Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Spooky.

That article was similar to a lot of pseudoscience I've reviewed:

- She's probably taught a few hundred students at most in ten years and doesn't seem to be aware of the rare ones with very high ability (let alone the very rare ones).

- She didn't say anything about testing her ideas objectively. So there's a high chance that her conclusions are subject to confirmation bias (accept the information supporting my idea, ignore anything else). This is the worst thing about these types. They have no clue about how to actually test an idea, and most or all of the ones I've met have no desire to do so.

- The analogy to tooth development was completely goofy.

- By ignoring the nuances she bleats about, she makes things even harder for gifted students.

There's nothing quite like the arrogance of ignorance.

Reading doesn't develop the same way in every child. It developed differently in all three of my kids, for example, and differently again in my neighbor's kids. Like linear growth, there are overall patterns, but few kids fit them exactly and many are way outside the bounds.

I agree with your note about not being made to read reading challenging books too frequently. But "challenging" has to be defined by the person doing the reading, not a teacher who decided that Harry Potter is too hard for a given age group. Don't forget that being made to constantly read books that are too easy can also be detrimental.

Completely agree with Ultramarina. No offensive but "reading specialists" with this kind of mindset practically destroyed my son's love for reading. Actually they did destroy it. He is just now regaining it. And his comprehension is HIGH much higher than his decoding and always has been. He has always like to read books just a touch too hard. He does look for the sweet spot for him - if it's too hard he will abandon it (but he needs to be the one making that determination) but if it is too easy - forget it. He explains it this way - "if I am reading I want it to be worthwhile. I want words I don't know, I want the struggle. I NEED it." Granted, my kid is a bit weird. But now we both groan when we hear the title "reading specialist" and brace ourselves.

Amen.

"Gifted children must get the dignity that his/her intellect deserves. When kids underachieve it's because we teach it so well."

Well, it could be accurate for a significant subset of the human population.

I mean it could be 90% of what she sees.

Actually, while one child's reading development may look differently than another's, with the exception of some type of reading issues (deficits in phonological or orthographic processing, hyperlexia etc..) reading does develop the same in most children. It is an overflow of language development and exceptional readers generally take the same path to reading. They may do so on a different timeline but they follow the same steps. Sorry if I am not drawn in by anecdotal evidence but I would have given this article no weight if this teachers anecdotal experiences were not consistent with current empirically validated research. I think it is important to remember that very gifted children are outliers and not take offense to an article that is obviously not meant to address their experience.

psychland, I read widely in educational research for work. Though this is certainly not my specialty, I have never seen any research that supports this theory:


Can you point me to it? Everything I have read about precocious readers supports the general idea that precocious readers continue to be strong readers. This doesn't mean children who are NOT precocious readers won't catch up, of course.

Yes, I have seen research that points to the conclusion that children must enjoy reading if they are to learn to love it, but I think we know that. That's not at all the same claim that reading books for fun that contain words a child does not know will harm him or her. It's also not the same as saying that forcing a child to read books way above his level in school is harmful. (I agree. But we are not talking about that! We are talking about withholding books from eager readers who are motivated to read them because the adult "knows better.")

Yes, I have known children who carried around Harry Potter without having read it or said they had read Harry Potter when they hadn't, but I don't know any who actually sat there for hours on end forcing their way through it when it was way beyond them for the sake of accolade. Children are easily bored little beings. My own daughter started reading Little Women in second grade, possibly because she thought it seemed impressive. I didn't say anything. She got about 40 pages in and gave up. It was not at her level at that time. I didn't need to snatch it away from her, because she was not going to sit there and push through it.

I can't think of a better way to depress and bore my two young precocious readers than to have limited them to books that contained only one word total that they did not know.

We keep seeing references to "the research" in this thread, but this is the first research-based information I found: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/reports/Trifolds/A9403P.pdf

Completely flaky. The author is basically saying that if a child happens to be an early reader, then as a consequence, the parents will push the child into reading books that are too hard.