Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Gifted or Not?

I think it is likely that a far greater fraction of cab drivers' kids are unidentified gifted kids.

I think it is likely that a far greater fraction of the middle-class and poor have not been identified as children or adults.

I would like to add that a great number of gifted girls and women are never identified and they spend a large part of their life feeling isolated and misunderstood and asking themselves what is wrong with them, when there was nothing wrong to begin with.

sigh

While I agree with the posts that there are definitely gifted (both identified and unidentified) in every walk of life, I think that in LMK's post, it was meant differently, although I could be wrong. I read this as LMK saying the teacher used the comment that there are gifted taxi cab drivers to argue that there was no need for differentiation for the child in question.

I would figure that a lot of people have heard such statements from educators/administration, used as their explanation of why the child requires nothing other than what is being currently offered. I recall a meeting where DH and I were expressing our worry about DS not learning how to overcome challenge. The teacher's reply was that "there are some people who just find everything easy all through life and never have to work at it." She was arguing DS needed no challenge in class -- no harm, no foul. Drove me nuts! I wanted to say, "How about we don't assume that DS will be one of those, and just try actually teaching him something? Maybe just for yucks?" Of course, I held my tongue and tried to be a little more polite than that....

I don't think schools that have gifted programs typically require parents to pay for IQ testing. So what do you think causes underidentification of the non-affluent?

But when you take a look at Murry
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040302_book443.pdf
at the begining of chapter 2, he says that he broke his groups down into 5 classes at the 10th,25th,75th,and 90th percentile.
So as far as I know, there is no data looking at income in Optimally Gifted, Highly Gifted and Profoundly Gifted catagories, no matter what definition one gives them. The majority of kids in the 'over 90th percentile' catagory can be expected to get a decent-fit education without their parents doing much of anything.

So I would suggest from personal experience that HGs and PGs vary all over the map on many personal characteristics, including income.

I heard about something in medicine once called the Starling Curve, and the expression 'falling off the Starling Curve'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_function_curve
and I've often thought that a lot of natural phenomenon must mimic this. One can be under pressure and rise to the occasion to a degree, quite sharply at first in fact, and then with increased stress, the gains get smaller and smaller, perhaps even being lost. My hunch is that the income/IQ curve is quite linear throughout most of the trip, but resembles more of a Starling Curve as one gets up in the HG/PG zone. Afterall, if the income curve was perfectly linear, and at least 2/3rd of HG/PG kids came from HP/PG parents, there wouldn't be much discussion about how to negotiate with schools, and more about how to find the best private tutor, yes?

Or do I have more straw between my teeth?
Grimity

I'll bet there isn't any one answer to that, Bostonian.

Probably because:

• underachievement is encouraged in those groups
• schools without any resources for G/T kids certainly won't go looking for them
• adults who could identify those children don't know to look (lacking understanding of what G/T traits actually look like)
• adults who could identify those children believe that GT children look like ________ (which is often more a mark of higher socioeconomic status than anything else)
• PARENTS can't/don't know how to advocate for those children (for a variety of reasons)
• cultural factors lead to a parental/familial reluctance for "identification" as gifted (or anything else)
• cultural pull against G/T push leads kids ot underachieve/mask very young in order to fit in
• proportion of 2e kids in that group is likely higher (due to environmental factors), and therefore G/T may be well-masked.

Take your pick-- any and all may be reasons why a child isn't identified.

In our state, and many others, there is no gifted program, no IQ testing except if an LD or other learning challenge is suspected. At least in those states, parents paying is the only route to identification.

It depends on how you define "gifted" for the purposes of creating an appropriate learning environment, which I think is the question at this point in the discussion (not the OP's question...).

I define it as the top ~2% (+2 standard deviations) in a given population. Narrowly, this is "in a particular school" and widely it's "in a small number of schools that are near each other." The first definition would probably work in rural areas. The second would be more useful in suburbs or cities.

For me, "gifted" means that the way you learn is sufficiently different from most everyone else that you need a learning environment that's different too.

Again, this is mean to be about creating appropriate learning environments, rather than picking an arbitrary number such as 130. An IQ of 130 may be +2SD in the US population as a whole, but this statistic doesn't necessarily describe four neighboring schools in the Bronx or a college town in northern New Hampshire.

In our district, they only test kids with a teacher referral. A MG kid from a non-affluent background might not "look" as gifted as a normal-bright kid from an affluent background. Not getting enough food or sleep, having a lot of life stress, having to work to support the family, being responsible for younger siblings, not being exposed to educational resources - all those things are more common in less-affluent households, and can mask giftedness.

Love this! Brushing the dust off the quotes thread.