We grandparents will do anything to help our grandkids, no matter how difficult. The evidence is in, there is one hugely important and very simple thing we can do that will just about ensure their success in life…
By Shweta Iyer
Most parents nurture a secret desire that their child will grow up to be an Einstein or a Rosalind Franklin. While the market is flooded with a number of commercial products like DVDs, books, games, etc., that claim to boost a child’s intelligence, new research shows improving a most basic skill in child years will lead to development of higher IQ later on in life: reading.
“Since reading is an ability that can be improved, our findings have implications for reading instruction,” Stuart J. Ritchie, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Early remediation of reading problems might aid not only the growth of literacy, but also more general cognitive abilities that are of critical importance across the lifespan.” Ritchie and his colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and King’s College London conducted this research, published in the journal Child Development.
Psychologists over the years, in an attempt to understand intelligence, have divided it into two categories: fluid and crystallized intelligence. While fluid intelligence defines our problem-solving skills, crystallized intelligence is the ability to gather and retain new information, like directions to your house or the name of a country’s capital, and the ability to read and process information. It improves with age, and reading skills and vocabulary are generally a measure of this kind of intelligence.
The researchers of the current study attempted to find this correlation between early reading and improved IQ. To do so, they tracked 1,890 identical twins who were part of the Twins Early Development Study, an ongoing longitudinal study in the United Kingdom whose participants were representative of the population as a whole.
The researchers looked at the participants’ scores in reading and intelligence tests taken when the twins were 7, 9, 10, 12, and 16. Using statistical models they determined if differences in reading ability between each pair of twins were linked to later differences in intelligence. Earlier differences in intelligence were also taken into account.
Since each pair of twins had the same advantage regarding genes and home environment, any intellectual differences between them had to be because of experiences that the twins didn’t share, such as a particularly effective teacher or a group of friends that encouraged reading. The researchers found that differences in reading between the twins during their childhood years affected their later differences in intelligence. Reading was associated not only with measures of verbal intelligence (vocabulary tests), but with measures of nonverbal intelligence as well (reasoning tests). The differences in reading that were linked to differences in later intelligence were present by age 7, which may indicate that even early reading skills affect intellectual development.