Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment NYC looks for new gifted test (NYT article)

Allowing a child to progress at some natural rate? Hard on the teacher trying to juggle several different rates.

And who is going to say their child's rate is slower than yours. I am trying to push the CTY at DD's gifted school as an open ended "pull-out acceleration". Anyone can test their kid for it, you can pay for it, so the school doesn't. The program is accredited and recognized so the teacher doesn't have to worry about the material. I got such a nasty remark from one parent because I dare to progress my child. And this in a gifted school. Now that was the exception but it was out there.

It would be nice if there was some adaptable program so that each child could get what they need. I have found great solutions on this forum in that I can adapt what I have to what DD needs. She had an interview at the AMNH yesterday for their afterschool science program. Really hard to get into but a great science program that goes through high school. I called a board member who donated the money for the Rose Center just to get the interview.

I wish things were more available for smart kids. And what about the kids that do not make the cut-off for Davidson by a point or 3 and cannot attend the camps and programs. In a few years, their IQs might test higher and kids already in could test lower. Who knows?

Ren

Well, if a kid is retested and makes the scores, a parent can absolutely resubmit to DYS. It's not a once-or-out thing.

But I completely agree that it would be nice if there were more things for smart kids. Especially local programs that we don't all have to travel for. We're lucky to be in a pretty good spot for programs and classes, but some gifted kids just have nothing nearby.

Well...I'm a bit skeptical here. I live in Silicon Valley, and we have lots of very intelligent people here, but I'd never claim that a third of the people in a given neighborhood have IQs above the 98th (or even 90th) percentile. Perhaps a high pass rate in your area is due, in part, to test prep.

Here's a quote from the New York Times about Hunter:

"In the most recent round, 1,183 applicants took the I.Q. test and 305 made the 98th percentile I.Q. cut-off, a score of about 132."

That's just under 26% of test takers. Even if they all came from the UWS, your one-third claim appears to be exaggerated.




I'm not even sure what this means.

The educational needs of highly gifted children are so different from those of other kids, the term "best school" has an entirely new definition. For many kids discussed on this list, the best school is at home. For a few others, it's the Davidson Academy. For mine, it's a little private school that lets a nine-year-old sixth grader take algebra, and offers to teach him a history course in French because the teacher happens to know French, too.

For me anyway, if a school is defined as "best" because lots and lots of people want to send their kids there, I wonder if the school is a good fit for a child with cognitive abilities past (or way past) the 99th percentile. Mathematics tells us that there just aren't going to be lots and lots of people in the 99+ group in one geographical area.

Just my rambling two cents...

Val

I agree Val.

I think it's important to realize that it's 26% of those who do take the test. I would expect parents have the kids take the test only if they believe the children have a reasonable chance to succeed. This for sure doesn't reflect the average NYC population.

Just to respond to a couple of these studies. The blacks who fathered the children in Germany had to take and pass an IQ test before fathering them! They were required to pass the Armed Services Aptitute Test, which is nothing more than an IQ test. So of course their children would be just as smart or almost as smart as the white children.

Any study which tests IQ, particularly in comparing between races, at the age of 4 is going to produce some pretty unreliable results. Black children tend to develop more quickly than European children (and Asians slower still). So of course blacks will have a much higher IQ in relation to whites at the age of 4 than they will at a later age.

If you have studies showing that black children raised in white homes have IQs equal to those of the white population, I congratulate you on finding them; but there are many more which show just the opposite.

I do believe that through the equalization of opportunity and the adoption of better parenting methods the IQ gap can shrink, but it can't be eliminated.

First of all, I do not understand the math if 26% of total achieved the result, but 30% of the UWS participants couldn't?

And I did say all of NYC, sorry. Can I smile and say that we Manhattanites forget the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island are also included? I did comment about upper income earners on the upper west side. Considering real estate is going down all over the country but 4-30 million dollar townhouses are going fast on the upper west side.

And the article did state that they were using national norms so many skewed to high scoring and maybe they should use their own norms? That was in the article.

The problem with NYC is that they have less minorities in their gifted programs using this system than the old.

Ren

Normally, I'd say "gotta cite?" for an unsupported assertion like that.

Given your other comments and your username, I think I'll limit myself to, "Your statements are based in racist opinion, rather than fact. I choose not to engage in arguments that are primarily derailing, but I will point out that that's occurring."

It's extremely unlikely.

Bottom line: you're going to have to show me proof that one-third of the residents of a precisely defined area in the UWS of Manhattan have IQs that are two standard deviations above the norm. When I see proof, I'll believe you. Though I'm not really sure why it's such a big deal.

I'm trying to focus on learning environments for gifted and highly gifted kids and how they can be developed more widely. This was the subject of my first post in this thread.

And I stick to what I've said before: test prep for pre-schoolers is (way) more about the adults than it is about the children. Parents can make all kinds of excuses for how it's about the kid or his future, but I'm not convinced. Test prep and other forms of hothousing seem to be about what the adults want the child to be, not what the child wants to be or who the child is. If the child isn't begging to go to test prep and if Mom is lecturing a child about the importance of a standardized computer-scored test, it's not about the child.

As a parent, I have a responsibility to make all kinds of decisions about what's best for my child. But, and this is a big one, I also understand that my kids aren't my property. I can guide them, but past chores and dental visits and homework and suchlike, I have no right to force them to do things (like, perhaps, test prep) that make me happy but make them miserable.

Again, just my two cents.

Val

Not true.

There was no passing score for the GT test then and nor today. The score only qualified the soldier for a given set of Military Occupational Specialities or MOS. Whether you were drafted or allowed to volunteer depended upon not only your GT scores, but the scores on physical and psych evals and the local draft board.

In general, in WWII, blacks were not considered for any jobs other than services or quartermaster. It was only later in the War that blacks were allowed into other MOS, most notably the Infantry. From a careful reading of the history of the war, I cannot find any reference to a black man taking the GT test.


While IQ will change over time for an individual, it is random, so age at 4 or 7 or 11 does not matter.

I'd like to see the cites for the assertion about development.

I doubt this for a number of reasons.

In general, a kid just gets smarter over time as knowledge accumulates. If any group were smarter, you would expect to see them raise to the top ranks faster.

Physical development is not linked to mental development.



Actually, their IQs are higher than the population they are raised in.

You have provided assertions, but nothing to back it up.


If the Flynn Effect is constant over time across all groups, then there cannot be an IQ gap based upon genetics. The Flynn Effect tells us that eventually all groups will converge.

Consider this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blacktest_score_rise.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

A couple of thoughts:

Test prep for anything that's supposed to be an "ability" test, in my opinion, invalidates the legitimacy of the outcome. As someone who is trying to understand my child, it's a frustration of mine because when I try to look at her results in the context of other peoples' results, I don't know how much to account for scores that have resulted from extensive preparation. Understanding how rare (or not) my child's abilities are is important to me not because I want her to be the "best" (whatever that means), but because I don't know how to evaluate her needs and progress without some sense of how usual or unusual she is. Should I trust the assurances I'm given by the school? Is it likely that there really are scads of academic peers available--or does that mean the school doesn't get my child? Is the progress she's making what I should expect? Or is it underacheivement? Is she learning or going through the motions?

Bottom line, our education programs have to get better at meeting kids where they're at and giving them rich, challenging experiences. The fact that families feel a need to compete for an appropriate educational experience is unacceptable on so many levels. There shouldn't be a sense that you have to "get into" school X or your child won't get what they need. Parents shouldn't feel like they have to deprive their child of a joyful, play and interest based childhood so that they can prep them (at age 3 and 4!) to score at a certain level on some high stakes test. Ick. Testing at that age should, IMHO, be done because the child is truly surprising to their parent or teacher and there is a strong need to UNDERSTAND the child vs. a need to QUALIFY for something. I have many complaints about our local school system, but I am incredibly grateful not to be living in a place where children are routinely tested and placed before they've even had the opportunity to go to school. I can't imagine the pressure that this must place on families. It must be very, very difficult to be a parent of a high average or moderately gifted child and maintain a non-competitive child rearing approach. I'd like to think that I still would have let my children's interests and wants direct their pre school age activities and time, but it would have caused me a lot more anxiety!

This competitive approach to placement creates too many problems---not the least of which is that the tests stop being able to reveal rarity reliably because outcomes are always less rare when large groups of people invest a lot of time practicing in order to reach those outcomes. That's unfortunate, because in order for us to understand our children it's helpful to have a sense of relativity. A child who recieves rare scores without preparation absolutely has different needs than the child who prepares in order to get those scores. Unfortunately, as long as scores of "prepared" and "unprepared" children are pooled together, that reality is often going to be invisible to the families or the schools or both.

As to the question of rarity within or between populations (by race, ethnicity, neighborhood, etc).....
Even if you take the various studies out there at face value (which I personally do not), the identification discrepancies far exceed the scope of of any supposed differences. Further, since it is impossible to fully disaggregrate race and class, and because we have such an uneven race/class distribution in this country, access to test prep can only exacerbate the problem.