I love that there are books aimed at the 'top 10%' - I strongly believe that the author needs to state- on the cover -who they are talking to. And that will probably include some numbers to be clear:
Some possibilities:
'Kids who score in the top 5% on State grade-level exams'
'Kids who are rare in the population - top half a percent if IQ tests reflect them clearly'
'Kids with a few areas of learning strength who are ordinary in other learning areas.'
'Kids with GAI over 135 and WM/PSI under 115'
I'm coming late to this conversation b/c we've been out of town for the past week, but I wanted to go back to this b/c it resonates with me. I find myself struggling at times with feeling elitist in wanting to restrict what is defined as gifted b/c defining it so broadly muddies the water so much that there is no way to adequately say "here's was a gifted child needs" when gifted means so many different things. I find that our local definition falls more into the "kids with a few areas of learning strength" area b/c most kids who are ided as gifted are ones who hit the 95th percentile in any one area in achievement (like an SRI lexile score in the 95th and all other achievement scores not that high).
However, I do like the idea that there can be many boxes that can be called gifted as long as one is clear as to which box we are using for the individual child. Has anyone read Jim Deslisle's article arguing for a more restrictive definition of gifted (
http://www.giftedteam.org/pdf/links/Understand_What_Giftedness_Is_and_What_It_Is_Not-Delisle.pdf)?
