Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Sorry Strivers, Talent Matters

There's a very interesting opinion piece in the Sunday Review of the New York Times.

Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice � and a lot of it. ... Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability.

Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields � and not just up to a point.

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It's nice to read something like this piece in a publication with a readership as wide as that of the Times.

Interesting read, thankyou!

Interesting article, but I feel like it oversimplifies things a bit. With the possible exception of obtaining a patent, I am not sure that the things listed (earning a PhD, publishing a scientific article or literary work) are necessarily the best measures of anything we can call "real world" success. They are also not that exclusive anymore. See this article, for example.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html

Of course, it all depends on how you define success. Wealth? Prestige? Happiness? Perhaps you could argue prestige with these measures, but not the other two.

Also, I have mixed feelings about this article. What is their purpose in writing this? Because it seems like it could just feed into the ideas that we don't need to worry about PG kids because they'll be fine, and increase the social distance between them and "everyone else" creating an increasingly lonely position.

Good question -- I just posed this question to Dr. Meinz -- I'll post if I hear back.

I didn't get this impression at all. The piece noted the obvious importance of practice yet added that talent can have an effect on outcomes.

I thought the piece was important because it said, in major newspaper, that talent is real. I agree that it probably simplifies things, but it's not like they had much choice. The Op-Ed pages limits people to 750 words or so. There isn't a lot of room for nuanced argument in those kinds of bounds, so I'm not sure what you expect.

What's important (to me at least) is that the piece said something that's true, yet is unpopular these days: talent matters, talent is real, and it can affect your chances for success. Saying this out loud is huge.

It's also so obvious (to me at least). Yet our society doesn't seem to want to say it out loud unless you're an athlete. So instead we hear arguments like "all children are gifted" and "they all even out by third grade" and "you must be making your kid do constant math worksheets." At the beginning of the school year, my son had to fill out a True-False homework sheet for math class that included the statement "There is no such thing as a mathy mind." Bollocks! But teacher's correct answer was "True," and answering "False" was not, let us say, encouraged.

So I guess I'm a bit confused by why people here would seem to be suspicious of an opinion piece that finally says that talent --- particularly cognitive talent --- is real and can have real effects.

The sad part to me is that although talent matters, aka 'being different' matters...if you are different, you are screwed in our public school system. Perseverance is still key.

I think the problem is that talent is not enough. Look at Hiliary Clinton. Estimates put her IQ around 125. Gifted but not brilliant and people who know her say the same, but she worked really, really hard. She applies herself, she takes risks.

She pursues her goals. Someone asked what success was, probably pursuing your goals and reaching many of them.

I think that why practice outperformed talent in many studies, is that talent can get lazy. Isn't that why we are on this forum? So our kids are challenged, don't get bored in school and fall of the cliff of life?

Yes, agreed. I am hanging around here to find ways to keep my kids from falling off that cliff.

The school my dd5 attends has a saying, from their namesake, that Success=Education+Motivation+Perseverance

Which I think is about right. Talent can be added in there for extraordinary results, but still success can be obtained with the above recipe.

I agree with Val that it's a good article. Let me comment on this part:

"In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the �best� players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the �good� players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled."

The implication is that practicing the most made the best players the best. I think that is partially true, but the reverse causation also exists. Talented violinists will progress faster than less-talented ones given the same amount of practice, so the talented violinists find practice more rewarding and do it more. In school, high-IQ students get more
out of academic work than low-IQ students do, so they may spend more time on it. Studying calculus or closely reading a Jane Austen novel does not reward even average-IQ people, so they rationally avoid doing so.

The article discusses the predictive ability of the SAT and correctly states that it is a quasi-IQ test. Because of large group differences found on the SAT (also found on the ACT, on Advanced Placment tests, on NCLB-mandated achievement tests, and on the NAEP) , most writers on education don't want to think about the g-loading of standardized tests.

I read the NYT article and interpreted it differently. The authors found that kids who scored in the top percentile on the SAT by age 13 were very likely to have successful long-term careers. To my eye, that doesn't prove necessarily that talent wins out over practice.
What kids take the SAT before age 13? Most do not do that on their own. Their parents sign them up for that, many of whom come from wealthy and/or educated families. You may simply be seeing a well-known association that you see with IQ- children from wealthier, highly educated families tend to have higher IQs.