I just read an article with an interesting finding in Science News: “Poverty may tax thinking abilities.” The research, originally published in Science, claims that financial concerns that arise from living in poverty “damages reasoning abilities about as much as going a night without sleep or losing 13 IQ points.”
To put the numbers in perspective, 15 points on an IQ test is one standard deviation. Assuming a normal distribution, a 13-point drop in IQ would move an average student from the 50th percentile to approximately the 20th percentile. In other words, if the numbers in this article are correct, a high-poverty school with students of average cognitive ability could expect their students to score in the bottom 20 percent solely because of the effects of the students’ current state of poverty on their test-taking ability.
