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

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Let's say their parents had $45 and the opportunity to find out "how smart your child is". What do you think they would have been told?

Indeed I would hope that all parents would think about what is good not just for their children but for other gifted children as well. Say our public school system accurately identified one gifted child in ten and gave them an amazing education and let the other ones rot. I'd be against this even if my kid was the lucky one in ten.

While I'm sure this instrument scores more accurately than random chance, we should keep in mind that even with just random chance some people are going to get results they agree with and are happy with. It doesn't mean those results are accurate and it doesn't mean it is a good instrument and it doesn't mean we should support random chance. I'm hearing a lot of circular reasoning on this thread along the lines of "reading her book I thought my kid was a level three and doing this test I found out I was right." All that is telling you is that her test is the same as the book. It isn't telling you that level three has any real meaning. It isn't telling you that early milestones are a good way to identify giftedness. And, it isn't telling you "how smart your child is".

Ruf is telling parents if they see a difference between the talentigniter and a much more comprehensive individual educational assessment then it points to the lack of validity of the individual assessment or of the parent's memories. What message do you see being sent their Kriston? What is being said about parents? What is being said about the rest of the gifted community?



I don't appreciate this. I have a great deal of respect for parents and that's exactly why I have a problem with this sort of program.

It may be hard to understand if you haven't been there, but it can be an incredibly overwhelming and difficult thing to be a parent of a child with complex disabilities. There are only so many hours in the day and getting through the day with therapies, doctor's appointments, and all it takes to care for kids it can be hard to have an unlimited time for research. Parents who already have multiple kids, jobs, etc. can really struggle to wade through a lot of conflicting information.


I'd be much less bothered by the whole thing if Ruf was more honest about the limitations of this approach and made it clear that it doesn't apply to a lot of kids. Instead she is presenting the approach as infallible.

PassThePotatoes: I agree with everything you just said.

I would also point to the danger of confirmation bias: the tendency to give extra notice or favor to information that confirms what a person already believes.

DeeDee

So do I, except that I am not sure the online tool is better than random chance. It looks to be a good deal worse than random chance for a significant part of the gifted population. Perhaps the whole problem is a failure to distinguish between sufficient and necessary, but then there are the grand marketing claims.

passthepotatoes:

If you want me to renounce Ruf (again, I mean the book, NOT the website, which troubles me), then we'll have to agree to disagree. It was by far the most useful thing that I read, and I see no sense in renouncing something that many people have found helpful. You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I am entitled to mine.

I am thinking of other gifted children, just as you are. We just see this differently.

Ruf's book is NOT a gifted program that leaves 9 out of 10 gifted kids in academic squalor. This is one possible *tool* for *parents* to use to help them *think* about their kids. That's two TOTALLY different things. If it helps, great. If not, move on to something else. That's how it works, time constraints or no.

No book fits all gifted kids perfectly. More options are better than fewer.

For the record, I thought DS9 was MG. He's a level 4 (and continues to be so). This is why Ruf's book helped me: I was deep in gifted denial. Far from confirming what I already thought, the book radically changed the way I understood giftedness.

I would not recommend the book to the parent of a 2E child. I did not use it with my own 2E child. But for parents in gifted denial, it is useful. Different tools for different jobs.

And again, the website gives me trouble. I think the marketing is more aggressive than it should be and the claims are overstated. I think that perhaps you should write to Dr. Ruf and explain your concerns. I intend to. Maybe she'll tone down the over-the-top claims.

I have to admit, nature/nurture discussions just seem to be mostly empty talk to me. It seems pretty obvious that there's *some* genetic component, and it seems just as obvious that environment affects growth and development. Both matter. After that we're just talking about how *much* they matter. How do you measure that? <shrug>

And frankly, whether the top of intelligence is fixed or not seems like a purely intellectual exercise to me. How would we know?

I will say that I don't believe that kids can be "made" gifted through hothousing. In that regard, I guess I think there is some upper limit. Athletics is a good analogy here: I could have run all day every day for my whole life, and I would never be a world-class sprinter. My short-legged little body is made for distance, not speed. Certainly I can improve my speed with training, and no one can say for sure how fast I could actually go if I worked obsessively on it. But there is some upper limit of a sort to how fast I can go.

I think brains work the same way. There is such a thing as native talent, and hard work isn't necessarily a substitute for it anymore than talent is a substitute for hard work. They're complimentary, but different.

The thing is that no one can say for sure how smart any one brain can get with training, so the "fixed" idea--even insofar as I am going with that, which is not far!--would really be just philosophy, not practice. Nor do I think that we can rule someone out as a wicked smart person because they didn't "sprint" intellectually right from birth. Development is too individualized for that. Brains grow and change over time.

I am a little disturbed by the implications of this offer:

"The Ruf Estimates Online Assessment is available with group rates for educational institutions needing Preschool and Kindergarten screenings."

Now it is not just a tool to give parents information, it is a decision-making tool for preschools and kindergartens?

Hi,

I do just want to point out something here (and I'm by no means suggesting that Ruf is without flaws, but just so that people are aware), she does actually say in the book that the levels aren't fixed (I don't have the book here, but have found a reference to it online: "There is no magic line between gifted and not gifted, nor is there a stationary or fixed line between different levels of intelligence" (p. xiv) - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6470/is_3_29/ai_n29341502/?tag=content;col1 - from memory she talks later in the book about movement between levels being dependent on appropriate educational arrangements/stability of environment etc).

Is this clear on her website? No, I don't think so. Does she touch on 2E - not at all that I can remember from the book and I can only find 3 references on her site. Neither of which is helpful. But if your child is 2E (even if you're unaware of it) or you had a late developer (who would have to have some other identifiers that make you think they might be gifted, otherwise you wouldn't be looking at Ruf's website), I would assume you would find that there would be indications that this text was not meeting all your needs and you'd look elsewhere. Surely that is why you are looking in the first place, for an explanation, because you suspect something is up and you're trying to fit the pieces together. I think it sells parents short to suggest that on finding that Ruf they'd decide that was the be all and end all and they'd give up. I don't think Ruf's concept is ideal, but I agree with others who view it as one tool amongst many. To me it's like suggesting this board is no use to anyone because you wont get an exact answer - which of course is ridiculous, it is hugely beneficial because it is another tool, another place where you can pick up some information and look in to it further. If a parent new to giftedness turned up on this forum and used nothing else, that would be a concern. Granted the forum itself doesn't purport to be expert advice, but people (including myself), take the advice on here seriously. There have been numerous times where I have doubted my daughter was HG+ (which I know her to be), based on the information on this site. Does it mean I walk away and leave my daughter to her own devices? No, it gives me another avenue to explore. You know as parent when the answer you get just doesn't feel right.

I do worry that there is an assumption that people aren't capable of identifying their children. I felt I knew that dd was gifted (though I felt ridiculous suggesting it) when she was 18 months old. Granted my daughter is very HG + (for want of a better description), so the difference was marked compared to other kids from a very early age. I don't know how many parents would think their very young children are intellectually gifted based solely on physical milestones - certainly I didn't, dd was very verbal, using humour at 1 etc in addition to early physical milestones. And as we know, there is much more that just verbal ability that indicates a child might be gifted, so while that might not be a marker for you, it's probable there will be something else to have got you looking. You know when your kid is different. I can't for the life of me find the reference, but I have read it in a reputable publication and it was appropriate cited there and referred to elsewhere, that 85% of parents who identify their children as gifted are correct based on subsequent IQ assessments. That figure raises to something like 95% once you take into account 2e. If we're going to talk about people being warned off and not taking action as early as they can, then I worry about the debate on this site about whether or not you can identify gifted kids when they are little. I don't know that you could predict a LOG, but I think that if a parent of a toddler has found this site then they're looking because their kid is different enough to warrant investigation. Granted sometimes I am surprised when people provide milestones that don't seem particularly gifted to me, but then this board is geared toward the top end of the range, so perhaps my comparison point is skewed (and as we've talked about, some are late bloomers). Ruf's book/questionnaire would give these parent's one tool to test whether or not there was any evidence that what they are seeing in their kids is unusual.

What worries me more than parents identifying their kids as gifted is schools that identify kids as gifted based on floored methodology, schools that parents of ND kids evidently think are going to offer their kids something that the standard curriculum can't. That is where problems with false identification lie for me, and where decisions are made that can really impact our kids negatively. I think there is a real suspicion within the gifted community of parents who are new to giftedness at times and I think rather than worrying so much about whether or not they are diluting the gifted brand, as a group we should focus more on educating the wider community on what giftedness actually is. A scary thought I know, given how secretive many of us (including me) feel the need to be - but without wider education, I can't see how anything will change.

This is a bigger problem.

I have become lost in the length of this thread and am somewhat confused. Has anyone on this discussion actually USED the online assessment tool? If so, was it helpful to you?

I am a little put off by the claims on the website but must say that we travelled to MN for our DS to be evaluated by Dr. Ruf two years ago. It was different than the first time we had him tested as Dr. Ruf's focus is on academic needs and his first assessment at the age of 5 was done by a clinical psychologist. But I have to say that we found our trip to see Dr. Ruf extremely helpful and well worth the time and money. She actually seemed to understand our son better than anyone who had met him. We had been struggling with behavior problems and she told us to address his abilities in math more accurately which would likely improve his behavior across the board. We had NO idea that he needed to be skipped two more grades in math until we met with Dr. Ruf.

I have to agree with others who have pointed out that Dr. Ruf is but one expert in the field and is not the person for everyone. But for some, her assessment approach may be just the thing they need.

Again, has anyone here actually USED the online tool?