Giftedness and cognitive development

Giftedness refers to a capability for high performance in one or more areas of accomplishment. The focus on giftedness as a human capability has led to efforts to identify giftedness early in life, to develop special programs of instruction for gifted children and adolescents, and to design counseling interventions to help gifted learners realize their potential.TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Developmental psychology; intelligence and intelligence testing

Introduction

Modern studies of have their origin in the work of Lewis Madison Terman at Stanford University, who in the 1920s used intelligence test scores to identify intellectually gifted children. His minimal standard for giftedness was an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 140 on the Stanford-Binet test, a number at or above which only 1 percent of children are expected to score. (The average IQ score is 100.) Terman and his associates identified more than fifteen hundred children in California as gifted, and follow-up studies on the Terman gifted group were conducted throughout their adult lives. Although individuals in the gifted group tended to achieve highly in school and in their careers, they were not greatly different from average scorers in other ways. Terman’s research dispelled the myths that high scorers on IQ tests were, as a group, socially maladjusted or “burned out” in adulthood. They were high achievers and yet normal in the sense that their social relationships were similar to those of the general population.

By the time the Terman gifted group reached retirement age, it was clear that the study had not realized the hope of identifying eminence. None of the children selected had, as adults, won the Nobel Prize, although two children who were rejected for the study later did so (physicist Luis W. Alvarez and engineer William Shockley). Nor did high IQ scores seem to be characteristic of artistic ability. Apparently, an IQ score of 140 or above as a criterion for giftedness in children was unable to predict creative accomplishments in later life.

Studies conducted in the 1950s under the direction of Donald MacKinnon at the University of California, Berkeley, tended to confirm this conclusion. Panels of experts submitted the names of whomever they believed to be the most creative architects, mathematicians, and research scientists in the United States; then these individuals were invited to take part in assessments, including measurement of their intelligence through the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. The IQ scores of these highly creative individuals ranged from 114 to 145, averaging around 130, significantly below Terman’s criterion for giftedness. No one knows how these adults would have scored on the Stanford-Binet as children or how creative adults in other domains would have scored, but the results confirmed that a score of 140 on an intelligence test is not a prerequisite for outstanding creative accomplishment.

More recent studies have cast light on the importance of nurture in the development of a broader range of talent. A team of researchers at the University of Chicago headed by Benjamin Bloom investigated the lives of 120 talented adults in six fields: concert piano, sculpture, swimming, tennis, mathematics, and research neurology. They found that in most cases, accomplishments on a national or international level by the age of forty had their origin not in a prodigious gift, but in child-centered homes. The child’s early experiences of the field were playful, rewarding, and supported by parents. Rapid progress was due to a work ethic instilled by parents (“always do your best”) and by increasingly expert and selective teachers, whom parents sought out. Bloom’s findings did not exactly contradict those of Terman (no testing was done), but they suggested to the researchers that nurture and motivation play the lead and supporting roles in the development of a wide range of talent.

Just what general ability IQ tests measure remains uncertain, but increasingly, psychologists and educators have conceptualized giftedness as a function of specialized capabilities and potential for performance in specific fields such as mathematics, biology, dance, or visual arts. A definition of giftedness first offered in a 1971 report to the Congress of the United States by Sidney P. Marland, then commissioner of education, indicates a much broader concept of giftedness than high IQ scores have been found to measure. “Gifted and talented children are those identified by professionally qualified persons who, by virtue of outstanding abilities, are capable of high performance.” He defined gifted children as those with demonstrated achievement or potential ability in the following areas, singly or in combination: general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual or performing arts, and psychomotor ability. This definition of giftedness, known as the Marland definition, does not distinguish giftedness from talent and includes performance capabilities that are sometimes related only distantly to performance on an IQ test. Nevertheless, the legacy of the Terman study of giftedness is that high IQ test scores remain one among several ways for psychologists and educators to identify intellectual giftedness among children in the general population. Giftedness in academic, creative, leadership, artistic, and psychomotor domains, however, is generally identified in other ways.

Identification of Giftedness

Different percentages of the general population have been identified as gifted, depending on the definition of giftedness. Terman’s use of IQ scores of 140 or above identified 1 percent of scorers as gifted. The common, contemporary indicator of intellectual giftedness is a score of 130 or above on a standardized, individually administered intelligence test, which is achieved by the top 2.5 percent of scorers. By the broader Marland definition, some form of which has been enacted through legislation by most states that have mandated gifted education programs, a minimum of 3 to 5 percent of school children are estimated to be gifted. Other definitions would identify as many as 10 to 15 percent of schoolchildren as gifted or as many as 15 to 25 percent in a talent pool. Gifted and talented students receiving services in schools in the United States constitute about 6 percent of all children who are enrolled.

By almost any definition, giftedness is very difficult to identify during infancy. Most researchers would agree that giftedness has a biological foundation, but whether this foundation exists as a general or a specific capability is unknown. One of the earliest indicators of many forms of giftedness is precociousness, or unusually early development or maturity. During preschool years, precociousness can generalize across several domains, such as the use of logic with an extensive vocabulary, or it can be more specialized, such as drawing realistic pictures of animals or objects or picking out a tune by ear on a musical instrument. Development does not seem to proceed in all areas at the same pace, however, so a young child may develop early in one or two areas but still behave in many ways like other children of the same age. Because of such asynchronous development, parents should not assume that a child who can master the moves of checkers at four years old, for example, will accept losing a game any better than the average four-year-old.

There has been debate regarding whether giftedness is the result of intense practice. Children with talents in specific areas, such as math or tennis, are seen to practice these skills very often and intensely. Often, giftedness in a specific domain is identified after much practice has occurred.

A surprising number of gifted children are their parents’ only children or first-borns, but this fact reveals only that their precocious development is due, at least in part, to learning from the models in their early environment, who are adults rather than age-mates. As Bloom’s study suggested, parents or other adult caretakers provide opportunities, resources, and encouragement to learn. Whatever reading ability a child may have, for example, can be nurtured by adults who read both to and around the child, who provide appropriate materials to read, and who show interest in the child’s spontaneous efforts to read.

Often, a child who is developing a talent early will tend to rehearse it spontaneously or call for repeated performance or for explanation by the parent (or other model) to review or understand what the child wants to learn. The products and performances of gifted children in elementary school are often similar to the products and performances of skilled but less gifted adolescents. For this reason, gifted children are often bored when instruction is designed for their age level rather than for an advanced level and rapid pace of learning.

By the school years, children’s giftedness can be assessed reliably in ways other than observation of precociousness. Assessment usually begins with nomination by a teacher, parent, or school social worker. Teacher nominations cannot be the sole indicator of who is gifted, however, because studies have shown them to miss about half of all gifted children. Nominations by teachers and others are often supported by academic marks during the previous year, often supplemented by standardized test scores. These scores can result from individual or group assessments of intelligence, school ability, cognitive abilities, academic aptitudes or achievements, and creative or productive thinking abilities. Since tests themselves have been found to identify only half of all gifted children, test scores are sometimes supplemented by scores from other types of instruments (such as checklists), ratings of portfolios or performances, or interviews to complete the assessment process. No single assessment technique or instrument has been found to satisfactorily identify all types of giftedness outlined in the Marland definition. Underrepresentation of African American, Latino, and Native American children in gifted education programs in the United States is largely a problem of identification. Some gifted children do not meet cutoff scores yet still have exceptional abilities. Other gifted children have poor test-taking skills, which highlights the need for multiple methods of identification of gifted children.

Instruction of Gifted Children and Adolescents

Eligibility for a gifted education program may be decided as a result of the process of identification, but the design of a program of instruction for each child is often a separate set of decisions, sometimes requiring further assessments. It must be decided whether a child who is nearing the end of first grade but who has performed at the seventh-grade level on a standardized achievement test should be promoted to a much higher grade level the next year. An adolescent who is writing commercial music and who is successfully performing it on weekends might be allowed to leave school during the day to make a recording. The programming decisions to be made are as diverse as the talents of the children themselves.

It is not surprising, then, that no single strategy for teaching the gifted child has been found to be the best. Rather, broad strategies of intervention can be classified as modifications in curriculum content or skills and modifications in school environment. Modifications in curriculum content for gifted students might include content acceleration (such as early admission, grade skipping, or telescoping two years into one), content enrichment (materials to elaborate on basic concepts in standard programs), content sophistication (more abstract or fundamental considerations of basic concepts), and content novelty (such as units on highly specialized topics). Modifications in skills include training in component skills of problem-solving, various forms of problem-solving (such as creative, cooperative, or competitive), and development of creativity. A program for the first-grader who is performing on achievement tests at the seventh-grade level, for example, might call for placement in a higher grade level (grade skipping), although which grade level is appropriate for placement would have to be determined using teacher observations, interview results, and diagnostic tests.

Possible modifications in the school environment include provisions for enrichment in the regular classroom (such as access to special equipment), a consultant teacher (who helps the classroom teacher develop lessons), a resource room (or “pullout” program), mentoring (often by a professional in the community), independent study (often a special project), special-interest classes (such as creative writing), special classes (such as advanced placement biology), and special schools (such as a statewide math and science school). A program for the musically creative adolescent might incorporate mentoring by a music professional, who would report to the school on a regular basis about work completed by the adolescent at a recording studio or while otherwise away from school during school hours.

Legal Aspects

In the United States, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965; amended 2024) defines "gifted and talented" as "students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities." Although the federal definition is often used by states, states and school districts are not required to use it. Further definitions of giftedness are left up to individual states and most gifted programming is left to individual school districts. This has created wide variance in services. Although the No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds legislation mandated support to help struggling students, there is no mandate to support gifted children. Moreover, the extra support for struggling students often comes at the expense of gifted students. Although children who experience a learning disability or developmental delays are entitled to extra resources, gifted students are often neglected. Likewise, while Common Core State Standards are being implemented in many states to improve the rigorousness of general education course, they specifically do not outline options for gifted students.

Most states require that children identified as gifted, just like those identified as delayed, have an individualized education plan (IEP) in place. This plan outlines how the gifted child is to be educated during the following year and is typically constructed and agreed on by teacher and the parents of the gifted student and sometimes also with the gifted student.

Counseling Gifted Learners

Beginning in the 1920s, Leta Anna Stetter Hollingworth at Columbia University investigated characteristics of children who scored over 180 on the Stanford-Binet test. Her study of twelve children (eight boys and four girls) suggested that despite their overall adjustment, children who were highly intellectually gifted tended to encounter three challenges not encountered by most other children. The first was a failure to develop work habits at school because of a curriculum paced for much less capable learners. The second was difficulty in finding satisfying companionship because of their advanced interests and abilities in relation to their age-mates. The third was vulnerability to frustration and depression because of a capacity to understand information on an adult level without sufficient experience to know how to respond to it.

Hollingworth suggested that the problem of work habits could be addressed by a combination of acceleration and enrichment. The problem of loneliness could be solved by training gifted children in social games—such as checkers or chess—that could be played by people of any age, and the problems of frustration and depression by careful adult supervision and patience. Research has tended to confirm that the problems Hollingworth identified often need to be addressed not only in cases of extreme precociousness but also, to a lesser extent, in the lives of many people identified as gifted.

If underachievement by a gifted child has its source in an unchallenging or otherwise inappropriate educational program, the recommended action is to assess strengths and weaknesses (a learning disability may be the problem), then design a more appropriate program or place the child in one that already exists. If the source of underachievement is low , the home environment may be unlike that found by Bloom to nurture talent. In this case, family counseling can often reverse underachievement.

To help a gifted child with peer relations, group therapy with other gifted children can be particularly beneficial. Group members not only can share their experiences of being gifted, but also can establish and maintain friendships with those who have similar (or sometimes quite different) exceptional abilities. Group counseling sessions can be both therapeutic and developmental.

At least some of the emotional challenges facing gifted children develop from their emotional sensitivity and excitability. Because parents and siblings often share these characteristics, the stage is set for conflict. What is surprising is that conflict does not create unhappiness more often. In the main, gifted people report satisfaction with their home lives. If tensions in the home arise more often than in the average home, the parents of gifted children and the children themselves may need to develop more effective conflict resolution strategies and higher levels of self-understanding. Developmental counseling can assist parents and children in making these changes. Research has shown that gifted children do not have a higher level of psychopathology than do non-gifted children. However, it is often assumed that because of their abilities, these children can find their way on their own.

It has been suggested that modern psychology could have much to offer the field of giftedness. Steven Pfeiffer of the Talent Identification Program at Duke University conducted a study to identify how the field of psychology could contribute to the study of giftedness and to gifted individuals. Psychologists could help build consensus around a definition of giftedness. After almost a century of work and research in giftedness, there is still no single definition to which all practitioners can turn. Although many schools use standardized intelligence tests to identify gifted students, there is considerable debate regarding the best way to test and measure giftedness. A considerable problem exists, especially in the identification of gifted minorities, who remain underrepresented in the gifted population. Psychologists could become more involved in the debate concerning how to identify all children who are gifted, regardless of race, gender, and ethnic background. Finally, there are still problems addressing the needs of gifted students within the classroom setting. Most teachers are unprepared by their schooling to meet the needs of gifted children. It is not merely a matter of giving gifted students more work, but different work that uniquely suits their abilities.

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