If you think as I do, g is largely genetic or the result of prenatal influences, then any g-loaded test should show minimal gains between grades. Suppose the PISA test is heavily g loaded. Then, it would be completely predictable that the standard deviation of the scores is large compared to the one year gain in test scores.
You make good points, Tigerle, in #378, and I agree with you for the most part. I suspect that you are right, that calls for all of the children to work equally hard would just result in a higher load without added intellectual challenge.
Where I don’t quite agree: I used the term “work” partly because I thought it was something that people who oppose special treatment of gifted children (as “unfair”) might respond to. But also I used the term “work” because in my experience, learning at the right level of challenge requires intellectual energy. While I find it exhilarating to work at the peak of my capability, in all honesty I also find it somewhat exhausting–like work, though nothing like conscripted labor.
Perhaps it would be better to ask whether all children should be equally challenged during the school day?
I have recently thought a lot about where my daughter’s comment, “If my friends know I’m smart, they won’t like me,” could have come from. It is certainly not the case that before this epiphany, she went around informing other students that she was “smart”! Nor was she ever a show-off of any sort. But as I mentioned above, even when a child can guard against showing some signs of giftedness, some are bound to slip out. The best I can come up with: an episode of Care Bears. Seriously, I think that might have been the source.
It would be more interesting to look at the relationship between IQ and income.
Re: #392: of course there are 2E kids and gifted kids can have ADD, autism, or learning disabilities. But some have argued that HG kids are MORE likely to have mental health challenges, and to my knowledge, although often stated, has never been scientifically proven.
Mom2aphysicsgeek: it must be challenging and frustrating for your son to be both highly gifted and autistic. Thanks for sharing. I also did not realize you had 8 kids. Must be very interesting around your house!
Back to the OP’s point, in my experience, the gifted kids I’ve been exposed to, including my own 2 kids (who are in the 130 range so not highly or profoundly gifted) don’t really need very much encouragement to branch out. Due to limited access to enhanced programming at the elementary level, we’ve supported our kids’ intellectual needs by supplementing outside of school. We didn’t do so because they were gifted but rather because we value a broad based education beyond the ability of the public school system to provide. They both have a wide range of interests and are far from uni-dimensional. Having said that, they were both really bored in school until they hit high school where they have had the advantage of specialty programs better suited to their preferred approach to education (one is in a program that compacts and accelerates whereas the other is in a program that compacts and extends the curriculum).
Despite the fact that neither of my kids are HG or PG, the elder one in particular would definitely still have benefited from a grade skip as he is very intellectual and an academic high achiever. He unfortunately flew under the radar during elementary school as none of his teachers recognized his abilities. For me, his abilities were not out of the ordinary as he is representative of people in both my and dh’s family. I didn’t recognize that he was at a level substantially above the majority of his classmates or that he could have benefited from an accelerated curriculum. It wasn’t until school wide testing in grade 5 that we learned that he was gifted.
The younger one is 2E (as is my husband) and has had the challenge of a visual-motor integration LD which impacts his ability to write to cope with and which had a significant influence on him during his early schooling (but has become less of an issue as he has matured and learned to compensate). His LD was not identified until grade 3 (which is how we found out he is also gifted) but by that time it had already had a substantial impact on his self-esteem and his view of school. I am hoping that we have finally found the right program fit for him in high school that will encourage him to work to his full potential.
Anecdotally speaking, there can be a cost for not addressing the academic needs of intellectually advanced students, even those who are not HG or PG. My husband is a case in point. He grew up in a small community and did not have the advantage of specialty school programming or much in the way of “after schooling”. Even his mother, who is a teacher, did not recognize his abilities. To say that he was bored in school is putting it mildly. In high school this led to him skipping a lot of school and getting into trouble from time to time. Fortunately things turned out well for him in the long run. My kids on the other hand living in a large metropolitan area at least have had the benefit of enrichment outside of school to keep them stimulated and out of trouble.
A summary of results of different studies is at http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf . Tables 1 and 2 indicate r of little over 0.2, so explaining 4 to 5% of variance in income. In the study of mathematically precocious youth I mentioned earlier, income was one of the variables that did not increase much as score went up beyond the minimum study threshold. For example, the top quarter of top 1% had similar median income to the bottom quarter of top 1%. This likely relates to the rate of MD and JD not notably increasing at higher score thresholds (7.4% of top 0.5% males had MD, 7.8% of top 0.01% males had MD).
@roethlisburger, you wrote:
“If you think as I do, g is largely genetic or the result of prenatal influences, then any g-loaded test should show minimal gains between grades. Suppose the PISA test is heavily g loaded. Then, it would be completely predictable that the standard deviation of the scores is large compared to the one year gain in test scores.”
I believe that the PISA questions are heavily g loaded, just as any competency based test is. Whether the test shows gains from one year to the next is a question of how it is designed and normed. The test creators, in this case, say they have designed their test such that they consider 40 points the equivalent of a year of instruction within an average cohort, ie the cohort that scores on average 500 points at the age of 15. You don’t have to believe them. I’m not in the business of defending PISA, I don’t work for them.
It’s just more fun to me to discuss stuff like this by taking it at face value as opposed to discuss everything by calling the validity of the data into question.
What I think is interesting how, provided you agree that g makes no difference by ethnicity or nationality, the differences produced within a school system can be as large as the difference between school system of wildly different countries and societies.
And that some school systems take g, and by a mixture of content and competency based instruction, produce much higher gains across the board than another, neighbouring country, with which it presumably shares a lot of similarities in ethnicity, culture and wealth. Look at Vietnam and Indonesia.
This is something schools do - they can’t eradicate the differences, but they can bring everyone forward by more than they were different in the first place.
This is the value I wish that public school systems would subscribe to - have every child make as much progress as keeps the child happy, along their own trajectory. Don’t stop at some mythical grade level arbitrarily set for a particular geographic area in the world.
@roethlisburger, you have also said it would be interesting to look how IQ correlates with income.
I believe it has been done, and and the results aren’t very interesting at all, given that the income level of most people is mediated by their level of education, and the more IQ you have, the higher the level. But it only works for regular salaries - the gifted mostly make the upper middle class incomes you’d expect from people with masters, phds and professional degrees. Some doctors or bankers may make much more. They don’t get usually get rich because a high level of education as such doesn’t make you rich, just well off.
To get really rich, you need to either inherit, or have incredible talent in a sport or an entertainment industry that makes you rich (curling probably doesn’t work, nor classical clarinet) or be an entrepreneur who gets lucky,
If the letter two come together with giftedness, of course, you get BIll Gates, or Steve Jobs. But I believe giftedness and the risk taking inherent I;entrepreneurship come together only very very rarely.
“So, Mozart and @intparent ‘s D get to be gifted enough by early age for special treatment. Anyone else? where would your cutoff be, if you were in charge of a school or a district? 1 kid in the world every 300 years is a bit thin…”
Well actually the numbers I’ve seen on distribution for 160 is 1 in 11,000 so with 50M K-12 kids, that would be 4500 kids. If you go with 140, that’s 1 in 161 or 355K. 4500 kids nationally is reasonable to provide a different kind of instruction if you will, to keep them engaged. 355K will be challenging for sure. Again this assumes all of them want to be challenged more than they are, which I don’t think is true, esp in subjects that are not math.
Did you miss that my kid’s greatest area of talent is in humanities (although she has grown up to be a physicist – who knew)? But it was English/humanities course pace that made her craziest.
Plus, even if schools don’t provide the pace for those 4500 kids, better to at least be paced with the top 50K than crawling with an average classroom. Again – technology COULD be used to allow pacing for a much wider range of kids than are well served today.
Note that Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people now includes a self-made score for each one.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/02/the-new-forbes-400-self-made-score-from-silver-spooners-to-boostrappers/
That score appears to be an assessment of how much inheritance, or lack thereof, the richest person started from (1 = purely inherited wealth, 10 = poor / disadvantaged start).
Thanks, @ucbalumnus, I didn’t know that. Interesting metric.
@theloniusmonk , what makes you think providing special education for 4500 students is easier than for 300 K nationwide? Do you want to provide this many individual tutors? Better to establish a class wherever you can,