Talk:Intellectual giftedness

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[edit] Early topics

I think this entire article has major issues. I will be proposing a major rewrite. Sources will include Annamarie Roeper and Maslow. Suggestions here as well as on main article please--Tznkai 06:10, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

This page seems to assume that all gifted children have high marks and are academically successful. I remember reading that the picture in a bit darker, as about half of gifted students are failing high school miserably (at least in France, where the system is based on cramming and repetition). Sprotch 8 Apr. 2005

The page DOES NOT assume that all gifted children have high marks. Check out the "Underachievement" part of the article. There are many reasons why a Gifted child could have low marks. The kid could have ADD or some other mental illness or disorder. He could be depressed, or simply have no interest in school work.

very true--Tznkai 06:10, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
I am in a Gifted class, and one of the kids almost got held back a year. He constantly gets failing grades on papers and projects. Mgw854 4:03 PM June 28, 2006
I can personally attest to this. I was in a graduating class of over 600, and my class rank was always in the mid-400s, despite the fact that I have an IQ above 145 (99.9th percentile). I was barely able to graduate from high school with an 83% average. Just because you're smart, that doesn't mean you care. Also, it's important for it to be noted that many gifted individuals who are highly gifted in their right brain have difficulty displaying the kind of performance that their overall IQ leads peope to expect. Soulsrocker 23:37, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


"Just because you're smart, that doesn't mean you care."

Yes, it enables some people to work out just how useless some school subjects really are. Tabby (talk) 13:18, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Use plain language

Might I suggest that the following passage, "Einstein's genius and his delay in speaking were developmentally intrinsic to one another," taken from the opening paragraph could be rewritten in a way that is more plain-spoken for the ordinary person. Marty55 (talk) 03:41, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Gifted adults?

Shame that this page only deals with gifted children. --BradBeattie 16:20, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Probably because all "gifted adults" are considered either geniuses or just high-functioning ... but I agree. Some longitudinal studies (Terman?) would be nice on this page. --zenohockey 03:04, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Maybe there could be a request for a seperate article for gifted adults?Michael Cook 03:25, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Agreed! I'm 52 years old and I was just tested and found to be at the 98th %tile in the Verbal Comprehensive index (with some subtests being at above the 99th %tile) but due to apparent cognitive defits (my working memory is 38points below verbal memory) I have always had problems with achievment. I didn't realize I would be considered gifted in some areas, any maybe would be generally if not for the cognitive deficit (due, I am assuming, to my childhood epilepsy).

[edit] Asperger's and Giftedness

Is there proof that gifted people are more likely to have Asperger's? Perhaps it seems that way because the less intelligent people with Asperger's are more likely to be tagged with autism? Simfish 19:55, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

 This may develop into High-Functioning Autism (HFA) later in life.

What kind of nonsense is that !? The only agreed-upon difference between HFA and AS is lack of delay in the development of childhood verbal/cognitive skills in AS. --Congruence 19:25, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

May develop into High-Functioning Autism? (Don't forget the cooties and insanity, too.) C'mon. HFA and Asperger's Syndrome (AS) are independent phenomenae from intelligence (which should be emphasized). AS got attention when it became popularly known that hyperactivity or ADHD was a common misdiagnosis of exceptional intelligence-- somehow the treatment for AS (Ritalin and behavior modification) is often the same as with hyperactivity/ADHD.

In the article is written: This ability is tempered by the fact that experts, including Linda Kreger Silverman and Dr. Fernidad Eide, have estimated that between 20-40% of gifted individuals have a learning disability, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or some other neurological disorder. * This is unsourced, for one, but is it above average, is my main question?

  • Some people seem to think that giftedness is related to Asperger, ADHD, Dyslexia etc. Can something be said about what is causing what? I guess that gifted people get bored easy and respond in several ways. They can fight or flee. First is to try to change the situation(fight); this can be labeled; ADHD. Another respond is to get away from the boring peers (flee) and concentrate on more interesting things. This can be labelled; autism.

But maybe it is the other way round. ADHD people can be very sensitive to the environment they can see and hear a lot. All this experience adds up to a lot of giftedness, or people that have the ability to concentrate (Autism) are making more effective hours resulting in higher scores on tests trying to measure giftedness.

  • And for Dyslexia. A possibility is that these people have found beter ways to cope with there life; ways that score positive in tests trying to measure giftedness. Maybe are written words not the best way to understand things and are pictures better. It might be an advantage to have dyslexia.

Another possibility is that dyslexia and giftedness is all inherited and that only very gifted people having dyslexia manage to get children resulting that their children are both gifted and having dyslexia. (survival of the fittest). Is there any research in this area or is it just common sense? --Freek Verkerk 20:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe its just that its a mistake to believe that dyslexia brings only disadvanages. If one believes such a thing (assumes it) then the above questionable interpretations easily follow.

Nothing proven though. Tabby (talk) 13:06, 11 April 2008 (UTC)


"Is there proof that gifted people are more likely to have Asperger's?"

There is some degree of overlap between the classic markers for Aspergers and HIQ, though the common points are caused by different things and manifest in different ways. Hence one is sometimes mistaken for the other. Tabby (talk) 13:08, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Reorganization

I've been working on a reorganization of this material. My reformatted page can be found at http://www.scvgifted.org/public/index.php?title=Gifted (also a wikimedia page, but on the site of SCVAGT -- the local gifted and talented organization for Santa Clarita, CA.) If the reorganization looks worthwhile, I'll be happy to bring it over to here. Phillip 22:44, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

I like the look of the reorganization; the stuff on various forms of twice-exceptionality, especially, needs to be separated out from the rest of the article. Also, I hope we can add some more detailed information and links about topics like asynchronous develpment, various acceleration and enrichment strategies, and Kazimierz_Dabrowski's theory of overexciteabilities (which has been used to explain the heightened sensory awareness experienced by many gifted people). Many other potential topics/links will spring to mind tomorrow when I'm more awake, I'm sure. AdelaMae 08:36, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Savants?

Excuse me, but I think that just "savant" is a misnomer for what the savant section is describing. Would this not be what's called an idiot savant? I'm extremely sleepy at the moment, but if I can recall correctly, a savant is simply extremely gifted in a certain area of intelligence and not "retarded" (as this article so delicately puts) in every other area. Thorns Among Our Leaves 03:43, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

The phrase "Idiot Savant" has fallen out of favor with the Politically Correct crowd. The preferred term nowadays is "Autistic Savant." The former is tantamount to using the word "dumb" in reference to a mute individual. Soulsrocker 23:29, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Grade Acceleration

"Grade acceleration has not been found to be an acceptable solution, especially if the grade acceleration is "radical" (more than 2 grades), because the child is often found to move ahead again."

It's late at night and I don't have the time and energy to dig up all the research on this, but I have two major complaints about this statement. 1) It's just plain inaccurate - studies have very consistently shown that grade acceleration, especially radical acceleration, IS an effective strategy in gifted education. Like I said, I don't have the relevant research to hand but I will try to return tomorrow with more information, and in the meantime you can Google "grade acceleration" and I'm sure you'll find evidence to confirm what I say. 2) It doesn't make any sense. It's incoherent to say that gifted children are MORE likely to "catch up" if they are radically accelerated than if they are only accelerated a year or two.

AdelaMae 08:24, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I will delete, most persons in the gifted and talented community would strongly oppose this viewpoint.

It looks like this was dealt with a while ago, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it was a problem. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 09:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Major edit

I've just done a major overhaul of this article in the process of merging in a big chunk of text from Social and emotional issues in the lives of gifted students. I moved a lot of things around but the majority of the text is still there, just in a different order. Here are the changes I've made:

  • Condensed the introduction down to a concise definition of giftedness.
  • Converted about half of the old introductory material into a section on identification, merging it with the information on IQ and levels of giftedness that used to be at the bottom of the article.
  • Kept the Savant section, but rewrote it to bring it in line with savant and autistic savant.
  • Converted most of the rest of the old introductory material into a section on characteristics of giftedness, eliminating a few redundant sentences.
  • Got rid of the highly dubious bit about giftedness being linked to Asperger's which "may develop into high-functioning autism," as the potential relationship between giftedness and autism is now addressed in the Savant section.
  • Added a mention of Dabrowski's theory of Positive Disintegration, on which I hope to someday soon write an article (or see one written), and a link to an article that explains its connection to giftedness and "overexciteability".
  • Added a section on social and emotional issues with content largely taken from the article mentioned above. Removed redundancies and improved transitions.
  • Removed two external links - a recently added link to a psychologist's home page and a link to a Russian "gifted television station." I'm sure the TV station is quite fascinating, but the website has no useful English content and this is English Wikipedia. The psychologist's page looked like it had some good links, but I replaced it with a link to another, non-commercial page with resources for gifted adults.
  • Expanded the links "by country," changing the title of the section to "by region" because of the inclusion of the ECHA and WCGT.
  • Merged in the References section from the social/emotional article.
  • Systematically edited the article to avoid conflating "gifted children" and "all gifted people". As the article already mentioned before my edits, people do not magically stop being gifted at the age of 18. I tried to make it pretty transparent where we are specifically addressing children or school situations and where we are talking about gifted people in general. Also, I culled a few phrases and sentences that would have been relevant to Gifted education but not to Giftedness in general. Discussion of specific educational strategies belongs there, not here.
  • Requires more sources, especially rigorous academic sources, preferably from multiple disciplines, not just psychology. These should include neuro-science, statistical analysis, and sociology.
  • Requires an overview of fundamentally different theories of development of giftedness and matured giftedness. Should not use sociological factoids or "interesting anecdotes from my Mensa group" in this approach.

Hope that helps you all in figuring out what exactly has been changed and why. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 11:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Advertising for therapists

An edit was made which provided several links to gifted-adults.com, the business website of a therapist specializing in gifted adults. The articles linked to were largely entirely unreferenced, as was the edit. This is also the second anonymous edit of this article aiming to insert a link to gifted-adults.com. I have reverted this edit and left the following note on the anonymous user's talk page:

Thank you for your contributions to the article Gifted. While it was nice to see the article's information on gifted adults expanded, I have removed the information you added because the entire section seemed designed as an advertisement for a particular therapist. Also, your statements about the incidence of depression and suicidal ideation in gifted populations are extremely misleading, perhaps deliberately so. As evidenced by the scientific studies cited in the section on depression, gifted individuals are no more likely to suffer from depression than anyone else.
It appears from your writing that you know a lot about this topic, so I would encourage you to continue editing the article - just please refrain from linking to websites such as gifted-adults.com that aim to advertise the services of a particular therapist. Perhaps you could write a section on the misdiagnosis and dual-diagnosis of gifted individuals using evidence from the scientific literature? - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 16:15, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article rewrite / merger discussion

I have an interest in seeing this page updated also. Unfortunately, right this minute I don't have time to check out everyone's suggested edits, but I'd like to contribute the following to general discussion:

1) I don't think "gifted" should be merged with "gifted education" because "gifted" has a much larger scope (eg education, parenting, models of, identification techniques, experiences of the, social/behavioural correlations, societal response to, etc). Many of these topics may be applicable to educators of gifted children/adults, but I do think "gifted" (or "giftedness" ?) warrants its own entry.

2) At a glance over this discussion page, it seems like a lot of work is going in to the article's rewrite. (I'm only a newbie to article maintenance, but) is there a point at which you say it's better to start the rewrite, and get some changes in, even though all your intended changes may not be ready? Alternatively, should the article have a "prelude" attached at the top which explains that it is under consideration for a major rewrite? (These are probably properly wikipedia etiquette questions, but given I'd like to contribute to this particular article I thought the others with an interest might like to consider the suggestions - and provide me with the answers! :) ).

youcantryreachingme 01:38, 24 February 2006 (UTC)youcantryreachingme

[edit] Historical Controversy?

Does anybody know more about the history of giftedness as a concept?

See my recent discovery about "talent" under the John Lydgate article.

[A different user than the person above:] My two cents: Um, I was labeled "gifted/talented" as a child but I reject the way the label is used/abused. (I was also labeled as "mentally retarded" early on. I think there should be a "Criticism"/"Controversy" or similar section because there is significant debate about the use of the term "gifted" and the concept in general. This article is pretty skewed, too, probably because there are so many (purportedly) "gifted" people who've had a hand in its creation/evolution. Some of the more flattering assertions are more than a little self-serving, don't you think? ;}

Also, not just about "giftedness" as a concept but also the change of terminology over the years. In my day I heard "g/t" for "gifted and talented" but it wouldn't surprise me if more politically correct terms are in circulation nowadays in the U.S.

By the way, is it just me or are there a helluva lot of "gifted" minors editing this entry? What about people with a more balanced/neutral and less self-aggrandizing take on the subject? What say you guys?

Iguana Scales 21:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

What matters on Wikipedia is not who is doing the editing, but what they're writing and whether it is verifiable and NPOV. Which parts of the article do you think need to be toned down? I certainly think there's room for a criticism section, but I think it's important to distinguish between criticism of intellectual giftedness as a concept, criticism of the behavior/attitudes of gifted people or the "gifted community", and criticism of gifted programs/educational strategies. If you have the information, go for it! - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 21:39, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Characteristics of Gifted Individuals

The claim the gifted people are "physically and emotionally sensitive" seems more like a loose generilization than a fact (or even a universal observation). It's one step short of claiming they all wear glasses and play Dungeons and Dragons. I vote for its removal. 24.16.53.132 21:00, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Giftedness itself is just a loose generalization so what do you expect?--67.183.132.49 12:50, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Whole paragraph is now labelled with "citation needed" flags. That should be enough for now. Looking at the low activity levels on this article, I would not remove the material unless four months have passed without references being added. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 15:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Gifted" vs "Gifted Education"

The very prominent flag at the top of the "Gifted" article indicates that there is still active indecision (?!) about keeping this as a separate article. Therefore ...

While there is overlap between these topics, there is enough difference to justify separate articles. One clear difference is that "giftedness" affects adults as well as children, while "gifted education" is aimed only at children.

Another clear difference is the "gifted education" aims primarily at the academic development of gifted children. Their emotional and social well-being is not necessarily a primary goal of "gifted education". This well-being is also an important topic-space for gifted adults, of course.

Finally, it is important to have a place where adults can go who discover they are "gifted" after their formal education ended -- who never encountered "gifted education" as students. Such adults can glean a little information about themselves in articles about gifted children; but articles that begin and end with children as subjects will always be of limited use to such adults.

Having looked over the article, I think it is pretty good, overall, for now at least. However it took me several readings to get to this point. My first impression was fairly negative -- I had the initial impression that it was mostly about gifted ed.

So I'm going to be so bold as to recast the "Overview of gifted child identification" in terms of identifying gifted *people*, not just gifted *children*. When I read the article for the first time, that section cast the rest of the article in a very strong "gifted ed" light.

I'm also going to remove some external links that seem to focus only on gifted education (or that link to adult-giftedness sites that are already on this article's list of external links). Lists such as this are easy to glance through to assess the gist of an article's focus.

Hope those (relatively minor) changes will help future readers.

Dana 04:52, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I'll remove the merge tag. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 09:27, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Isolation

Isolation is one of the main challenges faced by gifted individuals, especially those with no social network of gifted peers. Hoping to gain popularity, gifted children will often try to hide their abilities...' Complete nonsense. I am thirteen and in a gifted class; we have good social connections with the rest of the school and among ourselves. This article needs a major rewrite. Fredil Yupigo 23:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

It is not "complete nonsense" as you put it. Being in a gifted class, maybe you should have analyzed more. Outstanding ability shown by gifted students sometimes causes insecurity among some of the gifted's peers. This insecurity may cause them to behave in a hostile manner to the gifted, he may be bullied or isolated by his peers. So there you have it. in order to be more "acceptable" he may hide his abilities or underachieve. It may not be happening in your school, but it happens.

Seconded. Ostracisation happens wherever gifted people are in the minority. Which is most places on this planet, by definition. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 11:39, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
Indeed. Isolation can come from the gifted individual through hubris/arrogance or from others who are threatened or have difficulty relating to the gifted individual. Beyond this, your personal experiences may guide you, but are not sufficient for inclusion in the article as it would be original research.Robovski 01:30, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Examples

Is it possible to link to some gifted people. Real life examples? A lot of people are present in the wikipedia. How gifted was Churchill, Einstein, Mozart, Bush?--Freek Verkerk 20:15, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

From what I've read about Einstein he's either severely gifted or severely autistic. It's not so much intelligence, as it was a completely different mindset than that of the time. Adolf Hitler was a gifted public speaker as well, as for Bush, I don't want to go POV.....(I don't think highly of him)Michael Cook 03:36, 6 March 2007 (UTC)


For gifted individuals, just search for anyone that has made a big achievement. A list of such people would be excessively long. Tabby (talk) 13:15, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removed white supremacist link

Someone had nested in a link to Volkmar Weiss, a noted white supremacist from Germany whose research focuses on the supposed genetic superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon people. His "research" is primarily published in a German white supremacist journal. He claims to be a PhD but does not cite where his degree came from. The table and link purports to be a study of highly gifted Nazis, not the incidence of gifted relatives to gifted adults. I.e. the data comes from a self-selecting, limited population (you know, people who met the Nazi standards back in 1945... "Aryans" only, people who followed Hitler only...), and even if it was a statistically valid sample in terms of diversity, this source appears to be a review of articles - i.e. extrapolating facts by cooking the numbers from various papers (but note that they are poorly footnoted)... which means, if any of those studies are biased, it would affect the review's accuracy. This is not a reliable, NPOV, much less peer-reviewed article. The fact that no one bothers to check these links after they're added, to see if they're actually peer-reviewed, scholarly sources ... is one of those things Wikipedians should be deeply embarassed by. It really throws the entire quality of the article in doubt. 70.128.157.3 07:58, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Three paragraphs of lead

I've just moved three paragraphs from the lead into their own section after hopefully clarifying the Tolan position and the sentence structure that suggested that Tolan was making the claim that ADD could not be diagnosed beyond mere observation. The three paragraphs should not be in the lead, since their are not a summary of the article. The lead - as should hopefully be clear - should be just that: a summary of the rest of the article. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I did not read all the references. If there are further objections, please raise them again. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:48, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested move

The following proposal is copied from WP:RM:

  • Intellectual giftedness → Giftedness— Gifted children are children who score in the top one percent of the population on IQ tests. People who have special talents, creativity, or leadership ability are also gifted as well. I think giftedness in adults should be separate from children. It gets confusing when it is merged together. Intellectual giftedness is only about people who do really well on IQ tests. There are people who don't do well on IQ tests but are good at other things. Are you saying that these people aren't gifted? By changing the name to giftedness it would be neutral because it reflects to people who are good at other things but don't do well on IQ tests. —MrsMacMan 17:45, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
  • You seem to be looking at things backwards. Perhaps the redirect from Giftedness should point elsewhere (the Talent dab?), or Giftedness should be an article, but the fact that the title of this article is specifically Intellectual giftedness allows us to explain the variety of giftedness that you suggest at other titles in the future (e.g. Artistic giftedness). Moving the article from the current title to Giftedness would result in an article at that location that would be only about the intellectual type of giftedness, and that seems to be what you wish to prevent. Since this proposal was incomplete, I'm not going to close it officially. However, I'd suggest rethinking your strategy and possibly starting a new article instead. Dekimasuよ! 01:53, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
The user MrsMacMan is an abusive sockpuppet of User:Jessica Liao and a longtime disruptor of education related articles. You may safely close or even delete anything she has initiated at Wikipedia. --Fire Star 火星 02:53, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

The 1st quote of definition of Intellectual Giftedness includes talent in one or more areas, but also they require something the school cant provide. Whilst the talent is undefined, understanably it is talking potentially about any area of expertise(and this wiki article remedies this somwhat under the section "Identification methods"), the part refering to services or activities is fundamentally subjective. Lets say a person gets moved to a facility that can provide what they need. Hey presto, no longer gifted. The quote seems motivated from the perspective of: gee they are smart but they are so demanding.

“' The term "gifted and talented" when used in respect to students, children, or youth means students, children, or youth who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities." (P.L. 103–382, Title XIV, p. 388) '” My emphasis added.

It is sad that the 1st definition is used throughout the USA. I would be in favour of removing this quote from this article. The second quote is far more objective.KommisarCPU

[edit] Depression

"As Reis and Renzulli mention, "With the exception of creatively gifted adolescents who are talented in writing or the visual arts, studies do not confirm that gifted individuals manifest significantly higher or lower rates or severity of depression than those for the general population..."

This contrasts strongly with the data presented in 'The Outsiders' by Grady Towers. Tabby (talk) 13:22, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Testing under 10s

I removed

"Younger children need to be assessed by an educational psychologist to determine their IQ score."

because although there are significant issues with IQ test results for under 10s, there is no reason why such tests would only be able to be administered by an educational psychologist, or the results interpreted by them. It may well be policy in the US education system, but its not a fact, because its elementary to administer an IQ test to an under 10 and simple enough to understand the issues with the results.

This is just promotion of professionalism, which is widespread today. Tabby (talk) 13:27, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Racism or discrimination section needed

Under social issues, one needs to include the bias towards white people as the tests are inadvertently designed to have lower percentages of "giftedness" in african-americans and a couple other minorities. The IQ distribution is not favorable towards african americans (on a percentage basis) and as result, much less of them receive a gifted education. The NAACP newsletter addressed this issue years ago, and I have not been current with this issue. Could someone respond as to whether this section is warranted or should it be ignored? Sentriclecub (talk) 12:52, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I just saw that there is a section on the giftedness_education page that talks about the race-issue I brought up, but does it in a very poor style, and they cite no sources. I guess having it on both pages might be redundant since one would reason that if african americans have lower percentile scores, due to the tests, that they also receive disporportionately less resources allotted for gifted students, and eventually less opportunities. ~Sentric —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sentriclecub (talk • contribs) 13:25, 24 April 2008 (UTC)