Of Course!

_Want to help your students increase their fluid intelligence, and maybe yours too?   No, fluid intelligence has nothing to do with how much someone understands about fluid mechanics or even how much beer they can consume on Saturday night.   Fluid intelligence (or gF for you technical folks), Wikipedia tells us, "is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems.   It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge."   It includes "such abilities as problem-solving, learning, and pattern recognition," and "correlates with measures of abstract reasoning and puzzle solving."

In other words, it's the sort of grey matter ability that one needs to engage in deep learning.    You need high portions of it if you want to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate well.   Students who do have lots of fluid intelligence, so the theory goes, can make connections within the subject area, but they can also generalize and transfer the principles of a particular problem beyond the discipline to new situations.   They are good problem solvers, and are likely to develop adaptive expertise, that is, the ability and attitude that allows them both to recognize and relish the opportunity and necessity for invention.

For decades, the "IQ fundamentalists," as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, have believed that fluid intelligence apparently isn't very fluid.    You are born with a certain amount of it, so the conventional wisdom goes, and that's what you will have for the rest of your life (or at least until dementia sets in).   In the hard version of this "truth," we could just stamp it on the transcripts (or foreheads) of our students when they enter our university and dispense with all those bothersome grading of papers and exams.   Even in the soft version, many faculty members believe that their job is simply to help determine who possesses and is willing to use such intelligence ("put out the effort").

"You can't increase their IQ," one of my colleagues used to say, "so our job is to find out who the really smart one's are and get them to apply themselves."

I must confess.    I never subscribed to such fundamentalism about IQ's, and I have found appealing a variety of critics who have raised questions about it.   Most compelling for me has been the work of people like Carol Dweck, who has found that people who have such fixed views of intelligence (and, correspondingly, their own intelligence) are generally less successful (in school and out) than those people who believe that intelligence is not some central quality, a gF or Fg, but a variety of abilities, each one subject to improvement with lots of the right kind of hard work.   In other words, even if the fundamentalists are right, believing that they are right, can lead to a sense of helplessness in the face of any failure.

There have been other attacks on IQ fundamentalism, of course, including the so-called "Flynn effect," named for James Flynn, a New Zealander, who noticed that average IQ test scores have been going up for decades in every part of the world.   If IQ is something you are born with, how could the human average change so significantly in the course of a few decades?

Now comes the biggest challenge yet.   For IQ fundamentalists it may be like the kid who believes in Santa Claus and spends years trying to find a way to the North Pole, only to discover that the jolly elf isn't real.   A group of researchers have discovered a way to improve performance on measures of fluid intelligence without just giving subjects an opportunity to practice on the test.

As Robert Sternberg noted in his introduction to the research in the May 13, 2008, edition of PNAS (he was not involved with the research), the experiment demonstrates that "fluid intelligence is trainable to a significant and meaningful degree; (ii) the training is subject to dosage effects, with more training leading to greater gains; (iii) the effect occurs across the spectrum of abilities, although it is larger toward the lower end of the spectrum; and (iv) the effect can be obtained by training on problems that, at least superficially, do not resemble those on the fluid-ability tests."

So what is this wonderful training?   It is designed to help people improve what psychologists call "working memory," which theory and research have suggested is connected to gF.   No, that doesn't mean asking students to memorize blindly some list of material helps them improve their fluid intelligence.   It does suggest just one more in a growing series of discoveries that point to things that can make a difference in how well our students learn to think.   Our job is not simply to judge who can do well but to create those conditions that will foster deep learning, adaptive expertise, and all of the abilities associated with fluid intelligence.

I believe strongly that we can all learn how to create those conditions and that the ability to do so is no more ingrained at birth than is the ability to think wisely.   Great teaching requires diligent and proper work, not the lucky inheritance of the teaching gene.

If you would like to "play the game" that led to the improved fluid intelligence, go to www.soakyourhead.com.   You will also need to download and install some operating software from Microsoft (yes, even for Mac users like me), but if you don't have that already installed, the soakyourhead Web site will alert you and lead you to the right place to get it.   It all operates inside a browser like Firefox. Soakyourhead will also link you to the original research article.

Good luck

Ken Bain