Can you get more intelligent?

One of my core beliefs in education is that Potential is not fixed - that students can alter what they can achieve based on hard work and new opportunities.

A study suggests IQ is not stable during teenage years as was thought, but shifts in step with changes in particular brain areas


IQ scores can change dramatically in teenage years in parallel with changes to the brain, according to a study that suggests caution in using the 11+ exam for grammar school entrance to predict academic ability.


IQ was always thought to be stable across a person's life. Childhood scores are often used to predict education outcome and job prospects as an adult. But the study suggests scores are surprisingly variable.


Robert Sternberg from Oklahoma State University, who studies intelligence but was not in the research team, said: "A testing industry has developed around the notion that IQ is relatively fixed and pretty well set in the early years of life. This study shows in a compelling way that meaningful changes can occur throughout the teenage years."


Our mental faculties are not fixed, he said: "People who are mentally active and alert will likely benefit, and the couch potatoes who do not exercise themselves intellectually will pay a price."


Sue Ramsden from University College London recruited 33 pupils aged 12 to 16, from high achievers at 11+ to struggling students referred for assessments. She tested their IQ in 2004, and again three to four years later, and also analysed their brains using magnetic resonance imaging. The average of all scores stayed the same across the years, but individual IQ scores rose or fell by as many as 21 points, a substantial difference – enough to take a person of "average" intelligence to "gifted" status, or vice versa.


The study contradicts a long-standing view of intelligence as fixed. Alfred Binet, father of modern intelligence tests, believed mental development ended at 16, while child psychologist Jean Piaget thought it ended even earlier.


The team now wants to know what causes IQ drift: the rate of brain change, or educational factors that stimulate some skills but not others; and also if changes are teenage only or whether IQ can vary as dramatically in adults. In the meantime, the message for children, parents and teachers is, as Ramsden writes in Nature: "This study is encouraging to some whose intellect may improve, and a warning that early achievers may not maintain potential."


This article is adapted from one that first appeared in The Guardian in October 2011