Can a Child’s IQ Improve? What the Evidence Actually Shows

Parents ask us this in two very different situations. Some have been handed an assessment report with a number on it and want to know whether that number is a life sentence. Others have a child doing perfectly well and want to know how to make them sharper. The honest answer is more encouraging than the first group fear and less exciting than the second group hope.

What an IQ score actually is

An IQ score is a comparison, not a measurement of a substance. It tells you how a child performed on a particular set of reasoning, memory, language and problem-solving tasks compared with other children of the same age, on that day. It is not a reading of some fixed quantity inside the head, and it is not a prediction of what a person will make of their life.

Scores also move. A child who was ill, exhausted, frightened of the room, assessed in a language they are still learning, or simply having a bad morning will score below their usual level. This matters a great deal in Pakistan, where many children are assessed in English while thinking in Urdu, Saraiki or Punjabi — and where a score can then follow a child through school as though it were a fact about them.

This is exactly why we say on our intellectual disability page that an IQ figure on its own does not define a child or the support they need. Clinical reviews are clear that adaptive functioning — how a child manages actual daily life — and the intensity of support required matter more than the number.

So can it change?

Yes, and the strongest evidence for it points somewhere unglamorous: school.

A 2018 meta-analysis by Ritchie and Tucker-Drob, published in Psychological Science, pooled 142 effect sizes from 42 datasets covering more than 600,000 participants. They used study designs built to separate cause from correlation — controlling for earlier intelligence, using changes in compulsory schooling laws, and comparing children either side of school-entry age cut-offs. Across all three approaches they found a consistent benefit of education on cognitive ability of roughly 1 to 5 IQ points for each additional year of schooling.

Two details make this more interesting than the headline. The effects persisted across the lifespan rather than fading after the exams. And they appeared across every broad category of cognitive ability the researchers examined. Their own summary is worth quoting plainly: education appears to be the most consistent, robust and durable method yet identified for raising intelligence.

That is a real finding and a modest one. A year of school is not going to transform a child, and nobody should read this as a promise. But it means the answer to can my child improve is genuinely yes — through the ordinary, cumulative business of being taught well.

What does not work, or has not been shown to

Brain-training apps and games have been studied extensively, and the recurring finding is that children get better at the trained task and that the improvement does not transfer to general reasoning or to schoolwork. Practising a matching game makes a child good at that matching game.

Supplements marketed for intelligence do not raise IQ in a child who is adequately fed. Correcting a genuine deficiency is a different matter and can help a great deal — iron deficiency in particular affects concentration and energy, and it is common in Pakistani children. That is a blood test and a doctor, not a shelf in a shop. We go through the evidence on food and development properly in our guide to food, feeding and your child’s development.

Classical music, flashcard programmes for babies, and any product promising a genius child belong in the same category as the diets sold for autism: confident claims, thin evidence, and a cost that falls on worried parents. Our guide to weighing research claims sets out how to test a promise like this before you pay for it.

What genuinely helps a child think better

The things with the best support are almost embarrassingly ordinary, which is probably why they sell badly.

Being taught, consistently. That is the finding above. Regular schooling, and being in a class pitched at a level where a child can actually access the work rather than sit through it lost.

Language, in quantity and back-and-forth. Conversation — real turn-taking, not talking at a child — builds vocabulary and reasoning together. Reading and talking about stories does the same. It does not matter which language you do it in.

Sleep. A tired child performs below their ability on everything, every day. Of all the levers available to most families, this is the one with the biggest gap between how much it matters and how much attention it gets. Our sleep home program is there if bedtime is the battle.

Hearing and vision that work. A child who cannot hear the teacher or see the board looks slow and is not. This is checked far too rarely before conclusions are drawn.

Treating what is actually in the way. An undetected language difficulty, attention difficulty, or reading difficulty depresses performance across the board — including on the tests used to measure ability. Address it and the picture often looks quite different.

If your child has been given a low score

Take it as one piece of information gathered on one day, not a verdict. Ask what was assessed and in which language. Ask what the assessor thought about your child’s attention, mood and effort during it. Ask what the score means for the support your child should get — which is the only part that changes anything practically.

And be careful about how the number is spoken about at home. Children absorb the story told about them, and a child who decides early that they are the stupid one will stop trying long before their ability runs out. What we see far more often than a genuine ceiling is a child who gave up.

The short version

Yes, cognitive ability can improve, and the most reliable route we know of is steady, well-pitched teaching over years. No app, supplement or programme has been shown to do what schooling does. And an IQ score is a snapshot taken under particular conditions, which deserves respect as information and no authority at all as a prophecy.

If you have a report you do not understand, or you think your child is being underestimated, bring it to us. Our developmental assessment looks at the whole child rather than a single figure, and a consultation is Rs 1,500 and lasts up to 50 minutes — message or call +92 301 6424265.

Source

• Ritchie SJ, Tucker-Drob EM. How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Science. PubMed 29911926