“Students with advanced learning needs” is one option, or “Academically advanced,” or even “Academically excelling”. For students who demonstrate a high intellectual ability that’s not matched in their academic achievement, I favor similar terms: “Intellectually advanced,” or “Intellectually excelling.” I want to emphasize that providing services to such students is a need, not a privilege (I hate it when students see coming with me as a reward for being smart, or as a status symbol–gross!). I want to emphasize that it’s something they do, not some static essential quality of their beings. And above all, “gifted” makes it sound like a passive thing that is elite. Get rid of that term!
2E is certainly more common than we think, and often each condition masks the other: a kid with dyslexia and advanced cognitive skills may be able to mask their dyslexia well enough that they slide under the EC radar, but their dyslexia can mask their advanced cognitive skills such that teachers like me don’t identify them. But I don’t know that most “gifted” kids have such conditions. There are plenty of kids who glide through school, are socially well-adjusted, who play sports and join student government and stay pretty sane, who are identified. It’s been awhile since I read the research on the subject, and I never really evaluated it in any meaningful way, but I vaguely remember reading that the well-adjusted gifted students were the majority of gifted students.
Here’s a really interesting position paper on where we should move with gifted education. Search for “a note on terminology” to see an excellent encapsulation of some of the stuff I’ve been worrying about with terminology.
I could believe that a majority of Dopers in the thread have IQs that exceed 100 or even 120. But 150 is one-out-of-a-thousand territory. I would strongly suspect that’s inflated and probably not reliable testing. Like someone else said, I would have a hard time believing that any more than one or two people in that thread truly exceed 150 on a scientific, rigorous test.
Thank you! I have reserved that for later reading and sent it to my husband too.
We and the school are still trying to figure out what to do with my kid. So any resources are appreciated. We cannot afford school for the gifted so we are trying to figure out what’s available publicly, and I guess we have a year to figure it out before my son starts kindergarten. I guess the question is: what are we even looking for? Maybe that paper answers that question.
There’s a public school in the area that is supposed to have a really good program for academically advanced kids but I’m not sure how they do with autism. It’s like this constant balance between building the developmental skills he needs and nurturing his big brain. He needs both.
I have to say I am impressed as hell with what the ABA people have done with him. They are really doing things to nurture his curiosity above and beyond, writing programs just for him. Our BCBA recently devised a multiple choice test for him just to see if he could do it. It had questions like, “Where do I see Teacher’s Name?” “When do I go to sleep?” Once the BCBA demonstrated for him, he could read it and do it on his own. (My husband just checked out a bunch of library books on lizards and now he wants to create a lizard-based test. We recently visited the Reptarium.)
They are doing a kindergarten readiness program with him this summer. I’m always getting updates like, “We watched videos about black holes today” or something where it’s clear they are trying to follow where he leads.
They are just the best. I wish they could be his school. But next year is the last year of ABA.
I know my IQ score, I won’t say what it is (below 150 though) but I feel that it’s the most reliable way to determine a person’s aptitude at taking an IQ test.
I was moved up a grade. It was as terrible as you think it might be. I was already the “sick” kid. I was weird, nerdy and silent. These older kids wanted no part of me.
I survived because I had support from older siblings and my Daddy. And a couple of very understanding teachers. Don’t ever do that to your child if you have any understanding of how social concepts in a Jr/Sr highschool works. You can see what happens to a kid coming up from elementary school.
I know, it’s just social. For some reason teens find it important no matter how smart and brainy and high their IQ score is. Other teens don’t care.
I recommended my daughter not let them move her son up a grade. He’s got friends in his nerdy group and they seem happy to socialize. It’s not worth it.
Believe me, it’s not.
I agree with @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness , gifted is a horrible word. It can be an heavy burden.
I wish I was accelerated, actually. [just saw Beck’s reply above] In high school I got along much better with the kids in the grade above than in mine anyway, and was always tall for my age to boot. If I was it would have been early in grade school tho which is when my parents were discussing it with my grade school PTB-my best friend back then was accelerated, note (I only found this out when I googled his name and found his obit 8 years ago-I was a young kid for my grade being born in July but he was 6 months younger than even I).
Frankly in retrospect I’m not sure there was an optimal school for me [in the 70’s]. I think they had Montesorri back then but maybe not where we moved to (Florida from Ohio). My dad had a Catholic priest save him from being a street urchin/hood, so he thought I would thrive in such a rigorously structured environment. I, being the well-read and sensitive kid that I was, did not.
My best bet likely was to have a private tutor and do peer things in sports and such (since everyone always says that “He also needs to socialize!”), but I was never a social butterfly and have always wanted to do my own things. I likely could have finished high school scholastically by age 15-16 if allowed to warp speed ahead at my own pace, but I was also plagued by low self-esteem and depression (which was mainly from how my peers treated me note-take that abuse away and I would have likely thrived, meaning that I didn’t NEED socialization per se).
It’s a reliable indicator of academic performance. It’s a reliable indicator of how well someone can conform to the dominant culture, which is also an indicator of general success.
I think people both over and underestimate the validity of IQ tests. They are best thought of as a tool to be used for specific purposes.
No idea what we are going to do with my kid but I promise we will be considering all the factors. He’s already struggling socially with his peers.
He’s almost certainly going to be in advanced math from the time he enters kindergarten. I have no idea what that will look like in practice. But he is so passionate about it I’m not going to take away opportunities for him to develop those skills. He likes numbers more than people. There’s a school of thought that he should be socialized just like a neurotypical kid, taught to participate fully, to communicate and learn all those little social secrets neurotypical people have, and there’s another school of thought that says he shouldn’t be made to adapt socially to a neurotypical world because that would be oppressing his natural inclinations and gifts.
I’m probably somewhere in the middle, and our solution is probably going to be somewhere in the middle.
I don’t that you would have done any better accelerated. We can’t know. We’re stuck with what happened to us in school. I will say graduating early had one blessing, I got out of there quicker.
College was a low key art school. I was done with anything academic by then. It was not in me to pursue it. I know now it was my best path.
Going with where the thread is going (and I like it!), just to add that I too agree with Left_Hand_of_Dorkness here, and that the words used for what is usually refered as gifted in Spanish and German are superdotado and hochbegabt. Which are not great either, but put more emphasis on the potential and not so much where it came from or whether it is a gift: both mean something like “high (potential) aptitude”, the potential being implicit, at least in my understanding.
We did what was called a “psychological test” in school, I reckon I was 13. That took three days, if my memory serves me well. It included an IQ test, but also more general questions, like: list your three favourite school companions/friends. (They also tested us for lice). People who were named often were fine, people who did not make it to anyone’s list (like me, it seems) were not. The “psychologists” convinced my parents that I needed more socialisation and convinced them to send me to the Boy Scouts. Worst summer I remember. They made something with which I was fine (being alone and left mostly in peace, except for the usual bullies) into a problem. Such ignorant fools!
Meant to mention that I tested as 135 back in high school-my SAT scores were 98th percentile which allows you to get into Mensa (after just one meeting w/ 2 conspiracy loons as guests I never went back). I think that underrates me actually as a lot of my “gifts” didn’t really fit their mold (note my schools never had gifted programs).
But yeah, put me with a small group of other weird and quirky kids and I likely would have been fine socially. Add in the Moe’s and football heroes tho and all bets were off. [I was fair to middling sports-wise but enjoyed it for the most part]
If someone named Margaret who went by the nickname Maga picked the name Maga45 (she is 45 years old), you would also be forgiven for assuming they were a rabid Donald Trump fan.
If you pick a label with serious and widely-known negative connotations, you are going to face consequences for it.
I also remember an infamous case of a store for kids called Children’s Exchange with the URL “childrensexchange . com” and they ended up later changing it to remove the “s”.
More at the link, but the research is conclusive: grade acceleration for a very small percentage of children is almost always the right choice. Kids for whom it didn’t work obviously exist, but that’s generally due to poor decisions about acceleration (both which kids need it and how it’s done), not due to the intervention itself.
I do not the lament the acceleration in learning or the great lack of boredom. But that’s not all you need as a teen to be happy in a school setting.
Another point, kids seen as different, for whatever reason are often the most bullied. That has to affect their learning ability. If they are smaller and younger they are less apt to have the maturity to deal with it. You can be miles ahead academically and have a high IQ. But your maturity and emotional ability may lag far behind.
Yes, you may. But there’s always, as a wise person said, research on stuff. And the research–consisting of talking with children who have been accelerated– is clear. From that link previously offered:
Your experience with acceleration is an anomaly, and if you used it to dissuade your kid from accelerating your grandkid, against the recommendation of the school, you likely did the child a disservice.
But my grandson will get there, I promise. Maybe a year later. With his intelligence and self esteem intact.
He’ll still be smart and precocious. Interested and interesting just like his Mother, aunts and uncles are. Remember I’ve raised four. They maintained their abilities and possibly gained some by not acceleration to a higher grade. You realize an age appropriate grade is just some dudes decision sometime long ago.
If a child is first nurtured and taught at home in the early years and attends school at around age 5 they will succeed enough to be successful in their lives. Remember there are very few Einsteins. But very many children.
All I ever wanted for my children were for them to be happy. The rest is gravy.