Two examples of innumeracy in books for parents about gifted children:
1) "Unfortunately, highly gifted children (those in the 95th percentile) only occur in approximately 1 out of 1,000 preschoolers, and profoundly gifted children (those in the 99.9th percentile) are as rare as 1 in 10,000 preschoolers."
Huh? What part of the definition of "percentile" do you not understand?
2) "In our mushrooming populace, over 3 million Americans and approximately 70 million global citizens are highly gifted or beyond (99.9th percentile)."
The current population of the United States is 313,914,040 (according to Google, today) so the correct number of persons at the 99.9th percentile must be one order of magnitude smaller, that is about 313,914. And similarly for the world population.
Note the difference between the two popular books in their percentile definitions of "highly gifted," showing that that is not a term with a standardized meaning in scholarly research. (Note too that IQ tests never report percentile scores any higher than 99.9th percentile, as error in rank ordering at that end of the scale makes it very unlikely that even that percentile rank can be assigned reliably to test-takers.)
With friends like this, advocates of better education for gifted young people hardly need enemies.
