now a few things about PISA: there is no real enforcement of the requirement that the schools tested should be representative of the countries concerned; some countries have strength in depth (appears to be true of China, where even poor provinces do well) while others have much more variability (India), and  it is possible to game the test by teaching to it, rather than to a general curriculum. National exams probably have better coverage of the school population and of the curriculum, but they too can be gamed in various ways, by training children in particular test formats. As a rule of thumb, don’t let the providers of education have the final say about the outcomes of education. Get someone else to judge: universities, employers, patent offices, research labs.

However, whatever the quibbles, the results show that the Far East is about three school years ahead of the West. Sure, the West can ask for a re-count with recent immigrants excluded (PISA does actually provide some of those figures, and even second generation immigrants are usually not at the same standard of the locals), but if you combine a population of IQ 106 with an open economy you get high scholastic attainments, higher than societies with IQs of around 100 and moderately open economies.

Within our own society we probably have 7 tribes of intelligence. The same seems to be true of the world, though we are talking mean differences, not different bands of ability on a single national bell curve. It appears to be the case that the Top Tribe of Global Intelligence reside in China, Japan, Korea and Singapore and thereabouts. (For the moment, we leave to one side small minority groups like European Jews, who are as far ahead of the Chines as the Chinese are ahead of the Europeans). If we take 2011 estimates of a world population of 7.1 billion persons, then with China, Japan, South Korea we have roughly 1.6 billion persons. If they are three school years ahead of the West (three years of full time instruction that will not be easily made up as people take on full time work, so are likely to be permanent) then we (Westerners) have a competitive challenge on our hands.

If we assume that Europe has 740 million inhabitants and the USA 314 then that gives us an estimated Western European population of 1.05 billion. Assuming Easterners have a real IQ of 106 they are 0.65 of a standard deviation above the West. By my crude calculations that implies that only 35% of Westerners are above the Chinese mean, whilst 50% of the Chinese are above their mean, of course.

So, 369 million bright Westerners will be slugging it out against 800 million equally bright Easterners (all of them above GMIQ 106). Western wages are currently about 6 times as high as Chinese wages.

Have I ever explained to you that IQ is only a single number, that there is much more to people than IQ, and that Westerners are very creative, and have multiple intelligences, so many intelligences that, so far, they have never been measured?