<p>I mentioned spiritual intelligence because I know someone that constantly helps sick and poor people in an exceptional way. She is just able to be there, help and change lives of almost anyone - she’s worked with cancer patients, disabled children, homeless people, drug addicts, etc. Her family is enlisted military so far from wealthy but she is able to pull tens and hundreds of people together to assist or to get folks to give so she can help.</p>
<p>It’s uncanny to see especially when you are busy, feeling broke and find yourself helping someone when you had no intent to help before. She is that good.</p>
<p>Just because the correlation between giftedness and social contribution is not 1.0 (perfect) does not mean it is 0.0 (absent). It is positive but less than one.</p>
<p>7th graders take the SAT because schools simply do not accelerate students according to their displayed abitlities. If students already know the curriculum for the year in Sept, most schools feel their job is done and they dont need to teach that student anything for the rest of the year.</p>
<p>My son took the SAT because he thougt it was incredibly fun. (sure that annoyed the heck out of stressed out jrs and srs in line)</p>
<p>The sat is helpful because every adminstrator remembers their own score. When you ask the school what do you intend to teach my son in 7th grade when he already has surpassed 90% or your senior class. </p>
<p>IQ and achievement test scores are not always readily understood or believed. But everyone has a general idea of what the SAT or ACT score means.</p>
<p>Go to Hoagies gifted web page. Information and links to alll things gifted. There is a great page for kids and teens with links for books, classes, on-line communitites</p>
<p>twogirls: Gifted students have certain personality traits ie high intensity ( these are the kids that not only do a great presentation, but they videotape, memorize, and critique for two weeks as well), perfectionist, and hypersensitive. These are the kids that cry at commercials that other kids ignore, these are the kids that need special socks and want their tags removed from clothing. They tend to view the world through a microscope and notice every detail. These kids understand humor much earlier than their peers, and may react to tragedy on a different level. One can be an A+ student and not be gifted. One can fail every test and be gifted. Gifted kids do well on tests but they also have that " out of the box" thinking. A gifted child with an IQ of 140 is quite different than a gifted student with an IQ of 160. Some kids are gifted musicians or artists. Gifted kids typically have an imbalance between emotional maturity and academics, which explains the outbursts and tantrums that many have due to the inability to handle certain frustrations.</p>
<p>I just wanted to comment on this briefly. I have two D’s who are “gifted” and they are wildly different. The older does NOT fit the description above, yet arguably she is more “gifted” based on tests administered to both. Younger D fits the description pretty well. My point is that I don’t think there is a way to put any of these kids into a one-size-fits-all box.</p>
<p>The SAT & ACT are not intelligence tests.
An IQ test needs to be administered individually by a trained educational psychologist to be accurate.
However, advanced programs for gifted youth often use the SAT/ACT as screening tools, which is why you may see 11 or 12 year olds taking it.
Oldest participated in CTY for a short time, but it took her away from her other interests & she was able to attend an excellent private prep school that challenged her.
Her friend who had been attending an excellent private prep school * wasn’t * being challenged enough, she then participated in the early entrance to the UW, and graduated with a double major in astronomy & physics with a minor in Russian around the same time that D was graduating from high school.</p>
<p>I agree that there is no box to fit gifted kids into which is why I keep harping on the lack of correlation between social contribution and giftedness.</p>
<p>A gifted person can make zero impact on society or make a hugely beneficial impact or hugely catastrophic impact on society. The benefit, calamity or lack of either does not change the giftedness of that person.</p>
<p>Some here have mentioned how gifted someone is based on the amount of their social contribution. Some have dismissed giftedness in others because they’ve done little to benefit others. Neither of those are criteria of measurement for giftedness.</p>
<p>I can’t help but think of a friend whose every excuse for her highly intelligent but low-performing son was that he was “gifted” and the high school “wasn’t serving him well.” When the school seemed able to meet the needs of hundreds of other gifted students that came through its doors in the decade my children were there. Not to mention the outstanding special ed program they had!</p>
<p>I was an early reader, got bored easily with classwork in elementary school (finished the “phonics” workbook early on my own), and LOVED ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club “Classics” section. I read Bronte, Stevenson, Austen, etc. at a young age. So I was probably “gifted” in reading. OK, in music as well. But I wasn’t a particularly original thinker and I don’t think the fact I was accelerated in language arts meant I was any smarter than a lot of other kids. </p>
<p>Maybe today I would be challenged to work harder but then it just meant I was smart and hardly had to work at all. Not a good habit to get into!</p>
<p>“Giftedness is definable but probably not quantifiable.”
I definitely agree, but it can be very difficult to even detect talent. As others have stated, gifted kids don’t always do well in school. As Gardner wrote, many also have a specific area in which they do well- in my case, I am probably in the lower half of my science class, but my English teachers say I have a way with words. I also find it interesting how many people- even educators- automatically assume that a linguistically inclined student will also be endowed with creativity. It’s not always so. From time to time, I get bursts (for lack of a better word) of creativity and write pieces that I published, but usually my thought process is pretty drab. I suppose it can be the same with mathematically and musically talented people. Just because you can solve a problem or skillfully interpret a piece doesn’t necessarily mean you can dream up theories or compose an opera. Often I think the creative people are the true geniuses.</p>
<p>So-called “gifted” senior here. I don’t know why I am always wandering through the parent threads, but I found this discussion interesting and I thought I might contribute since school has nothing better for me to do (I am, in fact, sitting in the library doing nothing because I already finished all my work for my independent study lit class).
I’ve always been a bit wary of the term “gifted,” because at the elementary school I attended, I never got into the gifted program until the 4th grade (when I made a perfect score on the entrance exam). My parents and I were slightly miffed about this, as both my older brothers (one of which only made a 1490 on his SAT composite) got in in 1st grade and many of my classmates who entered this gifted program made mostly B’s, had parents working in the school system, or grew up to be average students. I guess my point is that you can’t necessarily measure a person’s innate giftedness with a written test. What does it even mean to be gifted? I like to think that I’m gifted- but then again, that could just be my vanity talking. I don’t know how to describe this without sounding vain or conceited…I’ve always had a very introverted personality, and I prefer being left alone to think over things than hang out with friends. I’m highly neurotic and extremely sensitive, and while I don’t have trouble making friends in school, I have trouble establishing deeper connections with my peers, and feel more at home talking with my teachers (which may be why I’m drawn to the parent thread). I suppose from an early age I’ve shown an extreme interest and heightened ability in reading and writing, but many other kids who may not be considered gifted could say the same. I think, then, a gifted person’s heightened talents come from the way they think and perceive the world. I don’t think I’m good at writing because I know all the grammar rules and where to put all my commas; rather, I think it’s because I see things and analyze them in a different way than my peers. I don’t even know if I finished saying what I wanted to say or even got to my point, but the bell is about to ring, so I’ll come back to this later!</p>
<p>There’s a good book about William James Sidis, genuine child prodigy, and his journey through life. He was famously “exposed” in a 1950’s New Yorker article as essentially hiding out in a quiet life doing basic clerical jobs. He sued for his privacy. Interesting look at the extreme outlying child geniuses.</p>
<p>I taught 4 and 5 year old children for years. At this age I had many students who I’m sure would be considered “gifted” by most school’s academic standards. But, as many people have already mentioned, there is giftedness beyond academics. I recall one of my students who, at the age of 4, was a gifted artist. This little girl’s ability went beyond drawing a nice picture. She saw the world differently. I remember her using crayons to draw a beautiful and detailed tree and explaining to me the importance of shading and blending the leaves with different greens. Then she did the same thing with the browns of the tree trunk. Her easel paintings were way beyond what any of the other kids were doing, even the ones you would consider good artists for their age. Once she was sitting next to me on the bus as we drove by some of the older stately houses in our town. She was looking out the window and I heard her gasp. I asked her if she was okay and she excitedly said to me…“Did you see that house? Did you see the way the trees were bending over it and how you could see the house peeking through with the sun sparkling on it? It was beautiful!” She was 4! She moved out of our school, so I lost track of her, but I will not be surprised to see her as a known artist some day.</p>
<p>Oh, wow…I read the article posted by the OP, and it kind of makes me REALLY MAD. You can’t determine if a child is actually “gifted” if they are tutored for the test that determines it. You can’t train someone to become gifted. You can train children to develop good study habits and to become proficient at certain academic subjects, but you can’t manufacture innate intelligence and intuitiveness in a tutoring program or study guide. That, maybe not in the same vein, is my gripe with the SAT, which doesn’t really measure anything except how much money one is willing to spend on a 5 hour, Saturday morning death test. (I’d also like to remind everyone that SAT doesn’t stand for anything anymore because it is no longer scholastic and it doesn’t measure any sort of aptitude- see, even the College Board itself recognizes that fact!) The fact that so many people refer to it as a “beatable” test, a test that can be mastered by taking it again and again and finding patterns (or just looking at CC threads) is proof enough.
I guess what I’m getting at is that our country seems to have a skewed idea of what it really means to be bright. I agree that intelligence can come through dedication to studies and hard work, but it doesn’t quite compare with being “gifted,” in the true sense of the word. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, it’s just that it seems to me that it’s a lot more difficult to recognize genius on a college application than it is grades and scores achieved by an above average student who spent the majority of their afternoons studying for the next test.</p>
<p>aleyna, I’m not saying that standardized tests measure pure genius. I meant that it’s a pretty reliable way of noticing general intelligence, and that high scores do correlate with higher IQs. I’m not the only one who thinks so- Johns Hopkins’ Study of Exceptional Talent uses the SAT as their sole criteria. And it studies “talent”, not test-taking skills.
Also, giftedness does signify potential for achievement, but it isn’t the only factor. It might not even be the dominant factor. Dedication and the willingness to work hard-which can be measured by the SAT, as you said- might be even more important than pure genius. There are posts on this thread about gifted people who accomplish little. I acknowledge that one can’t measure intelligence, but test scores often do suggest intelligence.</p>
<p>But JHU started using SAT way before it got centered and with the assumption that no 7th graders would be studying for it. I think for 7th graders who do well without any extra studying it’s probably correlates pretty well with IQ scores. I’m not sure if they wouldn’t prefer to use another measure, if one were easily available and equally inexpensive. I know when I saw my older son’s score way, way over on the right side of the JHU bellcurves (already preselected for bright kids) I finally got why he’d never found anyone on his wave length. My other son (who also qualfied for CTY programs) was much more of a plain vanilla gifted kid. Much closer to the center of those curves - he always had lots of friends and never complained of boredom in school.</p>