Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Freeman research vs A Nation Deceived etc.

Actually I'm across the water in Ireland, another system entirely...but we get a lot of UK press reported here, hence my interest in Joan Freeman's book and the articles which quoted her.

Our system is different again. At the start of secondary school, at age 12/13, students study about 11 subjects for their Junior Certificate Examination. English, Irish, Maths, a modern language, History, Geography, Science, Civic Social & Political Education (CSPE)and Religion are common obligatory subjects in many schools. Then you can choose another two or three from choices such as Latin, Art, Music, Classical Studies, Technical Graphics. This exam is taken at the end of Third Year.

Most schools offer what is known as Transition Year (TY) which is the 4th year of secondary school and in which students take a break from formal exam preparation. They have an opportunity to develop skills across a range of non-academic and academic areas such as volunteering, drama, work-experience etc. They continue to study core subjects of English, Irish and Maths, and some of their other subject choices.

In 5th and 6th Year students prepare for the Leaving Certificate Exam. Their results are calculated in grades which are each assigned a number of points. The points serve as entry requirements for university courses. Students usually take 7 or sometimes 8 subjects with the best 6 results counted for Points. For entry to Irish universities English, Irish and Maths is required, so almost all students take those. There are almost 30 subjects offered, although most schools can only schedule far fewer than that. Some students take an extra subject outside school, but this is considered a risk because the courses are content-heavy and the workload is considerable.

We have no formal provision for gifted learners here. It is prohibited by our 1998 Education Act for any school to admit students on the basis of ability, so schools for gifted learners do not exist. We have a long way to go to have any state provision of services for gifted children (called Exceptionally Able here). Most of our (scarce!) resources go to supporting those at the other end of the ability scale.

That's it in a nutshell really!

Yes, I gave history up when I was about 14 - I had THE most boring history teacher in the world, and he totally put me off the subject, unfortunately. Also yes- you study all your GCSE subjects for the whole 2 years - and then when you do your 'A' Levels, you study just those 3 or 4 subjects for 2 more years.

Wow! I can see advantages and disadvantages.
Grinity

Okay, I totally, completely do not understand these numbers. Maybe someone else can help.

Her data was collected in 1974, when the population of the UK was around 56 million. Of that number, probably around 11 million were kids under 18 (basing this on current numbers of 14.1 million 20 and under and making an estimate).

An IQ of 170 on an SB occurs once in 652,600 people. So finding 13 kids with that IQ means she enrolled more than 75% of this total population from all over the UK. Really? Wow. Are there any other people here who've identified and consented 75% of a national population of people with some very rare and non-obvious characteristic? If so, please tell me your secret. See arithmetic at end.

Yet I think her sample size was only 210, so she should have been surprised to find even one kid with an IQ of 145, let alone 170, even among a self-selected high IQ group.

More confusing is that she only had 46 people with IQs under 120. This is only 22% of her total population, yet an IQ of at least 120 occurs in 1 out of every 11 people. At a minimum, nearly everyone in her random-kids group (70 kids, right?) should have had an IQ below 120, yet even if all 46 were in the non-gifted group, they'd only comprise about 2/3 of it.

Bottom line: this data smells to me. It's puzzling why the reviewers didn't pick this up.

Maths:

13*652,600 = ~8.5 million
8.5 million/11 million = 0.77
0.77 * 100 = 77%

Quuuuiiite.

I forget which version of the SB it was she was using, though - if it was something with (then) outdated norms, the Flynn effect would account for some of it.

I'd actually also be interested to hear from someone qualified to give IQ tests what they think of the snippets of her testing children that appear in the Channel 4 "Child Genius" programs. At this distance I forget the details, but there were at least one or two occasions when she gushed that a child's answer (e.g. to a vocabulary definition question) was perfect when it seemed far from perfect to (admittedly utterly amateur) me - e.g., IIRR, she asked for similarities and differences between X and Y and the child gave only similarities. I did just wonder whether she might be systematically over-scoring the children she tested - which would also go some way to explaining these results (particularly if her own biases also influenced *which* children she over-scored most). One would hope this couldn't happen, and I'm certainly not asserting that it did; but it does seem clear that there's at least a bit of room for interpretation in which one relies on the tester's skill and lack of bias (indeed, were it not so, maybe one wouldn't need to be a qualified tester to administer the tests).

Having agreed (again) that the data smells, let me nevertheless point out one place where I think it doesn't smell quite as badly as you say.

The ones you're calling random kids were not random; they were matched for SE level and school class with children who were parentally identified as highly-gifted. Factor in that IQ is not (and was not) nearly as socially acceptable a topic in the UK as in the US - and "giftedness" as a phenomenon is identified much less - it wouldn't be surprising if the children whose parents identified them as gifted, against this social pressure, tended to be quite extreme. Then factor in that IQ is correlated with SE level and with educational background, and it's not surprising that children from the same background and schools as the identified-gifted children were themselves far from average. If in addition to all this the numbers were on a test with outdated norms, that might do the rest for the paucity of children with IQs under 120. I don't see how to stretch this argument to account for the crazy numbers she has at the very top, or for the apparent ability to match raw scores on Raven's.

(Note: the kids were ID'ed as gifted rather than highly gifted.)

Okay, here are a couple things I see:

1. She never provides a definition of what constituted gifted in her study subjects. What kind of study doesn't define the central point, especially when all you need is a test score?

2. See quote:


(By triad, she means the three kids in each individual comparison group.) So a major problem I have here is that she says that the control subjects weren't labelled as gifted. But, umm, if some were attending a school that selected for high ability kids, how could her controls possibly have avoided being labelled as, at a minimum, really smart?

Also, this is irrespective of socio-economic class. The paper says that subjects were matched by socio-economic class, not that they were all members of a single s-e class. So I stand by my assertion that the IQs of the second control group shouldn't have been so hugely skewed to the right. Remember, this was 1974 as well, and she herself admits that social mobility when the parents were growing up wouldn't have been the same as now (so, more high IQ people in the working classes).



See, for me this highlights another weakness of the paper. Namely, she's making you guess stuff that should have been spelled out.

One more thing:


Is it me, or does this statement undermine her anecdotes about some gifties becoming janitors or not using their PhDs?

Well, she's not using either as a technical term, and she's inconsistent, and the children were identified without having been tested, so it's unclear (as you say).

Your quote appears to contradict this one, which is what I was remembering - indeed I quoted it in the very first post of this thread:
This really isn't ambiguous, although maybe she contradicts herself elsewhere!

I thought I remembered a lot of media fuss not very long ago about the fact that social mobility in the UK has not improved since then, actually. (Big political hot potato: one argument is that grammar schools were very good for social mobility.)

Does an unquantified "most" on a sentence with an undefined "better" undermine an anecdote? Who can say, what would it even mean? Let's not waste any more energy on this stuff.

I agree in some ways and not in others. What bothers me the most about this kind of "research" is that she has a high profile and presents herself as being an expert. Everything else aside, the fact that she didn't define "gifted" in that paper ("Here's a cutoff number, and here's how I got it for all these kids") renders the whole thing bogus to me.

Unfortunately, people listen to her, and therefore, from what I'm reading in this paper, some kids whose parents or teachers listen to her may not be told that they're cognitively gifted. Which means that they might go many years without understanding why they're so different from everyone else (and possibly blaming themselves for not fitting in).

Bottom line, I think that it's wrong to withhold information like this from people. It needs to be presented correctly and put in context, but still, kids have a right to know if people around them do.

Just my 2c.

Val

But what is the point?

Whether it is this Freeman research or the longitudianl research done with Hunter students, what makes a successful outcome for a child?

There are PG kids without acceleration that are highly successful, look at Sotomayer. And PG kids who have all kids of acceleration, challenges and make nothing of their lives.

After reading "The Element" by Ken Robinson, the ingredient that really matters, besides hard work, is passion. Without the passion and drive, you just won't be notable. Or take advantage of opportunities, according to him.

So when I see research that clearly defines "what exactly was the defining factor or factors, I am interested.

Ren