Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Gifted or Not?

In NYC, they went with the OLSAT so they could identify cheaply across the whole city. Anyone could take it, it was free -- though I do not know how well it identifies.

Anyway, the result was that there were less kids identified as "gifted" in the low socio-economic groups. Asians do the best, whether in low income groups or not though. In fact, because so many kids did not qualify in lower socio-economic groups, they had to close some of the classes they had before the OLSAT testing, where they just relied on putting "smart" kids in them. So here is an experiment to identify kids in a very large urban environment. And the testing goes from pre-K through elementary grades.

And if challenge is an acquired taste, then isn' it a matter of habit and confidence. I know my kid would rather play with friends than do homework or practice piano but that is not an option. And when kids are encouraged and build their confidence, they rise to challenge, whatever their IQ. What does giftedness have to do with it?

Ren

IQ testing isn't usually what is used to id kids as gifted. Group ability tests, achievement, and scales filled out by teachers are the std fare. Affluent parents with gifted kids who underachieve or who are not convergent thinkers who are identified on multiple choice group tests may be able to pay for private IQ testing. Poor families usually are not able to do so and also may just take at face value what the school says -- your kid isn't gifted b/c his group test scores say so.

Use Occam's Razor. Much research has found East Asians to have an average IQ of 105, and blacks to average 85, so big "disparities" in the fractions of the two groups scoring above 130 should be expected.

My life experience tells me that for purposes of school Giftedness has nothing to do with any specific IQ score. Giftedness is having special educational needs due to being advanced relative to what is expected in their neighborhood school. Teachers have to try and reach the majority of kids in their room. Only a few very skilled teachers can create workable experiences for every kid. Thanks so much for those few but for now the conditions just don't exist for every or most teachers to do this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/12/race-intelligence-iq-science

Leon J. Kamin is professor of psychology at Northeastern University; he is author of The Science and Politics of IQ, and with R. C. Lewontin and Steven Rose of Not in Our Genes.

His article is an expanded version of a review that appeared in Scientific American February 1995.
"The publicity barrage with which the book was launched might suggest that The Bell Curve has something new to say; it doesn't. The authors, in this most recent eruption of the crude biological determinism that permeates the history of IQ testing, assert that scientific evidence demonstrates the existence of genetically determined differences in intelligence among social classes and races. They cite some 1,OOO references from the social and biological sciences, and make a number of suggestions for changing social policies. The pretense is made that there is some logical, "scientific" connection between evidence culled from those cited sources and the authors' policy recommendations. Those policies would not be necessary or humane even if the cited evidence were valid. But I want to concentrate on what I regard as two disastrous failings of the book. First, the caliber of the data cited by Herrnstein and Murray is, at many critical points, pathetic and their citations of those weak data are often inaccurate. Second, their failure to distinguish between correlation and causation repeatedly leads Herrnstein and Murray to draw invalid conclusions." (pp 81-82)
"Herrnstein and Murray rely heavily upon the work of Richard Lynn, whom they described as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences", from whose advice they have "benefited especially". "

"I will not mince words. Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity. But to anybody familiar with Lynn's work and background, this comes as no surprise. Lynn is widely known to be an associate editor of the vulgarly racist journal Mankind Quarterly; his 1991 paper comparing the intelligence of "Negroids" and "Negroid-Caucasoid hybrids" appeared in its pages. He is a major recipient of financial support from the nativist and eugenically oriented Pioneer Fund. It is a matter of shame and disgrace that two eminent social scientists, fully aware of the sensitivity of the issues they address, take as their scientific tutor Richard Lynn, and accept uncritically his surveys of research. Murray, in a newspaper interview, asserted that he and Herrnstein had not inquired about the "antecedents" of the research they cite. "We used studies that exclusively, to my knowledge, meet the tests of scholarship." What tests of scholarship?" (p. 86)
That is the kind of brave new world toward which The Bell Curve points. Whether or not our country moves in that direction depends upon our politics, not upon science. To pretend, as Herrnstein and Murray do, that the 1,000-odd items in their bibliography provide a "scientific" basis for their reactionary politics may be a clever political tactic, but it is a disservice to and abuse of science. That should be clear even to those scientists (I am not one of them) who are comfortable with Herrnstein and Murray's politics. We owe it to our fellow citizens to explain that the reception of their book had nothing to do either with its scientific merit or the novelty of its message." (p. 105)

he arguments they promote are used widely by white supremacist groups to legitimize racial hatred.


http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/genes-race-and-iq.html
"The racial I.Q. gap, he argues, is �purely environmental.� For one thing, it�s been shrinking: over the last 30 years, the measured I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped from 15 points to 9.5 points...As for the alleged I.Q. superiority of East Asians over American whites, that turns out to be an artifact of sloppy comparisons; when I.Q. tests are properly normed, Americans actually score slightly higher than East Asians.

If I.Q. differences are indeed largely environmental, what might help eliminate group disparities? The most dramatic results come from adoption. When poor children are adopted by upper-middle-class families, they show an I.Q. gain of 12 to 16 points."

And since I don't trust myself to be restrained in my own words this is from the NYT review Andrew Sullivan linked to above:

"Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned...its real value lies in Nisbett�s forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls �the new environmentalism,� which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q. ... evidence � drawn from neuroscience and genetics, as well as from studies of educational interventions and parenting styles."

deacongirl,

It is clear that the scientific evidence shows that the presence or absence of an enriched environment starting very early in life has a profound impact on later IQ. It is worth noting that the early environment in many poor families is not only not "enriched" but is, in fact, profoundly deprived in many of the dimensions that we know directly impact IQ, such as levels of verbal interaction and direct parental involvement, duration of breastfeeding, presence of adequate nutrition, early exposure to books and quantitative concepts, and opportunity to engage in exploratory play. Deprived environments depress IQ scores regardless of the "genetic potential" of the child.

... and to continue that thought, many of the adults in homes like that are simply not in a position to do much advocacy on a child's behalf.

It may be a matter of financial resources, lack of parental education or awareness, or a matter of a simple lack of time in a single working parent, but most kids from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes won't have guardians/parents that can help them to be identified even if they should be.

Where would most of our kids be under those conditions? Languishing in classrooms where they are slowly crushed into conformity? Or labeled as "problem" kids who are disruptive and defiant?

Most teachers would not identify such children as likely candidates for the relatively scarce "extra" resources of a gifted program, assuming that one even exists in the first place (and in many low-income neighborhoods, it does not).

__Parents who went unidentified may have little reason to suspect that a child who seems "just like I was" is a gifted child, and as most of us know, schools aren't necessarily going to bring it up if parents do not.
______________________

Heritability of cognitive potential exists, certainly. Twin studies have shown that it may be as high as 80% correlatable to genetic potential, in fact-- but that says nothing about racial characteristics, and the fact of the matter is that most adoptive homes are likely to be on the "enriched" side of things as well. Few adoptive parents are going to be in the socioeconomically disadvantaged category and have an adopted twin for a study, so I'm guessing that the relative differences between adoptive homes show only the limits of just how much heredity can contribute-- rather than how little it may matter under truly dreadful conditions.

Ergo, ideal conditions may produce cognitive ability which is limited mostly by genetics... but abysmal conditions may themselves limit potential to far less than genetics would otherwise predict.

Aculady, yes, that is perfectly clear and I totally agree with you. I do not agree with a previous poster throwing out a very debatable and highly offensive claim that has been used to justify racist policies as if it were uncontrovertible fact.