Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Plateauing

Has anyone's kid 'plateaued', or did the acceleration of learning more or less continue as they grew?

While I wouldn't say that it's a SMOOTH curve, no, it's not plateaued, either.

It's been more like a step-function-- a very particular type of step-function, I mean. Like a current/charge measurement in stepped-voltage polarography-- the wave-form is one of rapid acclimatization to a new "load." Any time she's been placed under cognitive load, or allowed to "stretch" she seems to make a major "jump" in ability, which behaves asymptotically with respect to the new upper boundary.

Then the growth continues at a more rapid-than-normative-even-for-older-peers rate, until she hits the 'boundary' condition again.



Does that make sense?

I suspect that this means that DD hasn't ever experienced appropriate challenge long-term. It's always a moving target.


She outgrows it too fast.

Now, that is not the behavior of a student who is "unusually motivated" or "bright, but not fundamentally different from peers."

While we expected that up to about age 10, what has been a little more alarming is that her learning curve continues to be not-NT well into adolescence. It worries us some in terms of what it may mean for college.

But HK don't ALL kids become better learners the older they get ( compared to their earlier self). Your DDs continuining trajectory makes perfect sense to me. Comparing what is expected at each level of schooling, children are not just expected to have more accumulated knowledge/skill they are expected to be able to learn faster/deeper and output more/faster (compared to their earlier selves or more accurately the age average). Your daughter was not likely to ever become normative in any way was she? Including the speed at which her personal capacity increases.

This is an incredibly informative and interesting discussion. All the replies have pretty much confirmed what DH and I expected, much to the chagrin of some, I expect! What a strange myth to be perpetuated, really.

I also found the comment about learning/growth being 'exponential vs. linear' both affirming and slightly alarming, lol. Even though it clearly seemed that way, one doesn't necessarily like to assume that their child is going to be THAT far ahead. But in the end, I think the most important thing is to be an advocate for your child, so that he gets the kind of education he needs and deserves.

i heard the "evening out" thing a lot last year from people who were trying SO HARD to pretend i was hothousing DD5.

at the time, i took this completely personally, but i'm starting to realize that they'd probably just never met anyone like DD before, so they honestly didn't know any better. the school's incoming Pre-K classes are typically around 15 kids - and no matter how many years of experience those teachers had behind them, it's pretty unlikely they'd have ever actually met a kid like DD - let alone someone like HK's wunderkind.

i'd also argue that "evening out" is performed pretty efficiently by a bad school environment - we nearly lost DD last year that way and it's taken her all summer to claw her way back to her usual sparky self. now that she's finally got an appropriate learning environment, it feels like she's got her foot on the accelerator.

Alternatively: at some point a person will set into a master set of learning heuristics and the pace of learning will settle into a norm for themselves. Some of these are heuristics others will learn in due time.

Also, the further you push the bounds in any field, the more input it takes to reach bigger understandings. Look at math, many of our kids here could never have heard of math and at age 8 master the concepts of addition, substraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals in a couple of weeks. They are really small ideas needing tiny heuristics to understand. Then look at geometry that is pretty content rich.

So, I'm going to say learning can be slow starting, fast in the middle, then slow at the end. Alternatively for some people it is fast, faster, slow...

At some point asymptotic looks pretty plateauish. That is also a caveat for the perfectionist learner, who can't appreciate that it may take 1000 pages of reading to progress the seemingly same functional amount that took half a page when they began studying a new field.

Zen scanner that is absolutely true, but not generally a point reached during high school I would say?

Definitely a problem for my DD in piano. A beginner lesson-book piece is not at all the same as a full work by Scriabin; it's just that 8 years of learning makes it possible to consider tackling something like that, where incremental gains are about as much as anyone can reasonably hope for.

I;ve written about this before here. I have seen some things happen in my peer group that could look like "evening out." I run with a Waldorfy/hippie group that does not do early academics, to the point of discouraging it. Some of these children did not read until 8 and then were quickly reading Harry Potter. If you put those kids next to kids of high-powered professionals who've been hothousing a bit and were feeding their kids BOB books in K, and then all of sudden there they both are at 8 reading HP--well, does that look "they all even out in 3rd"? It can.

It's not what we're really talking about, though.

I think it is. Because statistically, teachers are going to see a lot more hothoused kids who level out than they are going to see 99.9% kids. I think that is where the underlying nature of the beast lies.

Probably not much, I imagine some concept out there like junior year college angst where those walls are discovered. Calculus was my first wake up call in hs where all math before calculus I auto-learned and calculus as presented needed a lot more stuff before the big concept progress would take place for me.

It's also why I have scanner in my name, I am a sucker for the first drop of the roller coaster of learning and am ready to move on once the car gets to the next ratchety up climb.