Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Learning to do more detailed work in Science

According to the Davidson Database, 13 in 10,000 are PG. I have been curious. How do they know this? It's not like everyone gets an IQ test.

Also what should 13 in 10,000 mean to someone who is helping guide an elementary education?

It seems like the child has to show what they can handle/do before school would make any adjustments. When I talked to someone at school about DS being set at the same pace as the other gifted kids this doesn't seem to matter. He has to show them he can do the work but, I question if it's the pace causing less than his ability performance. It's hard for me to know. I'm thinking about Science, where his aplication has not been up to par for a kid who loves Science.

Well, it's by gifted for gifted. They probably have a statician.
I can't say I really know, but it seems to me like it means school is not for learning. It's just for fun. What kind of science does he like? Or is the question, should the school change for him or he for them? What does he have to show them, and what can they give him, or do you know? I think the value of the school is the years you get really good teachers and the price you pay is the years you get the boring ones. This reply's almost too rambling to post.

They know this because the people who develop IQ tests know how many people in their norming sample were able to achieve at each level, and they have calculated the scoring to follow a normal curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. An IQ score these days is actually a frequency measure, not an "intelligence quotient" (mental age/chronological age) like it used to be.

What this should mean to people developing an elementary education plan for a child with PG scores is that they almost certainly haven't seen enough children like this to make any judgments about what is or isn't going to work for a particular child.

[quote=La Texican]
What kind of science does he like?

Or is the question, should the school change for him or he for them? What does he have to show them, and what can they give him, or do you know?

I think the value of the school is the years you get really good teachers and the price you pay is the years you get the boring ones.quote]
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I have never seen him turn away at any science except biology. He has been watching programs and reading every kind of science and technology since he was a toddler.

I don't know if school should really change for him, if he is not showing the application of science well - like with reports and projects. I speculate it's the pace or he already know much of what he is learning. The application of what he is learning is new.

I think he has a really great teacher.

It seems like I'm missing something or he is. He can be driven and should be interested. This bugged me all last year and we are about to start again. Vent. Vent.

There is a huge difference between being able to absorb information and being able to organize and write reports and develop projects.

Some things to think about:

What skills do these reports and projects draw on?

Are they working with the ability to draw conclusions from data and make testable predictions, or are they more like book reports and presentations?

Do they require a lot of handwriting or good motor skills to be successful?

Is he actually being asked to collect data that might enable him to discover something that he doesn't already know, or are these projects the kind of "experiments" that should really be called "demonstrations"?

Are they covering topics that are new to him, or material that he learned a long time ago?

The answers to these questions could tell you a lot about what his issues are with the material. It could be complete lack of challenge, or it could be that he needs practice or explicit instruction in some skill areas required for developing these work products independent of their science content (or possible lack of it).

DS says the challenge is enough but knows much of it already. This seems a bit odd. But, maybe what he is not doing seems so obvious to the teacher and not to him. Teacher says it's simple he just needs to follow directions. There is such a wonderful variety in the class in assignments. He keeps a notebook which is for class notes, experiement results, preparing for a skit, ect. He does well on tests.

What skills do these reports and projects draw on?
Here is where he has been lacking:
following directions/format
giving details
researching information

Paraphrasing some suggestion I read, he can add details by telling him to pretend like he's using his homework to teach someone who doesn't know anything about it. Maybe it would line up with what the teacher wants if you tell him to prefend that they're going to use his project to show another student what the teacher said who missed that class.

I can testify to that. I took the new GRE yesterday, and they could not give me my score instantly like they normally do, because we are the population (the "norm", normal distribution, the bell curve) they will base the scores on. After they have enough of us real people types who have taken the test to know how our scores are distributed, ETS will tell us our scores and base the next batch of scores on how our scores were distributed.

My friends are very amused to think that I am now the norm.

Has the teacher given the class rubrics or examples of what an "A", a "C", and an "F" report or project would look like, with explanations of why?

These links might be helpful:

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_guide_index.shtml

http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistrylabexperiments/a/labreports.htm

Thank you, I think this might be helpful to talk to him about some of this in a different way, like you suggest.