Do you still believe that IQ is fixed and cannot be altered? Dr Stephanie Thornton looks at the increasing evidence that it is grit and determination, rather than IQ, that can predict success and advises on how we might encourage these tendencies in our s

Two teenagers given the same new thing to master. The task is hard: it’s going to be a real challenge. Both of them struggle. One gets there in the end, the other is just hopelessly confused...

This scenario is played out in every school, every day. Some individuals just seem to be more able to master certain academic challenges than others. In fact, some individuals seem to be more able than others to master almost anything.

This kind of observation led Francis Galton to propose that there are individual differences in “intelligence”: an innate ability that affects everything we do. So pervasive is this concept of “IQ” now that it’s hard to imagine how educators lived without it. Yet they did, until the mid-19th century.

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