Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Highly gifted vs prodigy...how to tell the differe

I think the point that was being made was about gifted underachievment. Sometimes kids with very high IQs do worse in school than kids with IQs that are high but not gifted or HG high.

This idea also applies to standardized testing. Gifted people may overthink the answer choices and pick the "wrong" one (I'm thinking specifically of verbal questions with no objectively right answer.). I suspect that the same thing happens in the classroom. Gifted students may not accept the teacher's explanation, especially in math class where the approach may just be memorize and regurgitate.

Definitely! This can sometimes happen. I'm just not a fan of "The kids who do best in school are pleaser kids who aren't really all THAT smart" blanket statements. (Although my DD didn't, in fact, test stratospherically high. But I also base this on my observations of her classmates. Some of the kids who are doing really well are pleasers. Some are just really sharp. Some of the kids with lower grades are out-there kids who may not be doing well due to 2e, no desire to please, etc. Some are probably just on the lower end of gifted or less motivated. I don't see a single unifying pattern, and FWIW the child who stands out as THE best student (not my DD) also stands out as most likely one of the most gifted. She's just on another plane. Also an athletic and musical superstar.)

Agree with Ultramarina - intelligence, last I looked, wasn't distributed by a parent's income level. We're not a six-figure income household either.

2e kids who are pg/prodigy like my ds seem to be real outliers of outliers of outliers. These are the kids who beat to a different drum in a formalized school setting no matter where they are. Can't see my son being in school again for some time.

2e kids like my son muddy these waters. I'm still scratching my head trying to figure this out because there are other skills involved here besides high IQ. Behavioral optometrist tested my ds's visual skills in Dec and he scored in the whopping 1% percentile on one subtest that involved visual working memory. On one academic achievement test, he scored in the 98/99% percentile, though he didn't entirely cooperate with that test.

Prodigies don't necessarily have high IQ. Some do. Some don't. IQ, alone, is not the defining factor here.

Some have speculated that prodigies have exceptional working memory, within 99% percentile, and that is the defining factor. But there are flaws with this argument too. First, there are many parts of working memory. There's visual and verbal working memory. Second, the prodigies, pg kids, or other kids who have been studied influence the outcome or results.

Tracy Alloway, who's written a book on wm, hasn't studied prodigies or pg kids. Joanne Ruthsatz has studied prodigies, such as Jake Barnett and other, and has come up with some traits. However, her sample of prodigies is still small - http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/pur...tz-on-the-common-trait-of-all-prodigies/

My issue is that working memory experts claim that wm plays a huge role with education and learning. They claim that if a child has poor or weak working memory it's a reliable indicator of who would struggle in the classroom and is a predictor of future success. Yet, this isn't the case with my ds; he's not struggling to learn per se. DYS accepted the work samples as evidence of pgness, though he lacked the test scores for entry into DYS.

I haven't contacted Dr. Ruthsatz yet. But I will.

Thanks Val. Well said. PG kids are not always high achievers who are highly extrinsic motivation. It's quite the opposite situation with my ds8.

Agreed.

I've been thinking about the idea of talent for a long time. I suspect that the extreme talent that gives us breathtaking new ideas results from a complex interplay of different abilities and other factors. IQ is important in many fields (e.g. mathematics or physics), but if a stratospheric IQ was all that was needed, we would have produced dozens of new Darwins, Einsteins, and Mozarts every century.

So other factors are presumably important. I think about creativity and intellectual independence (Lee Smolin talks about this idea The Trouble with Physics, and I've seen it discussed elsewhere). Intellectual independence refers to an ability to follow your own ideas, while being fully aware of the consequences to your career. Etc.

There are presumably other factors as well, such as being financially able to eschew a traditional career. Maybe you are independently wealthy. Maybe you find a sponsor. Maybe your spouse has a good job. Maybe you can work part-time.
Then there is access: access to an instrument, to books, to tools, and these days, to the internet. Maybe someone gave you a piano. Maybe your professor arranged things so that you could tag along on a ship going to the Galapagos and your uncle persuaded your father to pay for it.

Either way, I think it's all very complicated.

This is one of the things my son does all the time. He will make a problem more difficult than necessary. He did this just last week in his Algebra II homework. He insisted in making his combinatorics word problems more difficult than necessary, and got himself stuck. I couldn't convince him that his interpretation wasn't what was intended, but did suggest he check with the teacher before the test the next day.

The correlation between parental income and child IQ is positive. It is not 1.00, but it not 0.00 either. If the correlation is 0.4 (to make up a number), you can expect in a country of more than 300 million people to find millions of children with above-average IQs from below-average-income households. But it's also true that the average IQ of children from households earning more than $100K exceeds that of children from households earning less than $100K.

But this topic is about the highly-gifted and prodigies, not what's average.

It's rather like trying to explain to Shaquille O'Neal why he should be 5'9".

You're using IQ to define intelligence and the ability to identify what high intelligence may be for an IQ test. Moreover, prodigies don't necessarily have high IQ and they don't necessarily come from affluent families either.

I do believe that these prodigy or high intelligence families would need to value learning or improving on whatever the prodigy or pg kids excels in whatever the household income level. And they'd need parents or someone else to recognize such gifts/talents and then foster them.

I'm not saying that wealth doesn't play a part with exposing a child to learning (music, arts, STEM, etc.) because it definitely can. Yes, of course, money can tip the scales. And before public institutions (schools, libraries, etc.), this was more the case.

Let's face it there's a reason 19 prime ministers went to Eton (the most of any UK public/boarding school). There's little financial aid for students to go to Eton so that eliminates a segment of society. Then it's only for boys too and that eliminates a segment of society at large. So yes, Eton is weighted toward those with wealth and socioeconomic connections today (ie. Will Prince William, heir to the throne, do? YES, of course, silly question). However, Eton College was founded by Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to seventy poor boys who would then go on to Kings College, Cambridge, which was also founded by the same King.

A number of prodigies in Solomon's book did not come from wealthy homes; in fact, I was struck by the number of single mothers who raised these musical prodigies. If you study famous people who are/were prodigies or hg or hg/2e, poverty and childhood trauma, of some type, seems to propel people to reach dizzying heights than otherwise. They seem to beat the odds. But then, prodigies are not the norm and neither are pg/2e kids.

Thanks Dude. Yes. We're talking outliers of outliers of possibly outliers. Not the norm.