Edtech fails in two directions. It overclaims, selling a few games as a way to boost intelligence and reshape a life. Or it underclaims, staying so vague that it says nothing at all. Both are dishonest, and both erode trust in the whole category.
The transfer evidence is clear
The training-transfer literature is settled enough to build on. Melby-Lervag and Hulme (2013) meta-analyzed working-memory training and found reliable gains on trained tasks but little transfer to general cognition. Sala and Gobet (2017) reviewed reasoning training and reached the same conclusion. A 2022 Translational Psychiatry trial gave middle-aged adults eight weeks of adaptive n-back training and found strong practice effects with no near or far transfer, at the cognitive level or in brain structure.
The pattern across all of them: you improve at what you train, and sometimes at things closely related. You do not measure broadly. That is not a product failure. It is what the evidence actually shows.
What honest edtech looks like
An honest reasoning product claims a narrow edge. It trains a specific skill, adapts to your level, and scores you the way a psychometric instrument does. It does not claim to raise your IQ, fix your career, or make you a genius.
At IntelligenceMax I built practice scored with item response theory. The model estimates a latent ability behind your answers and calibrates difficulty to it. That is not magic. It is the same math behind standardized tests. What it buys is honesty: we can score practice fairly and measure the right thing, without promising to transform your mind.
Honest claims are the strategy
People do not trust brain training. The instant a product promises a twenty-point IQ jump, everyone discounts everything else it says. Trust survives when the claims do. We prefer narrow ones.
If reasoning practice has a future, it is the narrow kind: getting better at telling what is supported from what is merely plausible, reading closely, spotting hidden assumptions. That is useful on its own. It is also the only claim the research supports.
