How Can You Tell If Your Child Has Gifted Learning Needs?

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Categorizing children as either gifted or not-gifted is responsible for much of the confusion, controversy, ambivalence, and anxiety concerning gifted education. It’s also responsible for most of the racism and elitism that has plagued the field from its inception.

Slowly, educators and parents are realizing that the important question is not whether or not a child belongs in the gifted category, but rather how their individual learning needs might best be met. The field of gifted education is moving from a focus on categorizing kids—some as gifted, everyone else not gifted—to a focus on diagnosing and rectifying educational mismatches. This is what Joanne Foster and I call an optimal match.

How Is Giftedness Identified?

When the important question was, “Is this child gifted?” tests of intelligence were usually considered the gold standard. There have always been problems with these tests. For example, what are they really measuring? (Answer: Some kinds of reasoning skills, with only peripheral application to most school subject areas.) Why are the results so biased by race and socioeconomic status? (Answer: There are big differences in kids’ opportunities to learn and approaches to test-taking, totally independent of interest and ability.)

Reliable IQ tests are expensive to administer, requiring at least an hour of one-on-one time with a trained psychometrist or psychologist, and there are dozens of reasons a highly competent child might not do well on a given test administration. The child might be hungry, sick, distracted, worried, uncomfortable with the test administrator, not very interested in the content of the test, or something else entirely.

There’s only one way to score in the gifted range, and that’s to be really good at the questions and puzzles on the test, to be in good health that day, and to be skilled at the test-taking activity. It’s quite reasonable to question the high stakes involved—being identified as gifted or not gifted—in a child’s participation in a one-hour test of “intelligence” in an unfamiliar circumstance.

How Is an Educational Mismatch Diagnosed?

From an optimal match perspective, IQ isn’t a terribly relevant measure. Intelligence tests can be useful in identifying a child’s learning problems and strengths when there are questions about that, but if you’re working to provide a good curriculum match to advanced-level abilities, it’s much more useful to know how much the child already knows, subject by subject.

There are many ways to identify kids’ learning needs, and teachers are using many of those methods every day. Student portfolios; teacher observations; daily, weekly, and end-of-unit quizzes; classroom discussions; and interest inventories can all provide useful information about whether or not a child is being appropriately challenged and is engaged in the learning process.

An Unhappy Child

I remember one child I worked with who was in Grade 4. Gloria had always been an excellent student, and everyone was surprised that she didn't qualify for the gifted program. As it happens, she'd had flu on the day of the intelligence testing that was used to identify gifted kids. She hadn't wanted to miss school that day because the test had been scheduled so long ago and she knew it was really important. Gloria particularly loved math, but the Grade 4 math program was making her angry and frustrated. Her parents were worried, because Gloria was starting to hate math, and the teacher said she refused to do her math assignments.

I decided that the best way to get a sense of Gloria’s learning needs and communicate them to her school was to use subject-specific academic achievement tests. Among other measures, I gave her a math test with a high enough ceiling to measure how far advanced she was. That was the only way to know whether she was just a behavior problem, and well-placed in Grade 4 math class, or whether she needed to be challenged at a much higher level. As it turned out, she was functioning closer to Grade 9 in her mathematical reasoning and concept mastery.

A Great Solution

When Gloria’s teacher and principal saw how far advanced she was in her mathematical abilities, they found a retired high school math teacher who was interested in volunteering at the school. He agreed to work with Gloria and other kids like her, kids who loved math and who were so highly advanced at it, that their learning needs couldn't be met by grade-level math classes. The retired teacher formed a math club with Gloria and four other kids who were all mathematically underchallenged in their regular classes. The club met during school hours once a week, devising new challenges and finding contests they could enter. As long as they participated in the math club activities—which actually involved more homework than the usual grade-level assignments—the kids were excused from their regular math classes and homework, and before too long, they were winning local and regional contests, as well as loving math again.

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When a child is doing well at school in a specific subject area—whether math, language arts, science, or something else—and scores at the top of grade-level tests in that area, we need more information before deciding whether or not there is a mismatch that needs to be addressed. High-ceiling subject-specific achievement tests are much more useful than intelligence tests in figuring out where there might be a mismatch, and what to do about it.