Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment A thread for Jbell281 - are your children gifted?

The sooner they get to that point, the better off they are! Maybe indigo will chime in with some links and resources here?

Letting children skate through school without learning to study is not doing them any favors. They're losing opportunities to learn essential life skills and build their grit and confidence.

My childhood and young adult story is devastating - mostly because I never learned the essential life skills from overcoming academic challenges. I took a college writing class last fall and realized in a panic I hadn't learned anything about english or writing since 4th or 5th grade. I was an anxious mess for the whole class, nearly withdrew, and did not expect to pass the class. I did - with 100%, actually. But it was an unpleasant experience! It's not fun to be learning basic study skills in my 30's. It's not fun to have my husband with a graduate degree, my cousins getting their masters degrees and PhD's, my siblings getting PhDs, my sister-in-law and cousin have university teaching positions and I'm over here like "Today I swept the floor 3 times, cleaned up poop and vomit, and my baby screamed at me for 45 minutes because I didn't let him eat the entire 2# box of strawberries." I'm a stay-at-home mom *because* I can't do much of anything else *because* I didn't have opportunity to learn how to learn when I was a child. It burns. Every day.

The sooner you can provide your children challenging academics, the better off they will be.

Haha, I'm slow at typing. I see indigo already put the link up. You're awesome indigo! Thank you!

My education goal for my children is to keep them at the level where they have to work at it. My son breezed through Algebra 1. Wouldn't most parents be ecstatic? I wasn't. I was concerned what he missed. He's doing Algebra 2 now. He has been getting about 50% right the first time through the lesson. I AM ECSTATIC NOW! Because he has finally met his match. He's finally doing math at a level where he can't do it in his head. He's finally learning the necessity of checking his work. He's finally challenged enough that he needs - and is willing to do the amount of - repetition necessary to master the material.

I've seen some parents are conflicted because they want their children to learn, but they also want their children to get good grades. Those don't necessarily go together.

LOL! I was thinking the same thing about you, sanne! Jbell281 is getting great info.

PS. Remember, there is a roundup of links on frequent forum topics, which is great for quick reference. I added the excellent Bertie Kingore link...

With you. When we switched the oldest to homeschooling, I told the children outright that my goal for them was to score in the 80%s on summative assessments, as an indication that their instruction was both challenging and achievable (aka, in the ZPD). We went through periods of much lower formative assessments, as they also wrestled through learning to study, show work, self-monitor, organize, etc.

One of the beauties of home schooling is that one can decide on one's own grading system. Having used Singapore Math throughout (including in secondary), we also adopted the grading system used in many Singapore classrooms for our math courses, which includes much more challenging problem-solving on assessments, but also sets 80% as the minimum score for an A+. This allows us to have both ZPD and "good" grades.

Just to clarify, because the "parents are better at identifying gifted children" meme is often misquoted and often misunderstood: this goes back to a specific study (I'm sure someone on this board, probably indigo, can dig it up) in which parents and teachers were given specific questionnaires *designed* to identify gifted children. The parents' questionnaires were better at predicting giftedness than the teachers', but this could just as well mean parents simply knew their children better and in a bigger variety of contexts. It is NOT about gut feeling.
And teachers are usually excellent at recognizing *academically* advanced children, assessing children's academics is what they do all day, and they have a much bigger sample to compare children to, as opposed to the parents, who are more likely to say in bewilderment "but I thought that was normal, all children in my family have been like that!".
The problem is that intellectual giftedness doesn't always manifest in advanced academics, of course, for various reasons. And some teachers, of course, are wilfully blind.

Teachers are excellent at picking up bright high achievers but they don't usually have time to have in depth conversations and identify those who think deeply etc. My kid's daycare teachers identified them not me or tge school.

Sorry, the study which you mentioned does not sound familiar.

What I am familiar with is anecdotal evidence (observation and experience) of parents correctly identifying their own children as gifted more accurately than teachers did. This seemed to be related to "parents simply knew their children better and in a bigger variety of contexts. It is NOT about gut feeling. And teachers are usually excellent at recognizing *academically* advanced children, assessing children's academics is what they do all day".

That said, parents may run the gamut from false negative: denial or "bewilderment "but I thought that was normal, all children in my family have been like that!" to false positive: hot-housing and tiger-parenting average children in hopes of achieving a coveted "gifted" label.

"The problem is that intellectual giftedness doesn't always manifest in advanced academics, of course, for various reasons. And some teachers, of course, are wilfully blind." Agreed.

That doesn't sound familiar to me. I did read a piece about parent identification of gifted children that used the nominator (parent or teacher) versus the child's IQ score. The parents were correct in their guess, if my memory is correct - about 75% of the time, with teachers only have about 25% accuracy. Of course, I did not note the source, perhaps this will sound familiar to someone else with better memory than I have?

Same thing here.