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I once heard a Math professor say that children were able to use more methods for doing basic arithmetic when they first started school than when they'd gone to school for a year, or something of that nature.

My anecdotal experience correlates with this. First grade, with its required use of "bubble math," was very detrimental to my arithmetic abilities I'd acquired at home and during Montessori-style preschool.

So naturally, when a child goes to do an IQ test, which is basically a test in problem solving, he/she wouldn't know how to do it, because he/she would have been used to not having to solve problems.

Some IQ tests seem to test certain kinds of problem solving, like identifying patterns in a grid. Some few individuals may be able to identify the patterns without any prior experience, but I suspect most who answer such questions correctly do so from knowledge of a general class of problems, not intuition.




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