Re: Hmm - I think someone may have a short career

John Brockbank wrote: 
<  Their research was based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and
a further study of 20,000 students. >

I assume that the tests were done 'properly' as might have been the ones I took for the 11 plus. That is, there were several tests of varying types etc. taken over a few weeks. If it is assumed that there were 5 tests for each of the people, and of course that the people selected for the tests were a correctly taken sample with 100% takeup then the half million tests would have taken a long time and been very costly. How did these two people have the resources to even select a decent sample in the first place? Without a good sample (that is, every single person in the population above a certain age has an exactly equal chance of being selected) statistics such as the standard errors of the sample means have no meaning. So, either the story is just a fabrication or the report has many wrong numbers. (See for example today's Guardian which says that over 64% of Americans are obese with the worst State being Mississippi at 29%. The Guardian has similar rubbish almost weekly - I guess it is written by Eng Lit students)



John I am not sure, but my guess is that what they report is a meta-analysis (i.e., a quantitative literature review of many - sometimes hundreds - of studies mostly carried out by other people). Perhaps it is a meta-analysis combined with IQ tests from Northern Ireland schools - I'm guessing the latter from reading some of the titles of papers returned by a google scholar search.

There are persistent reports of sex differences in IQ, especially in quantitative sections of the IQ test. See for example

http://www.wikimirror.com/Sex_and_intelligence

but note that other authors have objected to that article.

The newpaper report makes it clear that what ever supposed IQ differences exist, women are actually doing much better than men in the real world of education.

Lance
.

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