Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school are they truly "gifted" at 2, 3. 4 etc?

Although we fall into the category where people would comment and say DD was so smart and very bright at 2,3, 4 and was certainly very verbal and articulate before her 2nd birthday. I was not sure I would put her in the PG range. She is now 5.5 and it is striking how much more her brain is developing.

Although she did read early, not nearly as fast as many of the stories on this forum. It is more her math side, her ability to visualize a situation, make comments, suggestions that is most striking.

Since we are friendly with a psychologist who owns a firm that does IQ testing and other sorts of testing in NYC. He does say it far too common that a child will drop back into MG range or just G range by 7th grade. But I have never looked at the stats.

Ren

I would note that this statistic has been obtained through regression analysis rather than through any actual studies of 4 and 17 year olds.

But, of course, test scores may change for a number of reasons: First, testing at 4 is so difficult. I am not at all confident that my 4 year old is outgoing enough to perform well on an IQ test at this time, and she is far more outgoing than some of her peers. Because so many preschoolers will refuse to cooperate for one reason or another, outgoing, obedient kids will naturally get a boost in their scores. That means that they appear to be smarter than the kids who don't cooperate, but in just a few years that difference won't matter and their scores will drop.

Second, when you're looking at kids testing at or above 130, you have to keep in mind that most of those kids will test at or barely above 130. How shocking is it that a kid with a 130 score would later score a 129? Not shocking in the least. Likewise kids who score a 129 may easily score a 130 on a later test, and the difference isn't at all significant.

Third, IQ testing compares the cognitive development of a child to his or her peers. It assumes that our cognitive development is constant and steady. But of course there are kids who, for whatever reason, develop in different ways. Some kids may have sudden leaps in development, and others may slow over time.

None of that means that kids aren't gifted at 4, or don't stay gifted if they are.

I've fought that battle and had to give it up. A good regression analysis is almost always right. And in any case, the result on IQ change IS based on longitudinal studies.


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I doubt most bright Hispanic or Black kids would sit through this, either. The black kid would be even more active while the Hispanic kid would be suspect of the tester the moment he walked into the room.


I would agree.

I think it is pretty sad that patience has more bearing on how well a child does in our current educational system than intelligence. Don't get me wrong; patience is a wonderful trait, and obviously one that is well worth having. But it doesn't make a child more likely to need special accommodations in school. In fact, it seems to me that it simply makes a child less likely to suffer the ill effects of not having special accommodations.

Regarding the "drop" in IQ, how much of it is related to using a different test? My D dropped 30 points from an early Stanford-Binet test to a recent WISC-IV (given about 10 years apart). The tests used to measure IQ haven't stayed the same over a 15 year period...

I totally agree here. In fact, impatience can actually be an advantage later on in a career (say a scientist who wants to gets results ASAP and works day and night and discovers something very interesting). I also wanted to add about the marshmallow exam. What about kids that don't like them? Or are not typically allowed sweets? It seems like that would affect the scores too...

As to the IQ test. That's talked about in Nutureshock some. I seem to remember that the 25% stat is funny. It's a reference to kids taking IQ tests at 4 and then compared to later ACHIEVEMENT tests when they are older. At least, that's what nutureshock said... Those could have very different results, especially if you're dealing with underachieving gifted kids.

I also wonder... Would a child hiding their abilities purposely answer incorrectly? Especially if they fell abnormal due to their intelligence? Something like that would show up much more at 17 than 4. What I'd like to see is try and do that same stat on kids that had proper accomidations at 4 and see how they progressed.

No5 also makes a good point. Most 4 year olds aren't going to go along with testing too well and I could really see how that would affect scores.

I completely agree. It just means that this way of measuring giftedness in 4 year olds may not be particularly reliable. For all of the reasons stated above, that doesn't seem too surprising to me. Just how unreliable, though, is pretty striking.

huh? my kid is the best reader for his age i have ever met. he is now 4 1/2 and reading at a 3rd grade level and making progress every day. he is in fact gifted. AND hispanic. he wasn't suspect of the tester. i don't even understand the statement. hispanic doesn't define his behavior, just his ethnicity.

I haven't gotten all the way through this very interesting thread yet, but did find this discussion interesting:
The beauty of prospective studies is that you are not dealing with false recollections as many of you have mentioned. The difficulty when we are discussing confirming advanced behavior in a very young child is getting the child to be a performing monkey and do whatever it is on command. I very clearly recall dd9's doctor inquiring as to whether she was combining words at all at her 2 yr apt as dd sat there mute. Dd had been combining two words since 5.5 months and was generally a non-stop chatterbox around me, but not on command. I guess that there could be some videotaping involved at home to confirm. I do also have a friend who has told me repeatedly that her kids were speaking in sentences at 18 months which is absolutely false. I was around these kids a lot at that age and beyond & they weren't speaking in anything that resembled a sentences until 3.5 or so. Parental representation that a child was doing something without confirmation due to stage fright couldn't be relied on either, for that reason.

In re to the original topic, if this point hasn't already been made, I believe that ultimately the same children who are gifted at 10 or 15 are also gifted at 2 or 3. Whether we can accurately identify who those kids are based upon behavior at those ages is a completely different question. There are a lot of "good students" who are labeled gifted by virtue of advanced reading skills, for instance. There are also a lot of gifted kids who are never recognized as such b/c they aren't stellar students. However, the difference in brain wiring that is gifted isn't a transient thing.

In terms of the value of identifying gifted kids as preschoolers, I don't know if there is tremendous value b/c there is too much room for false positives as well as false negatives. I would only view it as important to distinguish which kids are truly gifted that early if the child was having some difficulty that could be better understood or treated if the giftedness was understood as well.

By Hispanic I mean kids raised in neighborhoods in Texas where Spanish is the primary language, most of the parents are first generation Mexican immigrants, and the economy is based primarily on cash. (Cash means you never paid taxes...)

If you live in fear of the authorities in Mexico and then of the authorities when you are in the USA, even though you are a citizen, it has an effect. Hence the suspicion in a lot of these kids.

Let's compare again. Ever been to an AME Church Service? What if you took a kid used to an AME Service and stuck them in a Methodist or Freewill Baptist service? He'd go to sleep. And many if not most of the latter congregations would be very nervous at an AME service.

There are real cultural differences between Ethnic groups. I use Capital E to denote someone RAISED in that CULTURE. It has little to do with skin color.

If kids are evaluated only through the lens of one culture rather than though a lens that reflects their culture, then it will exclude most of the kids who do not have fluency in the primary culture of the evaluator.

A kid not of the evaluator's culture will be giving some blank looks to many of the questions or they will misinterpret the social cues. Behavior commonplace in the kid's culture will be seen as disruptive or non-participatory in another.

There are a lot of stories on this board about kids with FSIQ > 130 who are dissed by some evaluator because they got too weird for the adult's blue blood. Add in some true cultural differences and see how bad it gets.