I. Q. Control

One of the few fixed stars in the creed of orthodox psychologists is a belief that people are born with a certain degree of intelligence and are doomed to go through life with the same I. Q. Strange and heretical to these orthodox ones are reports that have come during the past six years from a little group of psychologists at Iowa's State University in Iowa City. Last week, before a conference of distinguished educators in Manhattan, Iowa's Psychologist George Dinsmore Stoddard laid astounding proofs supporting Iowa's heresy: that an individual's I. Q. can be changed.

Iowa made this discovery accidentally. In 1917 a Mrs. Cora Bussey Hillis, whose own children had died and who argued that the State should pay as much attention to the welfare of children as of hogs, got the State Legislature to establish a Child Welfare Research Station at the university.

Supported by State appropriations and $1,000,000 from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fund, this station followed the development of Iowa City children from birth. In its nursery school, the station found that children's I. Q.s rose as much as 20 points. This was unexpected, as it had always been supposed that an individual's I. Q., which measures not knowledge or acquired skills but ability to learn, represented his native intelligence and remained constant.

Five years ago the station's staff began to pay particularly close attention to illegitimate infants whom it placed in foster homes. Average I. Q. of these 275 children's mothers was 87, and their fathers were mostly unskilled laborers with little education. The parents were rated "poor stock" by every standard.

Their children were placed in better than average homes. After one and one-half to six years, the children were tested and their average I. Q. was 116, equal to the average for children of university professors. More remarkable still, 30 children in the group, who had feeble-minded mothers, also had an average I. Q. of 116.

That a bad environment works the other way was proved in a study of 988 orphan age children, whose life was educationally and socially impoverished. Their I. Q.s fell. Crowning study was one conducted in an orphanage where some children were given nursery-school training several hours a day. The school children gained in intelligence while their comrades who did not go to school lost and some became feeble minded. The station's researches show that young children's gains in intelligence tend to be permanent.

Moonfaced, enthusiastic Dr. Stoddard, 41-year-old father of four, is director of Iowa's history-making Child Welfare Research Station and its 60 psychologists. At the conference last week, conducted by famed Ben D. Wood's Educational Records Bureau and several other groups, Dr. Stoddard reported not only his facts but his conclusions about how intelligence is created:

1) Dull parents are as likely to produce potentially bright children as are clever parents.

2) The ancient controversy over nature v. nurture is beside the mark, for intelligence depends upon nature & nurture.

3) Changes in intelligence occur mostly in young children.

4) The way to improve a child's intelligence is to give him security, encourage him in habits of experiencing, inquiring, relating, symbolizing.

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