Giftedness

Being gifted refers to children who have an IQ of 130 or higher (Lally & Valentine-French, 2015). Having an extremely high IQ is clearly less of a problem than having an extremely low IQ but there may also be challenges to being particularly smart. It is often assumed that school children who are labeled as “gifted” may have adjustment problems that make it more difficult for them to create and maintain social relationships.

As you might expect based on our discussion of intelligence, there are also different types and areas of intelligence and giftedness. Some children are particularly good at math or science, some at automobile repair or carpentry, some at music or art, some at sports or leadership, and so on. There is a lively debate among scholars about whether it is appropriate or beneficial to label some children as “gifted and talented” in school and to provide them with accelerated special classes and other programs that are not available to everyone. Although doing so may help the gifted kids (Colangelo & Assouline, 2009), it also may isolate them from their peers and make such provisions unavailable to those who are not classified as “gifted.” Testing for high IQ or for disabilities needs to be critically looked at so that the good that these tests were created for are not used for undesirable purposes.^[1]

Read the following articles to get a better idea of the debate surrounding gifted and talented programs in the US:

• “Gifted and talented programs: What parents should know” by Emily Pierce in U.S. News and World Report (March 23, 2022) 
• “Proof points: What research tells us about gifted education” by Jill Barshay in The Hechinger Report (October 18, 2022)

How do we know so much about what children learn in schools? In the next section we’ll look at the different types of tests and what the schools are testing.^[2]