Intellectual giftedness
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average and is also known as high potential. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. These consequences sometimes include stigmatizing and social exclusion. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above or around the 130 mark. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
The various definitions of intellectual giftedness include either general high ability or specific abilities. For example, by some definitions, an intellectually gifted person may have a striking talent for mathematics without equally strong language skills. In particular, the relationship between artistic ability or musical ability and the high academic ability usually associated with high IQ scores is still being explored, with some authors referring to all of those forms of high ability as "giftedness", while other authors distinguish "giftedness" from "talent". There is still much controversy and much research on the topic of how adult performance unfolds from trait differences in childhood, and what educational and other supports best help the development of adult giftedness.
Identification
Overview
The identification of giftedness first emerged after the development of IQ tests for school placement. It has since become an important issue for schools, as the instruction of gifted students often presents special challenges. During the twentieth century, gifted children were often classified via IQ tests; other identification procedures have been proposed but are only used in a minority of cases in most public schools in the English-speaking world. Developing useful identification procedures for students who could benefit from a more challenging school curriculum is an ongoing problem in school administration.Because of the key role that gifted education programs in schools play in the identification of gifted individuals, both children and adults, it is worthwhile to examine how schools define the term "gifted".
Definitions
Since Lewis Terman in 1916, psychometricians and psychologists have sometimes equated giftedness with high IQ. Later researchers have argued that intellect cannot be expressed in such a unitary manner, and have suggested more multifaceted approaches to intelligence.Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s has provided data that supports notions of multiple components to intelligence. This is particularly evident in the reexamination of "giftedness" by Sternberg and Davidson in their collection of articles Conceptions of Giftedness. The many different conceptions of giftedness presented, although distinct, are interrelated in several ways. Most of the investigators define giftedness in terms of multiple qualities, not all of which are intellectual. IQ scores are often viewed as inadequate measures of giftedness. Motivation, high self-concept, and creativity are key qualities in many of these broadened conceptions of giftedness.
Joseph Renzulli's "three ring" definition of giftedness is one frequently mentioned conceptualization of giftedness. Renzulli's definition, which defines gifted behaviors rather than gifted individuals, is composed of three components as follows: Gifted behavior consists of behaviors that reflect an interaction among three basic clusters of human traits—above average ability, high levels of task commitment, and high levels of creativity. Individuals capable of developing gifted behavior are those possessing or capable of developing this composite set of traits and applying them to any potentially valuable area of human performance. Persons who manifest or are capable of developing an interaction among the three clusters require a wide variety of educational opportunities and services that are not ordinarily provided through regular instructional programs.
In Identifying Gifted Children: A Practical Guide, Susan K. Johnsen explains that gifted children all exhibit the potential for high performance in the areas included in the United States' federal definition of gifted and talented students:
There is a federal government statutory definition of gifted and talented students in the United States.
This definition has been adopted partially or completely by the majority of the individual states in the United States. Most states have a definition similar to that used in the State of Texas:
The major characteristics of these definitions are the diversity of areas in which performance may be exhibited, the comparison with other groups, and the use of terms that imply a need for development of the gift.
Another understanding of giftedness is that of asynchronous development. This asynchrony has also been referred to as "dyssynchrony". It can be within the person; where the child has distinctly different development levels socially, emotionally, physically, or even between different academic areas. It can also be asynchrony between the child and their social and/or academic environment.
The Columbus Group came together in 1991 to talk about their concerns that the current trends in gifted education focused overwhelmingly on achievement and the future impact these students could have on the world, and were missing focusing on and valuing who those children are in the moment, and what their lived experiences were like. They created a definition of giftedness that centers around asynchrony and intensity, which first appeared in print in an article titled "Giftedness: The View from Within". It states that:
"Giftedness is asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching and counseling in order for them to develop optimally."This definition shares many commonalities with the definitions above, but also emphasizes the parenting and counseling differences gifted students may need to be fully supported.
Neuroscience of giftedness
Since the late 90s, the development of the brain of people with high IQ scores has been shown to be different to that of people with average IQ scores. A longitudinal study over 6 years has shown that high-IQ children have a thinner cerebral cortex when young, which then grows quickly and becomes significantly thicker than the other children's by the time they become teenagers.Identification methods
| Pupil | KABC-II | WISC-III | WJ-III |
| Asher | 90 | 95 | 111 |
| Brianna | 125 | 110 | 105 |
| Colin | 100 | 93 | 101 |
| Danica | 116 | 127 | 118 |
| Elpha | 93 | 105 | 93 |
| Fritz | 106 | 105 | 105 |
| Georgi | 95 | 100 | 90 |
| Hector | 112 | 113 | 103 |
| Imelda | 104 | 96 | 97 |
| Jose | 101 | 99 | 86 |
| Keoku | 81 | 78 | 75 |
| Leo | 116 | 124 | 102 |
In psychology, identification of giftedness is usually based on IQ scores. The threshold of IQ = 130 is defined by statistical rarity. By convention, the 5% of scores who fall more than two standard deviations from the mean are considered atypical. In the case of intelligence, these 5% are partitioned to both sides of the range of scores, and include the 2.5% who score more than two standard deviations below the mean and the 2.5% who score more than two standard deviations above the mean. Because the average of IQ is 100 and its standard deviation is 15, this rule places the threshold for intellectual disability at IQ = 70, and the symmetrical threshold for giftedness at IQ = 130. This arbitrary threshold is used by most psychologists in most countries.
While IQ testing has the advantage of providing a standardised basis for the diagnosis of giftedness, psychologists are expected to interpret IQ scores in the context of all available information: standardized intelligence tests ignore actual achievement and can fail to detect giftedness. For example, a specific learning disorder such as dyslexia or dyspraxia can easily decrease scores on intelligence tests and hide true intellectual ability.
In educational settings, many schools in the US use a variety of assessments of students' capability and potential when identifying gifted children. These may include portfolios of student work, classroom observations, achievement tests, and IQ test scores. Most educational professionals accept that no single criterion can be used in isolation to accurately identify a gifted child.
One of the criteria used in identification may be an IQ test score. Until the late 1960s, when "giftedness" was defined solely based on an IQ score, a school district simply set an arbitrary score and a student either did or did not "make the cut". This method is still used by many school districts because it is simple and objective. Although a high IQ score is not the sole indicator of giftedness, usually if a student has a very high IQ, that is a significant indicator of high academic potential. Because of this consideration, if a student scores highly on an IQ test, but performs at an average or below-average level academically, school officials may think that this issue warrants further investigation as an example of underachievement. However, scholars of educational testing point out that a test-taker's scores on any two tests may vary, so a lower score on an achievement test than on an IQ test neither necessarily indicates that the test-taker is underachieving nor necessarily that the school curriculum is under-challenging.
IQ classification varies from one publisher to another. IQ tests have poor reliability for determining test-takers' rank order at higher IQ levels, and are perhaps only effective at determining whether a student is gifted rather than distinguishing among levels of giftedness. The Wechsler test manuals have standard score ceilings of 160. However, higher ceilings, including scores into the exceptionally and profoundly gifted range, exist for the WISC-IV and WISC-V, which were specifically normed on large samples of gifted children. Today, the Wechsler child and adult IQ tests are by far the most commonly used IQ tests in hospitals, schools, and private psychological practice. Older versions of the Stanford-Binet test, now obsolete, and the Cattell IQ test purport to yield IQ scores of 180 or higher, but those scores are not comparable to scores on currently normed tests. The Stanford-Binet Third Revision yields consistently higher numerical scores for the same test-taker than scores obtained on current tests. This has prompted some authors on identification of gifted children to promote the Stanford-Binet form L-M, which has long been obsolete, as the only test with a sufficient ceiling to identify the exceptionally and profoundly gifted, despite the Stanford-Binet L-M never having been normed on a representative national sample. Because the instrument is outdated, current results derived from the Stanford-Binet L-M generate inflated and inaccurate scores. The IQ assessment of younger children remains debated.
While many people believe giftedness is a strictly quantitative difference, measurable by IQ tests, some authors on the "experience of being" have described giftedness as a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world, which in turn affects every experience had by the gifted individual. This view is doubted by some scholars who have closely studied gifted children longitudinally.