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Kind of like watching a spelling bee in another language.

Social-emotional maturity in intellectually gifted children

Teachers who fear that gifted children may face social and emotional problems as a result of acceleration have often not taken into consideration that intellectually gifted students differ from age-peers of average ability in their emotional maturity almost as much as in their intellectual ability. In children and adolescents emotional maturity is more closely related to mental age than to chronological age. Teachers with a special responsibility for intellectually disabled children are particularly sensitive to the developmental delay which is readily apparent in both their cognitive and affective development; however many teachers are unaware that intellectually gifted children are characterised by advanced affective (as well as cognitive) development.

The most comprehensive longitudinal study ever undertaken in human psychology - the Terman study - is also one of the landmark studies in gifted education. At its commencement, almost 80 years ago, this study contained 1528 children of IQ 135+ (Terman, 1925). The sixth and latest volume of the study, The Gifted Group in Later Maturity, was published only four years ago (Holahan and Sears, 1995). The authors discuss, frankly and comprehensively, the influence of mental age on the subjects� cognitive and affective attitudes and behaviors through childhood and adolescence, and the influence of their high intellectual ability on their relationships, interests and career paths in early, mid and later adulthood.

�Mental age as behavior determinant. Through the school years and into adolescence these children�s interests, attitudes and knowledge developed in correspondence with their mental age rather than with their chronological age. Their academic achievement as measured by tests, their interest and liking for various future occupational careers, their knowledge about and interest in games, their choice of recreational reading materials, and their moral judgments about hypothetical conduct were all characteristic of older non-gifted children whose mental age-range was approximated by this much younger and brighter group. Even the intellectual level of their collections was more mature than that of their chronological age-mates.� (Holahan and Sears, 1995, p. 16)

In both their cognitive and socio-affective development, intellectually gifted children resemble older children much more closely than they resemble their age-peers.

"appropriate education", she needed to "learn how to learn"

I don't know if this is denial or clarity of thinking, but dd is not over the top in IQs. She is only 146. I can understand why a 160 might need more acceleration, but dd isn't topping out her testing. DD has already had one year of acceleration. Gross doesn't give current IQ testing numbers, so it's hard to compare. I think if she said 146 Wisc IV score sometimes need 2 grade accelerations, we'd push hard for that, even if it meant private school for a year.

Furthermore, the majority of individaul IQ tests, such as the WISC III, also have ceilings which are too low to assess the intellectual capacity of most highly gifted students and are quite impractical for the assessment of the exceptionally or profoundly gifted. Several of the children in this study who scored in the high 140's on the WISC-III's predecessor, the WISC-R, subsequently scored at 160+ on the Stanford-Binet L-M. As related earlier, Jessica, when tested on the WISC-III, scored in the moderately gifted range!

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the problems of social isolation, peer rejection, loneliness and alienation which afflict many highly gifted children arise not our of their exceptional intellectual abilities but as a result of society's response to them. These problems arise when the school, the education system, or the community refuses to create for the exceptionally gifted child a peer group based not on the accident of chronological age but on a commonality of abilities, interests and values. Only through the creation of such a group can exceptionally or profoundly gifted children be freed from the taunts and jeers of age-peers, the pressure to camouflage their abilities in a desperate and futile struggle to conceal their differences, and the frightening sense of being the one-eyed man in the country of the blind who is distrusted and resented because he has vision- or perhaps because of what he can see.

Hollingworth (1942) reported that, in her longitudinal study of profoundly gifted young people, the most successful interventions occurred when the children were identified earlier, rather than later, in their elementary schooling, and were either accelerated or placed in a class with other gifted children. She claimed that it was between the ages of 4 and 9 that the social difficulties experienced by children of IQ 160+ were most acute. The present study mirrors Hollingworth's findings. Indeed, as one traces the history of the 18 young people in this book, it can be clearly seen that, in the majority of cases, the seeds of their future successes or difficulties were sown in the early years of school.

In every case, the young people who have radically accelerated have found both outstanding academic success and the 'sure shelter' of a warm and supportive friendship group....Some of the young people have not yet found that 'sure shelter'. In the majority of cases these are the young people who remained, for much of their elementary schooling, in an unfacilitative classroom setting with age-peers, or children only a year older, who would have had little comprehension of the ideas, interests, and with who one has little, or virtually nothing in common.
Indeed, a striking finding of this study is that, the earlier exceptionally and profoundly gifted children are placed in a setting which is deliberately structured to allow them access, not to age-peers but to children at similar stages of cognitive and affective development, the greater will be their capacity to form sound friendships in their later childhood, adolescent and adult years.