I am becoming actively annoyed with the "academic precocity" definition of giftedness.
Oh, me too, me too!
More and more I'm thinking that we've got it all wrong when we think of "gifted" or "intelligent" as being on the same railroad track as everyone else, just moving along it faster. A gifted 4-year-old is not the equivalent of a NT 8-year-old. And I'm not just talking about asynchronies, I mean that the intellectual process is fundamentally different.
(Like you, I'm alert to this issue because of my kid. Hanni didn't talk early and shows no signs of being an early reader, but she offered her first causal explanation when she was still in the two-word stage. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a gifted kid, but there is so clearly something astonishing about the way her mind works.)
I think that when we test kids early, we are inevitably measuring the wrong thing. What we want to know is whether the kid will grow up to be a person who is capable of complex and sophisticated thought. What we are able to measure is whether the kid is ahead of the curve on mastering the basics. There is some correlation between these, but they are
not the same thing.
The science of understanding giftedness is still in its infancy. We need to know a lot more about what is going on in gifted brains, and what signs of that can be detected early on, before we'll really have a handle on this. (I'm thinking along the lines of how it's now possible to identify kids at risk for autism very early on, just by watching videos of the kid and knowing what to watch for. But a lot of basic science had to happen to get to that point.)
Back to my own experience, what I see in my kid is a skill at constructing mental models of a situation and playing around with hypotheses about how it works or how it might work under different conditions. This is a skill that is lacking in some of the grad students in my department's PhD program, and I can pretty much predict who will bomb out of the program based on it. It is absolutely essential for playing in the big leagues, and it cannot be taught. And I can see it in my 4-year-old, but I'm damned if I could figure out how to test for it.
