More School May Mean Higher IQ Scores

12 January 2012

Seventh-graders in Norway, where an IQ study took place, set a Guinness world record in 2008 for simultaneously performed resuscitation attempts

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

A study in Norway has found that students who stayed in school longer than others their same age scored higher on intelligence tests.

In the middle of the nineteen fifties, the government began requiring students to attend school until the age of sixteen instead of fourteen. Communities had almost twenty years to make the change. So some students went to school for seven years while others went for at least nine years.

This difference gave researchers the chance to see if the additional schooling had any effect on intellectual development.

All young men in Norway must take a test of their cognitive ability at age nineteen in preparation for required military service. This is commonly called an IQ, or intelligence quotient, test.

The researchers compared the test results of one hundred seven thousand young men to their years of school. Taryn Ann Galloway is a researcher at the University of Oslo.

TARYN ANN GALLOWAY: "The young men who were basically forced to stay in school for two years longer actually did have higher IQs. So, based on that, we were able to say that increasing compulsory schooling did actually have an effect on their cognitive abilities as measured at nineteen years of age."