Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment TalentIgniter (Dr. Ruf)

I couldn't get the search feature to work at all in order to look up the thread on this topic, hence this new post on the subject.

I just received a newsletter saying that Dr. Ruf's new site, TalentIgniter, is now up and running.

Sorry if this has already been posted.

TalentIgniter

Does anyone have experience with this program? I know some of you assisted with piloting - is it worth the $45?

Thanks! :-)

I personally wouldn't pay for it. (I wouldn't pay for her book either, but that's just me.) Since the website seems to offer the same content as her book, perhaps you could find a local library that has the book and escape paying for the website. There just seem to be better ways to spend $45 on a child's education.

I don't know anything about Dr. Ruf or this website, but I took a quick look at the descriptions of levels of giftedness and the I.Q. ranges they are supposed to correspond to seem way off to me.

One of my kids is very consistent across different areas and has taken the WPPSI-III (140), WISC IV (148), and SB V (140, but he was quite sick and rescheduling wasn't an option). This testing was done with two different testers. Because of his extreme consistency I doubt his I.Q. is being underestimated, but it's not being overestimated either. He is physically healthy and has been in a simulating and secure environment since birth, so no issues there. IOW, I am reasonably confident that his I.Q. is no lower than 140 and no higher than 148. So going by I.Q. he should be in the level 4-5 range. He is no where near what is described for level 5, and it would be a stretch to describe him as level 4. Level 3 I could go along with, but even some of those criteria seem too advanced to describe him. However, Dr. Ruf says the frequency of level 3 children is one in 100 - my son is clearly more unusual than that. In fact, I would argue that he is not 1 in 200 either (what Dr. Ruf estimates as the frequency of Level 4). So going by frequency and I.Q. he is clearly level 4-5. But the descriptions seem a little, uhh...insane?

Now, I know my children and I am very confident that they aren't "out there" smart. I do realize that there are other children doing exceptional things - I don't think it's a fairy tale for a child to read at 2. But I also don't think that judging a child's intellect on such criteria as, "They have favorite TV shows before 6-8 months" has much value. And although my kids happen to have been extremely alert infants I'm sure there are a lot of babies who were not who turned out to be smart.

In short - these levels of giftedness seem way, way out of whack to me. I'd be curious to hear what other people think. I have another son who is not so consistent who i could not even attempt to categorize using Ruf's descriptions.

I agree. They don't work for my kids either. I think her lists probably speak most to the clientele she is serving. If it is useful info to people, great. But if your child doesn't neatly fall into those particular groupings, I don't think it's necessarily very telling.

Edited to say, I'm quite sure I wasn't too alert when my kids were born either. ROFL! Those early milestones are a blur to me as well. I watched old video of my daughter (now just turned 6) in the past year of her at about 3 months. She was laying in DH's lap saying her own name over and over. Ummm ... really? I filmed the video and I never picked up on it at the time.

Good points. I don't know if the apparent problem is lack of sufficient data, gross over-generalization, or what. The Ruf levels don't seem to account for different flavors of 2E, delayed verbal development of some exceptionally math-talented children, etc. The Ruf levels (in the overviews I have read) seem to potentially have conflicting criteria, as well as to place extreme emphasis on early precociousness (which I think is certainly quite telling but just as certainly not the whole picture in predicting maximum potential in any area).

I also read some comments elsewhere on the web questioning the accuracy of the Ruf levels on various grounds, which whether true or not, made me feel in the end that I just wasn't interested enough to pay to read her book. But maybe I am grossly oversimplifying myself-- I know of the Ruf levels only from browsing websites.

I did notice that the Ruf website says that parents can get the main thrust of the Ruf classification from her book, so if I were interested, I would probably buy that instead of subscribing to the website. I am a book person, though.

I guess I'm one of the few that it does work for and was my wake up call when I read her book. DD and our experience with her was all in the examples. We had that infant who was alert from birth, even helped deliver herself during the c-section. She was also a very early verbal baby. Obsessed with books from 3 months on and learned ABCs by 9 months which was not my doing but her own obsession with some letter books we had in the closet and brought out for a toddler who came for a visit one day. What she isn't is a child interested in puzzles. My sister bought her a shape sorter for Christmas when DD was barely a year and DD was able to use it but didn't really care for it, so it sat in a box forever.

I went ahead and paid for the assessment because price wasn't much and since we have no plans of testing DD right now. I wasn't shocked by the results but found it interesting that Ruf's assessment places DD higher than I did by reading the book.

Thanks for the comments - I, too, have some hesitancy about the LOG descriptions. DD6 tested at 139, which places her at Level 3 or 4, but many of the bullets on each list don't seem to describe her. I also don't remember how alert she was at birth, as she screamed for the entire first 8 months of her life (until she figured out how to walk), and I was too busy trying to figure out what was wrong with her! Her sister was born when DD was 13 months old, so those first couple of years are pretty much a blur. *I* wasn't very alert myself!

Anyway, DD has never been that interested in traditionally "academic" pursuits - she's learning to read only slightly ahead of the "norm" (I'd estimate 1-2 years above grade level) and was never that interested in learning her letters, etc. as a toddler. However, by ages 3-4 she had a massive vocabulary and was asking complex questions about evolution, sex, and religion - questions I don't know if many people EVER contemplate. But she certainly wasn't adding 3 digit numbers in her head or working with fractions just for fun. So after reading Ruf's book, I have often wondered if the testing was wrong??

It makes me feel better to hear some of your opinions regarding the LOG issue....thanks for your thoughts! :-)

I suspect a lot of people's child(ren) will test a little lower because from posts I've read in the past a lot of people don't agree with Ruf's alignment of levels. Some have even argued that their child is in DYS which means the child has to be profoundly gifted but Ruf only categorizes them as a level 4.

And yes I paid for the assessment and did it really to answer my own question of where Ruf would classify my child by her standards; basically, I did it more for curiosity about my interpretation of her book. I would definitely need to pay for an IQ test if I wanted to really get into it all, but like I stated; I have no plans at this point to do so, because we are happy with our school choice at the moment. If this changes and we need to move DD we will have no problem taking the steps of testing her. But from the assessment I received about DD, I didn't find it off base.

I am a Ruf fan, in spite of the flaws in her methods and reporting.

Now, I would caution anyone and everyone to resist getting too worked up about the levels, just as I would caution people not to reduce a child to an IQ number. The levels are a tool. Tools are good for some jobs and utterly destructive for others. The levels don't work well at all for most 2E kids or for late-bloomers, for example. I find that very problematic and limiting.

But to jar a parent--like, say, ME!--out of gifted denial, Ruf's book is very useful. I thought DS9 was "just" moderately gifted, and we were prepared to spend years trying to jam the square peg that he is into the school's round hole, no matter how disasterous the results. Ruf's book changed all that for me. The anecdotal evidence of other gifted kids was useful to me because I could see my son in the children she described. I could see where he was "more this, but less that" than the kids she discussed. That was more useful to me at the time than test scores, which were just numbers on a page. Ruf's book brought the kids to life for me so I could understand levels of giftedness in a way I hadn't understood it before.

As a hard-and-fast way of nailing a kid's IQ or future achivement or whatever, though? Not so useful. And while I think she goes too far about what "must" happen for gifted kids, since personality matters a lot and all kids are different, I will be forever grateful to Dr. Ruf for giving me permission to homeschool from a pro when I needed it. Her book saved our DS9 and our family from all sorts of headaches and heartaches. I'd go so far as to say that it was life-changing for us.

With numerous caveats about its weaknesses, I still recommend her book to parents who seem to need a wake-up call, as I needed. More than anything else I've read about gifted kids, it serves that role. I wish there were better, less anecdotal research out there to fill that role, but to my knowledge there is not. It's not perfect, but it really, really helped our family!

As for the website, I think it's like the book in that it's a first step/wake-up call. It's a computer applying the lists in the book to a given child. Any parent could do the same thing without paying the money. I don't think it is anything definitive, nor is it really supposed to be, I suspect.