Something unusual is happening to student cognition. IQ scores are declining, and the skills most affected are the very ones schools were designed to build. Why?
Thanks for parsing out these interesting findings! I hope that your presentation will prompt action on part of administrators. My husband and I attended a talk about the future of AI in education, and were heartend to hear the speakers conclusion, that learning needs to be effortful and it needs to happen in a relational context. Tech intereferes with both of those requirements. See Learning Fast, and Slow: Why AI will not revolutionize education ://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/learning-fast-and-slow-why-ai-will
Former teacher here. Throughout my education classes in college, I was told, "If you are comfortable, you aren't learning. Learning is difficult." At the same time, putting kids in positions to feel unconfident was demonized, as was rote memorization. Making a kid speak in front of the class if they were shy was seen unnecessarily cruel. Making a kid memorize multiplication charts, parts of speech, or dates in history is seen as wasting brain power since all of those things can be looked up.
When I graduated and started teaching, the advice became even more contradictory. We were told to make things cognitively demanding but at the same time not overwhelming for kids. We were told that we need to make sure kids have good foundational skills so they can build on those skills in higher grades (I taught at the elementary level), but we were encouraged not to waste time repeating the same information if kids don't get it. Just move on. They'll circle back at some point, and the kids may not be cognitively ready for that information now, so don't waste time reteaching it more than once. However, we shouldn't leave gaps in learning.
In practice, this meant that we were supposed to just truck through the curriculum at the curriculum's pace. And if a kid didn't want to do an assignment, they knew that if they repeatedly complained that it was too difficult or repeatedly refused to do it, there was a likelihood that things would be made easier for them. Parents, administrators, or progress monitoring teams would come in and tell you to make it easier in some way. Make them only do half the problems. Or give them the less difficult assignment over the same material. (This would be for kids who are working at close to grade level. There were other options for kids who have an identified disability or are well below grade level.) The idea was that, so long as a kid could show they could complete that task or understand that concept, then 5 problems are as good as 50. There is some truth to that since it can discourage kids to have to complete tons of problems just to prove they can do it.
However, practice is practice and academic rigor can't be cheated. The kids who had strict parents or came from cultures where they take academics very seriously easily outperformed kids that were naturally brighter. The kid who could sit down and read the whole book, not just stop at the first boring spot, would get more practice reading and gain more information from whatever they read. The kid who completely 50 math problems of the same kind saw that math concept played out across more situations (and with more numbers) than the kid who did 5.
In the end, we were lowering academic rigor. Add technology with all its hints and help, and you end up with kids who have never been pushed very hard. If they get uncomfortable, they take it as something being wrong and look to adults to remove the impediment.
Thanks Jared for explaining this so clearly! As an SLP, I have noticed a trend with students struggling to be able to visualize a story they are reading. As you describe above, they have difficulty internalizing the language to create a picture in their brain, which is so critical for reading comprehension and inferential thinking! The problem, screens create the visuals for kids so they don't have to and then the brain never fully develops the ability to visualize. So grateful for your voice and your ability to share the data so clearly.
I hear your plight and am side by side with you. Not 4 years ago they swore we'd never be able to get rid of smartphones from the classroom - I can't wait to see what impossibilities we bring to fruition in the next 4.
Thank you for writing this, Dr. Horvath. After your testimony to the U.S. Senate went viral, the mass takeaway was simply “Gen Z is the first generation that’s dumber than the last.” This piece clarifies what the data actually shows, and that distinction matters.
Rather than framing cognitive scores as a generational ranking, I see these abilities as a reflection of essential human survival qualities. Every generation develops the skills their environment demands. Survival of the fittest has never been about fixed intelligence, it’s about adaptation.
The decline in skills like mental arithmetic, memory retention, and sustained attention isn’t surprising when you consider that technology has systematically replaced the need to exercise those cognitive muscles. We outsourced calculation to calculators, memory to search engines, navigation to GPS, and now reasoning to AI. When a muscle isn’t trained, it atrophies. That’s not a generational deficiency, but a predictable biological response to a changed environment.
What this data actually reveals, I think, are two things:
First, the essential skill set for thriving in today’s world is undergoing a seismic shift, and we haven’t fully mapped what the new requirements look like yet. The cognitive abilities being measured (arithmetic, memorisation, sequential processing) were critical survival skills for previous generations. They may not be the defining skills for what comes next.
Second, and more critically, our education systems are still evaluating and teaching students against traditional benchmarks while the world they’re preparing for has fundamentally changed. We’re measuring 21st-century students with 20th-century yardsticks, and then acting surprised when the scores don’t match. The system isn’t ready for the future it’s supposed to be building.
As a parent, I see this tension firsthand during school visits. Too many schools equate “learning with technology” with “handing a child an iPad.” There’s a profound difference between using technology to cultivate genuine curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving versus using it as a passive content delivery mechanism. Most schools are doing the latter and calling it innovation.
This tells me education is overdue for disruption, not by adding more tech, but by fundamentally rethinking what we’re trying to cultivate in young minds.
What gives me hope in Dr. Horvath’s own data is this: Gen Z actually showed moderate growth on externally scaffolded, visually mediated tasks, pattern recognition, visual reasoning, rapid perceptual processing. Their brains aren’t declining across the board. They’re adapting to a different environment.
I’d be genuinely curious to see more research on where Gen Z outperforms previous generations. Digital fluency, visual literacy, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial instinct, navigating complex information ecosystems etc which aren’t measured by traditional IQ tests, but they may matter more in the decades ahead.
If we only measure what’s been lost against yesterday’s yardstick, we risk missing what’s emerging, and more importantly - what needs to be intentionally developed for the world ahead.
My students don't seem more visually literate or emotionally intelligent than they did 15 years ago. Quite the opposite. Increasingly, I have no patience for "21st century skills" rhetoric. Our brains are evolutionarily adapted to think and process in specific ways. It's tempting to believe that outsourcing our memory and reasoning to Google and AI is just tool-mediated thinking the way shifting from oral to written literacy was, but I think that's a category error; as Paul Kirschner recently wrote, written literacy functions as cognitive "offloading" of information our brains have already processed, whereas AI outsources the cognition entirely.
Modern education is certainly due for a disruption: returning to practices we have known to be effective for helping generations of learners to become independent, creative, flexible thinkers. Explicit instruction. Extensive reading and writing on paper. "Mere" memorization of tier two vocabulary, math facts and algorithms, key dates and timelines of history, etc. Embracing desirable difficulty for students.
Great article on a really troubling data trend. I have no doubt that technology is at least a partial cause of the downturn, as you conclude. But, you may be too quick to dismiss the negative impact of curriculum and teaching. Teachers may be working harder than ever, but philosophical changes to abandon proven techniques and curriculum in favor of politically popular approaches must also share part of the blame. “Boring” old topics such as grammar, memorization, and diagramming sentences are out. New math asks less of students than old math. Teachers are given the impossible task of advancing students with current abilities ranging from well-below grade level to well-above all in the same class period because it aligns with political priorities, not because it works. So many decisions about what happens in the classroom have been made without regard for what helps students master the skills that IQ tests measure. How can these not be part of the problem?
The introduction of NCLB and testing-accountability corresponds roughly with the start of this problem. The rollout is probably too near in time to correspond precisely. But it makes me wonder if the curriculum and instruction changes in schools that have been made to get better scores on tests is related to this issue?
I believe there is an agenda to create a less capable human that is a consumer and compliant citizen. We know more about learning and the brain than ever and yet we are creating educational systems that do not integrate this knowledge into their curricula ... why is that?
I’m a mid-career assessment professional and current psychology PhD student. I’ve never heard of cognitive tasks being classified as internally vs. externally scaffolded. Could you point me toward resources that explain that distinction further? Tia 🙏🏻
I too would like to know more about these concepts. The main distinction I have observed is between cognitive tasks is whether they are abstract or concrete. “Scaffolding” was something the instructor did in early stages of a “lesson”. If the idea has been expanded into another aspect, I’d like to learn more.
I think the intended point is more powerful without the reductive metrics of intelligence, many of which are intertwined with eugenics. Part of why EdTech is ineffective is that it defaults to quantification. The default, which also manifests in standardized testing, intelligence scoring, etc., is precisely where U.S. education went wrong. It is the ledge we need to walk back from.
Technological brilliance is a dazzling flame, but flames consume as much as they illuminate. True salvation is not in escaping nature but in kneeling before her vastness, remembering we are threads in her endless tapestry. Innovation without humility is exile; innovation in service to life is return. The future will not be built against the earth, but within her heartbeat.
I’d argue that much of the school system, while still filled with caring people and increasingly deeper curriculums, has based much of its focus on standardized testing and the process of mining data as though the institution is akin to Walmart looking for patterns in consumer trends or areas to trim overhead. We’re producing less learned kids because our schools are all rational, cost-cutting efficiency machines designed to get the product out the door.
I don't see how this follows from the fact of reduced IQ scores: "In other words, something has shifted within schools themselves. The values, habits, and cognitive skills that education once reliably supported are no longer being cultivated in the same way." Couldn't the primary causative factor be what is happening prior to formal education and outside the classroom?
The part I rarely see discussed is this.
What happens when Gen Z education majors become teachers?
If they never had to struggle through learning without devices or AI, how will they teach kids how to struggle productively?
The death spiral of civilization, of course. Thanks for asking
Teachers, such a quaint thought.
Thanks for parsing out these interesting findings! I hope that your presentation will prompt action on part of administrators. My husband and I attended a talk about the future of AI in education, and were heartend to hear the speakers conclusion, that learning needs to be effortful and it needs to happen in a relational context. Tech intereferes with both of those requirements. See Learning Fast, and Slow: Why AI will not revolutionize education ://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/learning-fast-and-slow-why-ai-will
Former teacher here. Throughout my education classes in college, I was told, "If you are comfortable, you aren't learning. Learning is difficult." At the same time, putting kids in positions to feel unconfident was demonized, as was rote memorization. Making a kid speak in front of the class if they were shy was seen unnecessarily cruel. Making a kid memorize multiplication charts, parts of speech, or dates in history is seen as wasting brain power since all of those things can be looked up.
When I graduated and started teaching, the advice became even more contradictory. We were told to make things cognitively demanding but at the same time not overwhelming for kids. We were told that we need to make sure kids have good foundational skills so they can build on those skills in higher grades (I taught at the elementary level), but we were encouraged not to waste time repeating the same information if kids don't get it. Just move on. They'll circle back at some point, and the kids may not be cognitively ready for that information now, so don't waste time reteaching it more than once. However, we shouldn't leave gaps in learning.
In practice, this meant that we were supposed to just truck through the curriculum at the curriculum's pace. And if a kid didn't want to do an assignment, they knew that if they repeatedly complained that it was too difficult or repeatedly refused to do it, there was a likelihood that things would be made easier for them. Parents, administrators, or progress monitoring teams would come in and tell you to make it easier in some way. Make them only do half the problems. Or give them the less difficult assignment over the same material. (This would be for kids who are working at close to grade level. There were other options for kids who have an identified disability or are well below grade level.) The idea was that, so long as a kid could show they could complete that task or understand that concept, then 5 problems are as good as 50. There is some truth to that since it can discourage kids to have to complete tons of problems just to prove they can do it.
However, practice is practice and academic rigor can't be cheated. The kids who had strict parents or came from cultures where they take academics very seriously easily outperformed kids that were naturally brighter. The kid who could sit down and read the whole book, not just stop at the first boring spot, would get more practice reading and gain more information from whatever they read. The kid who completely 50 math problems of the same kind saw that math concept played out across more situations (and with more numbers) than the kid who did 5.
In the end, we were lowering academic rigor. Add technology with all its hints and help, and you end up with kids who have never been pushed very hard. If they get uncomfortable, they take it as something being wrong and look to adults to remove the impediment.
Thanks Jared for explaining this so clearly! As an SLP, I have noticed a trend with students struggling to be able to visualize a story they are reading. As you describe above, they have difficulty internalizing the language to create a picture in their brain, which is so critical for reading comprehension and inferential thinking! The problem, screens create the visuals for kids so they don't have to and then the brain never fully develops the ability to visualize. So grateful for your voice and your ability to share the data so clearly.
" It isn't that I'm so smart. I stay with the questions much longer." A. Einstein
/
I hear your plight and am side by side with you. Not 4 years ago they swore we'd never be able to get rid of smartphones from the classroom - I can't wait to see what impossibilities we bring to fruition in the next 4.
Thank you for writing this, Dr. Horvath. After your testimony to the U.S. Senate went viral, the mass takeaway was simply “Gen Z is the first generation that’s dumber than the last.” This piece clarifies what the data actually shows, and that distinction matters.
Rather than framing cognitive scores as a generational ranking, I see these abilities as a reflection of essential human survival qualities. Every generation develops the skills their environment demands. Survival of the fittest has never been about fixed intelligence, it’s about adaptation.
The decline in skills like mental arithmetic, memory retention, and sustained attention isn’t surprising when you consider that technology has systematically replaced the need to exercise those cognitive muscles. We outsourced calculation to calculators, memory to search engines, navigation to GPS, and now reasoning to AI. When a muscle isn’t trained, it atrophies. That’s not a generational deficiency, but a predictable biological response to a changed environment.
What this data actually reveals, I think, are two things:
First, the essential skill set for thriving in today’s world is undergoing a seismic shift, and we haven’t fully mapped what the new requirements look like yet. The cognitive abilities being measured (arithmetic, memorisation, sequential processing) were critical survival skills for previous generations. They may not be the defining skills for what comes next.
Second, and more critically, our education systems are still evaluating and teaching students against traditional benchmarks while the world they’re preparing for has fundamentally changed. We’re measuring 21st-century students with 20th-century yardsticks, and then acting surprised when the scores don’t match. The system isn’t ready for the future it’s supposed to be building.
As a parent, I see this tension firsthand during school visits. Too many schools equate “learning with technology” with “handing a child an iPad.” There’s a profound difference between using technology to cultivate genuine curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving versus using it as a passive content delivery mechanism. Most schools are doing the latter and calling it innovation.
This tells me education is overdue for disruption, not by adding more tech, but by fundamentally rethinking what we’re trying to cultivate in young minds.
What gives me hope in Dr. Horvath’s own data is this: Gen Z actually showed moderate growth on externally scaffolded, visually mediated tasks, pattern recognition, visual reasoning, rapid perceptual processing. Their brains aren’t declining across the board. They’re adapting to a different environment.
I’d be genuinely curious to see more research on where Gen Z outperforms previous generations. Digital fluency, visual literacy, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial instinct, navigating complex information ecosystems etc which aren’t measured by traditional IQ tests, but they may matter more in the decades ahead.
If we only measure what’s been lost against yesterday’s yardstick, we risk missing what’s emerging, and more importantly - what needs to be intentionally developed for the world ahead.
My students don't seem more visually literate or emotionally intelligent than they did 15 years ago. Quite the opposite. Increasingly, I have no patience for "21st century skills" rhetoric. Our brains are evolutionarily adapted to think and process in specific ways. It's tempting to believe that outsourcing our memory and reasoning to Google and AI is just tool-mediated thinking the way shifting from oral to written literacy was, but I think that's a category error; as Paul Kirschner recently wrote, written literacy functions as cognitive "offloading" of information our brains have already processed, whereas AI outsources the cognition entirely.
Modern education is certainly due for a disruption: returning to practices we have known to be effective for helping generations of learners to become independent, creative, flexible thinkers. Explicit instruction. Extensive reading and writing on paper. "Mere" memorization of tier two vocabulary, math facts and algorithms, key dates and timelines of history, etc. Embracing desirable difficulty for students.
Very thought provoking.
Great article on a really troubling data trend. I have no doubt that technology is at least a partial cause of the downturn, as you conclude. But, you may be too quick to dismiss the negative impact of curriculum and teaching. Teachers may be working harder than ever, but philosophical changes to abandon proven techniques and curriculum in favor of politically popular approaches must also share part of the blame. “Boring” old topics such as grammar, memorization, and diagramming sentences are out. New math asks less of students than old math. Teachers are given the impossible task of advancing students with current abilities ranging from well-below grade level to well-above all in the same class period because it aligns with political priorities, not because it works. So many decisions about what happens in the classroom have been made without regard for what helps students master the skills that IQ tests measure. How can these not be part of the problem?
The introduction of NCLB and testing-accountability corresponds roughly with the start of this problem. The rollout is probably too near in time to correspond precisely. But it makes me wonder if the curriculum and instruction changes in schools that have been made to get better scores on tests is related to this issue?
This is fascinating. Does anyone have any data to show if the reverse Flynn effect is measurable with the Amish or Hasidic Jewish community?
I believe there is an agenda to create a less capable human that is a consumer and compliant citizen. We know more about learning and the brain than ever and yet we are creating educational systems that do not integrate this knowledge into their curricula ... why is that?
I’m a mid-career assessment professional and current psychology PhD student. I’ve never heard of cognitive tasks being classified as internally vs. externally scaffolded. Could you point me toward resources that explain that distinction further? Tia 🙏🏻
I too would like to know more about these concepts. The main distinction I have observed is between cognitive tasks is whether they are abstract or concrete. “Scaffolding” was something the instructor did in early stages of a “lesson”. If the idea has been expanded into another aspect, I’d like to learn more.
I’m not saying they have zero diagnostic value, but is there any reason you didn’t mention any of the issues, limitations, or history of IQ testing?
I think the intended point is more powerful without the reductive metrics of intelligence, many of which are intertwined with eugenics. Part of why EdTech is ineffective is that it defaults to quantification. The default, which also manifests in standardized testing, intelligence scoring, etc., is precisely where U.S. education went wrong. It is the ledge we need to walk back from.
Technological brilliance is a dazzling flame, but flames consume as much as they illuminate. True salvation is not in escaping nature but in kneeling before her vastness, remembering we are threads in her endless tapestry. Innovation without humility is exile; innovation in service to life is return. The future will not be built against the earth, but within her heartbeat.
I’d argue that much of the school system, while still filled with caring people and increasingly deeper curriculums, has based much of its focus on standardized testing and the process of mining data as though the institution is akin to Walmart looking for patterns in consumer trends or areas to trim overhead. We’re producing less learned kids because our schools are all rational, cost-cutting efficiency machines designed to get the product out the door.
I don't see how this follows from the fact of reduced IQ scores: "In other words, something has shifted within schools themselves. The values, habits, and cognitive skills that education once reliably supported are no longer being cultivated in the same way." Couldn't the primary causative factor be what is happening prior to formal education and outside the classroom?