So I have been hearing about this recently...how gifted kids will 'plateau' in their learning. For example, if there was a child that starts reading at 2, and has a reading level of, let's say, 2nd grade at 3...some people would say that in 3rd grade, the normal kids would catch up. Apply this to any topic really. Do you agree with this? I get that in the beginning, with a very young kid, there is less breadth of knowledge, and so where he/she would learn very deeply/quickly about say, math and reading early on...as he/she gets older and delves into other topics, science, computers, history, whatever, the knowledge would expand more horizontally vs vertically....and it might 'appear' to be a slow down or plateau. but, to be honest, i'm just not convinced that plateauing actually happens. If a child learns incredibly fast at 3, what magical thing happens at 6 that would slow down the acceleration, other than the aforementioned 'widening' of knowledge...which would only be a plateau in the most superficial sense of the word?

Has anyone's kid 'plateaued', or did the acceleration of learning more or less continue as they grew? I am curious to hear some feedback on this topic!

Many educators who like to show off their ignorance about the nature of giftedness will say, "They all even out by third grade." And there's some truth to that saying, because if a gifted kid is occupying a seat in a class for three years, in which they learn next to nothing, the rest of the class will close the gap.

Someone who learns quickly will still learn quickly, as long as they're given the opportunity (which doesn't happen in many elementary schools) and they haven't lost their motivation (which often happens due to lack of opportunity).

In 3rd grade my kid will take Algebra I with 9th graders. The other kids his age are not going to catch up.

Especially not with a curriculum that spirals back to grade 1!

Seriously, what's with this? My DS is in second grade and they literally have him adding 2+3 with blocks... seems so odd since the overwhelming majority were in this school last year and that was covered ad nauseum. I mean so odd to me.

If the extraordinary level is really only because all the kid's focus is going into one topic, rather than a greater ability/interest in learning overall, this could be true. It's the pushback I get over asynchrony: if you have a kid who is 2 years advanced in one topic but a year behind in every other topic, they're just unusually focused, not gifted. Offering challenge in the lagging areas, and letting them drift in the advanced areas, brings them into better balance while keeping them engaged. I have no idea how common this actually is, but it *sounds* plausible. I certainly don't know anyone like this.

The 'plateau' word gets used mostly by classroom teachers who aren't able to keep up with the diversity in their class. If your child moves on to art or music or the war machines of the Renaissance, it *is* a plateau as far as their reading/math/other instructional level is concerned - and that makes them easier to teach in a group. As far as the classroom is concerned, this is the same as the first situation (and keeps educators from having to acknowledge the scary, non-PC degree to which *people are different*).

It also happens when new material is persistently withheld from a child who is ready for it. The cynical side of me connects this to the 'learned helplessness' description on another thread. By third grade, a child who can't get appropriate level material no matter how hard they try will stop trying altogether and subside into the academic middle or bottom of the class.

I've found that 9 is a magical age in my family: many of us have very serious fit issues by then resulting in depression, poor sleep, poor eating, lack of memories from the period, anger and acting-out, etc. that are only resolved by a change in school and more appropriate placement. So far it's hit six members of my family over three generations. I hear the same story from many mid-year, emergency applicants to the school my daughter found to be more appropriate.

I agree with the others (and re 22B's point, I once posted here about a difficult conversation I had with a friend in which I contradicted her assertion that I couldn't tell he would still be ahead of his peers in x years (at school change) by pointing out that to be still ahead he didn't have to keep up the same, or any positive, pace - he only had to avoid going a large step backwards).

But... plateau can mean a lot of things. Beware the self-selecting sample here. I think it does happen, sometimes, that young children seem very ahead (perhaps because of an exceptionally enriched home environment, perhaps for some biological reason, who knows), and then blend back into the average. But their parents don't stay here, so you won't hear from them!

DS's learning patterns are certainly uneven sometimes. It's easy to believe that someone who saw only part of what he did could think he'd plateaued when his attention was elsewhere.

I fear that it's also possible for children with huge potential to never realise that potential, if they don't get good enough opportunities. By the nature of that, I can't prove it by anecdote. But I do wonder how much of "they all even out by 3rd grade" is caused by such a phenomenon.

Yes to this!! Agree, agree - absolutely spot on!!!!!

I don't think IQ is stable until a child is about 8 or 9. So many kids who appear very advanced at age 3 will not still be advanced at age 8. And some kids who appear average at age 3 do indeed end up "gifted". My son was one of these--he had developmental delays and his IQ shot up about 30 points in the last 2.5 years.

I do believe that those kids who start out at the top of the class in kindergarten or first grade tend to stay there, esp. if the teacher gives leveled materials and differentiates instruction. If a kid starts out in the "low group" and everyone else in the class is doing more advanced work, it's going to be pretty hard for him to catch up. The same is true of those in the "high group". If they are given 20 spelling words and others in the class are given 10, then they will likely stay highest in spelling. Even if they are really not that smart.

My DD was grade accelerated in the middle of kindergarten and quickly caught up and surpassed the kids in the next higher grade, so of course there are exceptions to this. She's never had a real IQ test, I don't know if she's officially "gifted" but I would guess the fact that she was able to do that is pretty good evidence. I also think that those kids who are given work that is above their grade level are going to be those that continue to score best on achievement tests. If I stop trying to give DD enrichment stuff, she will likely slip a bit. Not go down to average, but other kids will surpass her if they do extra work at home or are given special opportunities in the classroom or other schools. Our school/district is terrible about allowing kids to work ahead in math so I'm surprised that anyone in the district is scoring in the upper percentiles for math on nationally normed tests. The ones that are are probably being given instruction in advanced math at home. Those that aren't, could appear to be plateuing.

I don't buy it. Even an ordinary child who is not in the "gifted" spectrum of IQ and is very interested in a subject matter and learns that subject or skill continuosly will be way ahead of his peers forever. I believe that learning and growth in any subject or skill is exponential rather than linear... which is why plateauing is impossible - especially in academics (I am not a sports person, so cannot talk about plateauing of sport skills). Infact, when my son gets interested in a specific topic, I tell him that the sky is the limit to what he can learn and do on that subject.

Has anyone's kid 'plateaued', or did the acceleration of learning more or less continue as they grew?

While I wouldn't say that it's a SMOOTH curve, no, it's not plateaued, either.

It's been more like a step-function-- a very particular type of step-function, I mean. Like a current/charge measurement in stepped-voltage polarography-- the wave-form is one of rapid acclimatization to a new "load." Any time she's been placed under cognitive load, or allowed to "stretch" she seems to make a major "jump" in ability, which behaves asymptotically with respect to the new upper boundary.

Then the growth continues at a more rapid-than-normative-even-for-older-peers rate, until she hits the 'boundary' condition again.



Does that make sense?

I suspect that this means that DD hasn't ever experienced appropriate challenge long-term. It's always a moving target.


She outgrows it too fast.

Now, that is not the behavior of a student who is "unusually motivated" or "bright, but not fundamentally different from peers."

While we expected that up to about age 10, what has been a little more alarming is that her learning curve continues to be not-NT well into adolescence. It worries us some in terms of what it may mean for college.

But HK don't ALL kids become better learners the older they get ( compared to their earlier self). Your DDs continuining trajectory makes perfect sense to me. Comparing what is expected at each level of schooling, children are not just expected to have more accumulated knowledge/skill they are expected to be able to learn faster/deeper and output more/faster (compared to their earlier selves or more accurately the age average). Your daughter was not likely to ever become normative in any way was she? Including the speed at which her personal capacity increases.

This is an incredibly informative and interesting discussion. All the replies have pretty much confirmed what DH and I expected, much to the chagrin of some, I expect! What a strange myth to be perpetuated, really.

I also found the comment about learning/growth being 'exponential vs. linear' both affirming and slightly alarming, lol. Even though it clearly seemed that way, one doesn't necessarily like to assume that their child is going to be THAT far ahead. But in the end, I think the most important thing is to be an advocate for your child, so that he gets the kind of education he needs and deserves.

i heard the "evening out" thing a lot last year from people who were trying SO HARD to pretend i was hothousing DD5.

at the time, i took this completely personally, but i'm starting to realize that they'd probably just never met anyone like DD before, so they honestly didn't know any better. the school's incoming Pre-K classes are typically around 15 kids - and no matter how many years of experience those teachers had behind them, it's pretty unlikely they'd have ever actually met a kid like DD - let alone someone like HK's wunderkind.

i'd also argue that "evening out" is performed pretty efficiently by a bad school environment - we nearly lost DD last year that way and it's taken her all summer to claw her way back to her usual sparky self. now that she's finally got an appropriate learning environment, it feels like she's got her foot on the accelerator.

Alternatively: at some point a person will set into a master set of learning heuristics and the pace of learning will settle into a norm for themselves. Some of these are heuristics others will learn in due time.

Also, the further you push the bounds in any field, the more input it takes to reach bigger understandings. Look at math, many of our kids here could never have heard of math and at age 8 master the concepts of addition, substraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals in a couple of weeks. They are really small ideas needing tiny heuristics to understand. Then look at geometry that is pretty content rich.

So, I'm going to say learning can be slow starting, fast in the middle, then slow at the end. Alternatively for some people it is fast, faster, slow...

At some point asymptotic looks pretty plateauish. That is also a caveat for the perfectionist learner, who can't appreciate that it may take 1000 pages of reading to progress the seemingly same functional amount that took half a page when they began studying a new field.

Zen scanner that is absolutely true, but not generally a point reached during high school I would say?

Definitely a problem for my DD in piano. A beginner lesson-book piece is not at all the same as a full work by Scriabin; it's just that 8 years of learning makes it possible to consider tackling something like that, where incremental gains are about as much as anyone can reasonably hope for.

I;ve written about this before here. I have seen some things happen in my peer group that could look like "evening out." I run with a Waldorfy/hippie group that does not do early academics, to the point of discouraging it. Some of these children did not read until 8 and then were quickly reading Harry Potter. If you put those kids next to kids of high-powered professionals who've been hothousing a bit and were feeding their kids BOB books in K, and then all of sudden there they both are at 8 reading HP--well, does that look "they all even out in 3rd"? It can.

It's not what we're really talking about, though.

I think it is. Because statistically, teachers are going to see a lot more hothoused kids who level out than they are going to see 99.9% kids. I think that is where the underlying nature of the beast lies.

Probably not much, I imagine some concept out there like junior year college angst where those walls are discovered. Calculus was my first wake up call in hs where all math before calculus I auto-learned and calculus as presented needed a lot more stuff before the big concept progress would take place for me.

It's also why I have scanner in my name, I am a sucker for the first drop of the roller coaster of learning and am ready to move on once the car gets to the next ratchety up climb.

Yeah-- the climb can be ugly for the adrenaline junkie within.

Like Ultramarina we know a lot of alternative minded folks who don't hothouse to the point of avoiding early academic development, this was particularly the case when our eldest was young. She went to a very alternative preschool and school, where I would hazard most of her (tiny) cohort was at least MG with at least one PG child in her group (of 10). NONE of them started school really reading. Most of them were truly reading by mid year, novels by the end of the year (ie way beyond normal reading progression, though to varying degrees). Except my own DD of course, who has multiple learning issues and was still working on the alphabet 2 years later. But because of this cohort not being academically encouraged before school she had looked perfectly normal until they all finished preschool and went to school... None of them had been supported to learn to read, all of them were advanced in general knowledge, problem solving, etc. Certainly some more than others.

On the other hand the school we moved to next was a high end private full of hothousing families... Our 2nd daughter is HG+ and has learned at a far faster rate than most of her peers - but again did not look developmentally unusual amongst a group of super enriched 4yr olds because she was doing sandpit and dressup while they were doing Kumon...

I think given these sorts of differences in approach to early life, when combined with the rarity of actual 99th-99.9th++ kids, it's little wonder teachers think "it all evens out".

Ironically enough though we have been told more than once that children who are as behind as our eldest was in yr 2 do not ever catch up, let alone get ahead like she has. So apparently it's only the kids who are ahead who are expected to "even out", not the strugglers.

Everything mumof3 said, plus my 2cents, which is really the same as what she said...

There are hothoused kids and middling kids and kids whose parents avoid early academics. There are kids who will struggle with reading, there are middling kids and there are kids whose brains are hardwired to decode. There's no correlation between those two groups so some born decoders will have been reading since two because of coaching, some will start K not reading and all other permutations.

Teachers are most likely to see early readers who are heavily coached middling ability children, and they will even out because the not heavily coached children will, after four years of instruction, have reached their own natural skill level. The odds of any given teacher seeing more than a couple of kids in the 99.9th percentile is low. We had a 40 yr veteran teacher and ours was the third at that level she'd ever seen. They are not talking about our kids when they say this.

Hothousing is like buying and reading the textbook the week before class starts. You look smart on the first day, but as everyone else is taught the same stuff you fade into the pack.

That was pretty disjointed, apologies.

I think also the fact that you are talking about 6-9 year olds also play into things. DS 7 last year found the captain underpants books in his school library. They are maybe 15 levels below his reading level, but he found them just as hysterical as the other boys in his class. Because he was 6 and its toilet humor! However those boys are not then capable of reading and understanding Neil deGrasse Tyson's book about killing Pluto - mine could. Comprehension is often the thing teachers or others who believe in leveling out hang their hats on - he's not getting all the depth of a book, like after reading the little prince, or something else with depth. So they think sure he's reading but he's not absorbing so then at 3rd grade when all the others are reading those books, they think DS's depth has not developed, possibly because unless you engage in a deep conversation you won't find out if they understand it deeply. But any teacher actually doing reading assessment should be able to see the difference. I also think the whole reading on a 4th grade level or whatever terms are used also often mask things - the average 4th grader or the gifted 4th grader.

What also interesting is that this leveling out conversation disappears in high school where separation is encouraged, with honors and AP courses.

DeHe

This is the primary problem we have with DS9. His communication skills are poor for his age, and he doesn't care for writing (delayed fine motor skills), so you sure as hell aren't going to get a book report out of him... so when I tell them he's capable of understanding high school level books they honestly don't have a good way to see that for themselves... At least he's been able to show at least 6th grade comprehension on the AR tests.

Also, I do personally think it's hard to tell a bright kid from a really bright kid unless you're spending a lot of time with them and/or are unusually observant. I know a lot of kids who have been tested for GT who did not get in, and a lot who did (since DD is at a magnet where they only take kids in the 99th%). There is a big group there where I would have to say I just could not have predicted which way these kids would go. They probably are all in the 115-140 range.

Did some of those 115 kids look really sharp as toddlers and young kids? Maybe, yeah, and some of the 140 kids might have looked behind. My own daughter looked more "out there" as a toddler than she eventually tested, though I'd hardly say she's plateaued. Meanwhile my son didn't look nearly as precocious and now looks a bit more scary-smart. Time will tell. They're both basically in the "smart enough to do whatever they want and need to keep a careful eye on it" group, but not the "so smart we're really in trouble and school isn't going to work" group.

Personally, I think the tests are blunt instruments at best, but do serve a valuable purpose in sussing out unknown areas of really high ability and unknown areas of challenge. They provide additional info, but day to day experience is invaluable.

One of the things I have noticed going from preschool to school is that the relationship with the teacher is much more superficial. My son's strongest test was problem solving (AE of 16+ at 5.8) which really only shows if you give him hard problems to solve or have an depth conversation. The preschool teachers had the time and inclination to do that as they are interested in the child developing. School teachers have less time and are more interested in the child conforming. That's what is seems like anyway.

My DS's reading level at school has not changed since early 3rd grade (he's in 4th grade now). Did he plateau? Well, no. He hit the highest level they test for and so there's no room for him to be assessed higher. The other kids have not all caught up to that level, though.

At the beginning of the year he came home freaked out because his teacher said they were expected to read 3 chapter books per week. I told him to show her what books he was reading and she changed the requirements for him.

That said, his reading did not progress smoothly. He pretty much refused early readers and was only slightly above grade level at the start of 2nd grade. He was reading and understanding the False Prince (a middle school book) by the spring. So, imo, his reading level before that was fairly meaningless. His younger brother, now in 2nd, reads WAY better than he did then and is 9 months younger (May birthday compared to Sept.) He can pretty much read anything you put in front of him (although he doesn't always demonstrate what he can do).

Kids are all different and have different trajectories. Suggesting that that means they will "even out" in 3rd grade is just silly.

Thanks - I'd not heard of the False Prince so I will have to see if my DD would be interested because it looks like an absorbing tale.

My opinion of the 'plateau theory' is that it is believed only by those who have never encountered HG and above kids. The thing about >=HG, in my experience at least, is that the rate of learning is so much faster than 'normal' - that given the right access to knowledge they may never plateau until well beyond secondary education.

If they appear to plateau earlier than that the school is doing something wrong - very wrong.

Exactly. They don't plateau-- they ceiling. Big difference.

Where's te like button?

madeinuk, I had never heard of it either until he brought it home. It's an entertaining story. I was just thrilled that my ds who loved to be read to but had up until that point resisted reading on his own had chosen such a book as his first independently read novel. Bonus was that the author, Jennifer Nielsen, made an appearance near us about a month after he finished it. He was by far the youngest kid present and she was fantastic, taking time to chat with him personally for a while.

There is now a sequel, The Runaway King and a 3rd is expected in the spring.