Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research I found it! Rate of learning for gifted kids

This is a very interesting summary of research on learning of gifted students:

http://www.nswagtc.org.au/info/articles/RogersResearchSynthesis.html


or via tinyurl at:

http://tinyurl.com/2hcxjr

It answered my question on the rate of learning. I've pasted just a small amount below:

Research on Instructional Delivery: Pacing, Process Modifications

* The learning rate of children above 130 IQ is approximately 8 times faster than for children below 70 IQ
* Gifted students are significantly more likely to retain science and mathematics content accurately when taught 2-3 times faster than "normal" class pace.
* Gifted students are significantly more likely to forget or mislearn science and mathematics content when they must drill and review it more than 2-3 times
* Gifted students are decontextualists in their processing, rather than constructivists; therefore it is difficult to reconstruct "how" they came to an answer.

Thanks to Hoagies for the link!

Wow Bk1 - you found it! the controversial mislearn through repitition link! I'll dive in later today, but for now, ((thumbs up))
Grin

Yes, bk1, I posted something about this and was warned off it, though I still maintain that it makes sense to me...Kids daydreaming because they're bored start playing with the numbers and *poof* the material gets mixed up in their heads.

I'd still love to see evidence that this is flawed. I accept that it may be, but I hate to give such useful statistics up without a fight!

This is really interesting to me. Dd's 2nd grade class has been working on math facts to 20 for what seems like forever now. They do these drills and have to get 20 or 30 number problems correct within a certain time frame to move on to the next level. Initially dd was passing these easily but as time went on the % of ones she was passing declined, almost like she was getting worse. Anyway, when we got home we tried flash cards to help. Very quickly she started to rattle off the answers correctly. No mistakes and certainly quick enough to pass her test.

If I sit down with her and work on math she learns concepts very quickly (especially more advanced math) but when I see her doing math in school it seems that the repetition makes her worse. I really couldn't understand how she wasn't passing these rather simple math tests and yet she could come home and easily understand math concepts way beyond what they're doing in class. I thought I was losing my mind but maybe it makes more sense now?

I think I remember mislearning things when they got boring. I just tried to make everything a little harder than it needed to be in order to keep my brain engaged. In the process of doing that sometimes it got twisted up. I'll try to think of an example....

You know, that was totally me in elementary math. It was like it was so easy I spent a lot of time making it hard in my head. I did really mediocre in math in elementary school. Not to mention there was just this sub culture of "girls don't do math" at my small catholic school, nor was there was there anything resembling GT prgramming or identification there.

And I went on to get BS degrees in math and comp sci. I loved math once I got to algebra!

Yes-- I have to say I like it because it supports my push for less repetition and test prep. The Ruf summary I link to doesn't give any info on the research backing it.

bk

I know that the connection seems intuitivly appealing, but look at the very way the question is posed. It's so general.

Do I believe a child should be held back from learning algebra because they can't beat the time on a worksheet of simple multiplication fact? NO.

Do I believe a child should continue to drill, after they have demonstrated mastery, because the other children still need drill? No.

Do I believe that the weight of experience shows that many gifted children can learn Math much faster than most people imagined? Yes.

I believe that each child should be taught at their readiness, AND that memory readiness for math facts shouldn't limit math concept readiness for math ideas.

But that isn't the same as saying that controlled studies have been done.

Why do I make a big deal over it?

Because there are times when a child will need lots and lots of drill. Music, Language, Handwriting, and Math Facts should continue to be engaged with at the child's readiness level, even when the child is soaring ahead with the conceptual. I want our children, each of whom is an individual, with individual learning needs to be seen, noticed, and thought about as an individual learner.

An Example:
My DS loves to learn musical instruments, and it's clear that he progresses much much faster than other kids his age, or really, any age. I even say that 15 minutes of DS practice is equal to 30 minutes of regular practice. But there does come a point where he really really just has to sit down and practice. He sometimes gets in trouble during performances from underpreperation - I've seen it happen.

((shrugs))
Grinty

Hi Grinity:

I agree with you on all of the above regarding when repetition is necessary.

Thanks for providing the needed sourcing for the assertion re repetition.

I'm sorry I passed on this information, since there doesn't seem to be support for it in the research.

Thanks for taking the time to get this info for us.

bk

bk - appologies accepted! Belief me, it's a mistake I've made, both with passing along the info, and with applying it - We all make mistakes.

My definition of a friend, BTW,is someone who can have a lot of fun with, who loves you, who also can act like a warning bouy, showing where the hidden rocks of life are - and flash!

((Giant Grin))
Grinity

Maybe this is the answer i was looking for. I have had trouble teaching my daughter her numbers 6-19. She is advanged in all other areas: reading, vocab, art, athletics, problem solving, and even science. She is 4.5. But these numbers have been driving both of us nuts. I actually stopped showing the numbers to her the other day because i was afraid it was making her irritated. She just can't recall them. But I showed her a clock and explained the short hand and she start telling me times. She can put the numbers in order and tell more and less and other things like that but she just can't name them. I think I will move onto addition with her and see how she picks that up. Who knows?

"US teachers tend to aim content towards the 19th percentile which is 7 or 8 times lower than gifted students need"

If this is correct, it is the most frightening point of the paper.

WOW! Does this help make some sense of my dd!!!

Don't you love when you read something and the bell goes "ding, ding, ding, ding!!!!!"

Thanks for finding and sharing!!!

So i tried this concept out on my 4 yr old who couldnt remember a lot of her numbers. I just tried her with addition, subtraction, and did some more "more or less" and she did very well and started remembering the numbers. So I guess she just needed to move up a level to stay focused.

My kids didn't like the English language naming system for numbers 11-19 because it doesn't make sense. DS invented his own names which follow the pattern for other numbers:

11 = Onety-one
12 = Onety-two
13 = Onety-three

etc.

From there he was able to transition to the regular names when I explained that the suffix "-teen" comes from the word "ten", so "sixteen" means "six and ten." That seemed to make sense to him.

To help kids learn the names of the other numbers, nursery rhymes like One, two, buckle my shoe are good. Use her verbal strengths to give her a memory hook for the numbers.

My daughter did that also. She would say oneteen, two teen, threeteen etc. I think that is why she gets the 20's and 30's easier.

my son used to say eleventeen, twelveteen, etc.

Tell me if this makes sense?

Set a goal each year for Math facts and once the kids hit the goal they can do something else. It seems to me they can only get so fast. It does take time to write down the anwsers. Do they really need to do all the drills again if they have it?

One day I looked at my 3rd grader's math drill page with single digits next to my 1st Grader's page with 10 less problem and felt like school is overdoing it. It just seems like a waste of time if he has got it already. Am I wrong?

And in the Hobbit, Tolkien adds another twist:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q=hobbit+eleventy

onthegomom,

It doesn't make sense to me, but I'm not a math expert. You would think that they could go onto the next step if they showed mastery in the facts.
My DS9 in 4th grade (self contained 3rd/4th grade gifted classroom in my local public school district)has had the timed math drill pages for addition, subtraction, and just started the multiplication ones. I was told that they would just do the addition and subtraction ones in the first marking period and just had to meet a certain percentage then move on. However it is now the third marking period and they are still drilling the same things. He is no longer making the percentage he needs to and I'm finding it very frustrating. I did inquire about the timed facts tests in the beginning of the year and really didn't get much of an answer...just that the district requires it.
Sorry if this isn't much help....you are not alone and I feel your pain.

Gifted students are decontextualists in their processing, rather than constructivists; therefore it is difficult to reconstruct "how" they came to an answer.

That is my DS in a nutshell! Now I just have to commit that phrase to memory and beat people with it!

I always wondered what that meant - still do!

Mel caught what I was going to post, that is frightening. Does anyone know anything in particular about this researcher?

Great Potential Press has this:
http://www.giftedbooks.com/authors.asp?id=52

Proofrock Press has this:
http://www.prufrock.com/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=386

[email]http://gerric.arts.unsw.edu.au/abut_stff_karen.html[/email]

I would like to know what this means. Anybody want to explain?

Here's a quote from a summary of Dr. Rogers' work (which was a summary itself; I'm going to try to get the original paper tomorrow).

Summary of her work in PDF form


These statements are pretty big generalizations.

One of the ideas that comes up repeatedly on this board is that gifted kids have many different learning styles. So the apparent claim that all gifted kids learn by taking in a whole gulp and then extracting details seems flawed to me. And I expect that individual gifted kids can take some things in as a gulp but have to go stepwise through other things. I presume that it all depends on the kid and the subject.

And the statements are also contradictory: the top one says that it's difficult for gifted kids to reconstruct how they get an answer. The bottom one implies that they can break a whole concept into details through analysis. It seems reasonable that sometimes they should be able toapply the same process to how they got an answer, especially if given a bit of time. I also expect that some non-gifted kids just figure stuff out sometimes without knowing why.

Overall, I'd say that IT DEPENDS.

(I'm not wild about unsupported generalizations.)

One thing I really don't like about the paper (or whatever it is) is the complete lack of references. How were the studies designed? How many kids were involved? Were they at different schools, and if so, where and how many? What were the controls? How did she analyze the data?

Research that's unsupported by even a single other published paper is always suspect. I'll try to get the original tomorrow; maybe it's better.

Val

I can say I always had more trouble explaining how I did something that just doing it. Even with vocabulary I was able to use words correctly and have images and ideas of what they meant but it was really hard for me to put the meaning into words. The same thing happened with math. I could solve equations and sometimes give a very quick estimate of what I thought the answer was, but it was hard for me to work a problem step by step. I actually make better grades when I am not required to work out a problem. I have come up with very interesting ideas in science, health, and psychology, but I am having to work backwards to attempt to prove anything. I can't tell someone how I have come to a conclusion...I just have a strong feeling it is right. I am also very intuitive. People have accused me of being psychic. But I think I just see patterns and so I know how things are likely to turn out. I used to cry when I was little to my parents that there were no surprises in life. To this day I am very seldom surprised. I think that is why many gifted children and adults have a difficult time living a normal life. It is hard to explain what you know and the gifted are a lot of times very sensitive to their surroundings. It can be somewhat painful at times... but I think only because society makes it that way.

The decontextualist thing is about making cognitive and intuitive leaps, which is very common in gifted individuals. My most dreaded words in school (after "review") were "show your work" - because it took more effort to figure out how I got to an answer than it did to come up with the answer in the first place.

Oh if I had a dollar for every time I got in trouble for refusing to show my work...

I remember sitting there stunned while my then barely 4 year old DD was taking a placement test for math. I didn't even think she knew what to do with a two-digit addition problem, but when faced with the question of 17+8= ? and was given the answer choices of a)14, b)20, c)9, d)25 .... she selected d)25. I asked her how she knew that answer, and all she could say was, "It is the right one". I asked if she added them in her head, and she looked confused, then said to me,"well it could not be 9 or 14 'cause they are smaller than 17, and well 25 is just the right one"

Our days have been filled with this ever since then.

Yeah, how can I show my work if it wasn't ANY WORK???

Sorry.....just had to get that one out.

When asked to show his work on math stuff, ds9 will make a bunch of arrows pointing from the problem to the answer, like, 'you see the problem, here is the answer, right??' Sometimes he does show work, but sometimes it's just the arrows, or a re-write of the equation from a word problem, and then arrows.

On my DDs critical thinking math assignments she not only has to show her work but write a complete sentence that justifies their answer.

Her first time she wrote "I wrote 12 because it is the answer."

Needless to say, that did not count for justification.

I did'nt really like it at first, but seeing how much my DD has grown in this area, I have become a fan.

There is perhaps some biology to support "women's intuition." In males, the brain develops more quickly, but with females, the two hemispheres of the brain develop more closely. It is believed the closer the two hemispheres are to each other, the faster the information is processed, making it harder to be conscious of how the brain has processed information.

I know this post is old.. but THANK YOU! XXX

Oh no ! now that I have gotten all excited abt reading this ... the link is no longer there! . .can s one pls help me to find it ?

I think this is it:

http://nswagtc.org.au/resources/for...garding-gifted-education-provisions.html

thanks!

Would anyone be willing to explain this point for me. "Direct training in creative thinking skills results in significant divergent production effects."

Again, I know this is an old discussion, but the original symposium work she's basing part of the article on is at: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10004.aspx

I still don't see the support for the math quote (that said, I haven't seen all the articles listed in the references).

Maryann

That is great. I really see it with my DS7. The more he has to do adding and subtracting over and over and over again the more likely he is to do it wrong because he is sick and tired of doing it. He even left 7 blank on one test and I couldn't even blame him.

I realize this is an old post, but just reading this makes me feel so much better to know that there are others who struggled like I did when younger and had to show my work. I describe it as if something just clicks in my brain - I can't really go through the logical steps to explain how I got the answer, I just know it. It's extremely frustrating and now I have a DS9 and a DS6 who are going through the same thing. DS9 has been struggling for several years with writing and explaining his work. DS6 has been able to do logic puzzles correctly since he was 3 - but if I asked him which of our 2 cats was which, he would have a hard time with that!

Also, if any one can find the link again, I would love to be able to show it to my son's teachers. It appears to be gone from the site. Thanks!

If you go back to Val's post on 2/11/10, you can download the summary in PDF form.

When I read that teachers pitch instruction to the 19th percentile, so much suddenly made sense...

I can't get to the the page that matmum posted.

I got as far as http://www.nswagtc.org.au

I've prowled around, but can't seem to find the resources tab. Anyone able to help?
Thanks!!

Try this one:
http://www.aea11.k12.ia.us/gifted/Research.pdf

It should let you download the summary in PDF form.

That part about how gifted kids learn/unlearn math was very compelling. DD7 had issues in the past week with this. Her 2nd grade class does these weekly 100-question timed tests and this week it was x4.

We studied using flash cards and she did fine, though she never really enjoys it. One time she fought the boredom of it by cutting out large numbers from paper and assembling the answers. Increasingly she is starting to tune out math homework because "it's boring."

So the day of the test, she got stuck on 4x7. Something went wrong and she couldn't remember the answer, got stuck on it, and would not move past it. So she ended up missing 49 out of 100 by default and was very distraught. She had hardly ever missed any before.

So this might in fact be a gifted issue rather than my normal gut reaction of it being the case of a 7-yo who needs to endure some drudgery?

I realise that there are multiple issues with this report, given the complete lack of references. But it's pretty interesting reading!

I was wondering what people make of these two points:

Gifted students prefer a structured learning environment (desks, tables, etc.) but open-ended tasks and assignments

AND

The greatest academic benefits of "discovery" learning have been attained with gifted students, particularly if the learning was Brunerian (teaching of major ideas and concepts)

I think that the new K-2 curriculum at my DD's school fits the second description quite well, but I have been wondering whether she would be better suited to a "Structured learning environment" as per point 1. And I find it odd that the report seems to have these two contradictory points listed so close together.

Or in fact are they not contradictory so much as point 1 is about what gifted kids prefer and point 2 is about gifted kids doing better than other kids in the second environment (which is not necessarily to say this is the best environment for gifted kids)? Assuming of course that any such broad sweeping statement is valid in the first place.

When I took algebra in 8th grade, I successfully negotiated myself out of the requirement to show work, which applied to every other student in the class. In order to reach this deal, my teacher challenged me with one of the hardest word problems pertaining to our lesson, and gave me 1 minute to solve it in my head. 45 seconds later, I could obtain full credit for correct answers without showing my work. She warned me that she wouldn't be able to award me partial credit for wrong answers unless I showed my work. I did eventually get a wrong answer, and lost all credit on that problem. I'm proud to say that I didn't complain. No other students requested that deal or challenge. Perhaps some of the children of forum members here could negotiate such a deal though.

In precalculus I failed to negotiate a deal by which homework wouldn't affect my grade. Although I had a test average of over 100 due to extra credit problems, the teacher seemed to imply that he would have made the deal only on the condition that I had answered every single test question correctly for the entire first quarter. Thus I had to be happy to obtain an "A" rather than an "A+" and a teacher comment that read "Student is not working to potential." Looking back, I wonder if that comment was directed at me, or at school administrators. Perhaps he was trying to use me to draw attention to the fact that some students could ace his class without using their full potential.

She needs to learn to skip the question and come back to it if she can't remember it.