Gifted individuals may gravitate toward thinking about and focusing on the fringe or edge of any concept... the exceptions to the rules, and any possible inconsistencies/discrepancies.
Right--this is exactly DD. "But it says always, and that's not always true, because sometimes...so that can't be the answer." (A bit of ASD-ishness, there, too, perhaps. Who knows.)
Exactly!!
The problem is most severe when there seems to be NO "perspective" which is uniform and allows for the selection of one "best" answer. It's like she has to pull back until they are ALL "fuzzy" and potentially correct, and if she pulls in to a view that has discriminating power, then they are ALL
incorrect.Drives us both nuts-- and I've seen a lot of those constructed response questions-- it's not that her approach needs fine-tuning. It's that the questions require a different LEVEL of scrutiny/background
for each individual answer selection.with what they may already know which was not in the passage (as though they were having a conversation, not as though they were being tested.)
YES.
Assess my DD Socratically, and she'll blow the doors off-- both with her speed and her level of insight. But diminish the activity to a multiple choice series, and you've killed it for her.
This is why (in part) I think that multiple choice questions are (in general) not a good idea at all for gifties. It is
way hard to write them well even for a well-defined population. Whole graduate theses have been constructed from less, quite frankly, and ETS can tell you all that they do for on-going item validation, which is a 2-3year process involving LOADS of data inputs.
Pretty sure that AR isn't thinking about it that hard. LOL.
I did a lot of "this is what the question actually says, but this is what they meant, and so even though this would technically be correct, this one is the answer they really want" when I was in school.
Yes-- only be aware that the people writing assessments now at this level
are really not very good at this activity. So then it becomes a matter of dialing in to the individual idiosyncratic thought process of the INDIVIDUAL person who was writing test items.
DD is
darned good at this now-- but it's frankly hellish for HG+ people to spend much time at this particular activity. It's completely soul-sucking to have to do this deliberate... um... well, okay, it's a specific kind of "dumbing down" in order to take a particular perspective. I have very mixed feelings about the fact that this is probably the skill that my DD's formal education has done the most to "teach" her.
