When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act in 2004 (IDEIA 2004), local educational agencies (LEA) were permitted to use a Response-to-Intervention (RtI) approach for identifying children with possible learning disabilities for special education. Furthermore, IDEIA 2004 no longer required LEAs to establish an…

Criticizes claims in "The Bell Curve" that a high value for heritability of intelligence constrains the extent to which environmental changes can increase intelligence. Cites adoption studies and the increasing intelligence of successive cohorts of U.S. children as evidence that intelligence can increase substantially without heroic…

This evaluation of cognitive change in Head Start children focused on changes in performance as opposed to changes in competence; specifically, that Binet test performance improves as a function of experience with Binet examiners. The study involved 93 children assigned to four groups who were tested for IQ gains during a 6-week Head Start program…

The Ramey and Haskins intervention experiment is examined. Narrow transfer of training from cognitive intervention techniques to IQ test performance in early childhood, rather than enhancement of the g factor itself, is hypothesized as a cause of the typical fadeout of early IQ gains in later childhood. (Author/RD)

Ramey and Haskins report two findings of major importance: absence of decline in test scores and absence of mother-child correlation for treated children. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author)

This book is organized in nine parts, as follows. Part I, "Preface," includes an account of how the author went from the rather esoteric research on theoretical problems in serial rote learning to research on the inheritance of mental abilities and its implications for education. Part II, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?," is…

Infants judged to be at risk for subnormal intellectual growth were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups which varied as to educational curriculum activities. Two types of evidence, group differences and parent-child IQ correlations, demonstrate the importance of early environments in intellectual development. (Author/RD)