Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Are gifted education programs a waste of money?

Emm. On closer inspection of their graph, I'm questioning the conclusion that math scores "fell" among GT kids. The "fall" doesn't look like much of a fall to me. It actually looks like it's about 0.05 of a standard deviation. In easily-understood IQ terms, this would be a difference of less than 0.75 of an IQ point. This is a difference? "I am smarter than you. You have an IQ of 124.25, whereas mine is 125."

I didn't see the original study and have to get my kids right now, but I'd be interested in knowing how they discussed this apparently very small difference and how much emphasis they put on it significance WRT special programs for gifted kids.


The scores increase steadily with increasing distance above the threshold (and decrease likewise in the other direction). So the study shows pretty clearly that smarter kids got higher scores on tests of the same academic material.

Given this observation, it's not too surprising to me that people whose IQs are nearly identical might have test scores that are nearly identical.

(Of course, I'm speaking in aggregate terms here: on average, the smarter kids did better. But some smarter kids who didn't study probably got lower scores than a less-smart kids who did study.)


Philosophical note: the authors were "test[ing] the effectiveness of gifted education," but they were making an assumption that standardized computer-read multiple choice tests are a good measure of the success of education.

I disagree. These tests don't measure a student's ability to synthesize knowledge or think of new solutions. They're focused exclusively on answering relatively straightforward questions quickly. They may be a crude measure of processing speed. But I don't think they measure "education."


This statement "might" be an exaggeration in the sense that saying "The ants were bigger than a 1954 Chevy and they ate my parents" might be an exaggeration.

Them! Them!