Gifted Students: Individual Differences Among Children With Extraordinary Intelligence.

What characteristics define the gifted girl or boy?

We can say, in general, that their intellectual development is always more advanced than expected for their age. For example, if most children are always able to say a few words a year and a half after being born, a talented child has a repertoire of words twice or three times as large by the time they reach that age range.

Gifted students: what factors make a child have high abilities?

When the talented child starts school, basically what is noticeable is: speed of thinking, ease of creating much more elaborate responses, and a very good use of information. These children may require adapted educational strategies, since they may hide their talent in a normative class, get bored or drop out of classes For this and many more questions we could ask ourselves the following: What guarantees does being part of the gifted students? Is a talented child a successful adult?

Not necessarily.

Contextual variables

Certain contextual variables that each child may have must be taken into account. On one side support (or absence thereof) by their parents, legal guardians or loved ones. There are cases in which the family does not support them, devaluing the fact of studying and investing time in studies and emphasizes the need to bring home a salary at the end of the month. This can cause the child to put aside her talents and focus on fulfilling what her parents ask of them. The school can ignore talent, causing the child to not receive an adapted education and the child to end up getting bored and dropping out of classes. Or, the environment of friends may lead the child to hide his abilities through teasing which could even trigger bullying dynamics.

The economic circumstances in which the person is familiar also play an important role. There are families that cannot finance their children’s studies, since their economic situation does not allow it, no matter how much both parents work and there are certain aid or scholarships. Consequently, the child will have to adapt to the situation and her talent will not be able to develop as expected.

Finally, there are other variables to highlight such as the opportunities that life offers each person, or their own health.

Analyzing real cases

All of the above is reflected in a study carried out by Melita Oden together with Terman, in 1968, where the 100 most successful men and 100 least successful men were compared in a group; defining success as holding jobs that required their intellectual gifts The successful included teachers, scientists, doctors and lawyers. The unsuccessful included electronics, technicians, police, carpenters and pool cleaners, as well as unsuccessful lawyers, doctors and academics.

In the study it was concluded that the successful and the unsuccessful barely differed in average IQ In any case, the differences between them turned out to be in the confidence, persistence and principles of parental encouragement.

Smart kids and parenting

When we talk about intelligent children, the main criteria focus on IQ and academic environments, but the factors socio-emotional In the study carried out by Terman and Melita we can observe a clear bias in the sample since it is only a university population. Terman ended up becoming a convinced geneticist, but he did not take into account the historical variables of the moment such as war, etc. Many subjects died there, others from alcoholism, suicide…factors that have to do with socio-emotional characteristics.

Alencar and Fleith (2001) pointed out a lower emphasis on emotional development due to the hegemony of educational plans little focused on strengthening a positive self-concept and promoting their social development. They also highlighted that the vast majority of works presented up to that point on the topic were not related to socio-emotional development. Terman recognized, however, that children who had an IQ above 170 presented difficulties in social adjustment, which was considered by their teachers as isolation (Burks, Jensen and Terman, (1930), Gross (2002)).

An emotional vulnerability has also been found, in reference to the ability of these students to understand and engage with ethical and philosophical issues, before the emotional maturity has developed to deal with these types of issues (Hollingworth, 1942).

Gifted Students and School Expectations

As external agents we can observe how students with greater intellectual abilities are prone to suffer from what Terrassier called the “Negative Pygmalion Effect.” This occurs when, as there are gifted students who have greater potential than teachers, the latter tend to expect performance in the average range from these young people, and then begin to encourage some students to perform well below of their real capabilities (Terrassier, 1981).

As a last point, it is worth mentioning a study carried out on the detection of gifted students in which the structures of educators’ implicit theories of intelligence were analyzed and the relationship between them and the beliefs about identifying gifted students. Educators who rated creativity as an important attribute of intelligence tended to favor multiple methods for identifying gifted students.

In contrast, educators who supported the use of intelligence tests as the primary basis for talent identification generally agreed that analysis capacity It was part of the structure of intelligence (García-Cepero, et al, 2009).