(Note: the kids were ID'ed as gifted rather than highly gifted.
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).
2. See quote:
The Second Control was taken at random from the class, culling a wide range of abilities from gifted to below average depending on the school class make-up. Some of the schools in the sample selected by ability so that in the triad matching, the random Second Control group child would more likely to be gifted, others were for all-comers so that the Second Control group child might be below average.
(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.
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:
Each Target child was matched with two Control children of the same sex, age and socio-economic level, sharing educational experience in the same school class.
This really isn't ambiguous, although maybe she contradicts herself elsewhere!
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).
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.)
Most subjects with an exceptionally high IQ, whether labelled or unlabelled as gifted, did much better in life then those with an average score...
Is it me, or does this statement undermine her anecdotes about some gifties becoming janitors or not using their PhDs?
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.
