I have just been appointed "Gifted and Talented" Co-ordinator of a secondary school in the North-East. We are about to identify our top 5-10% in each year group from KS3 and KS4.
Anyone with any ideas for criteria which can be used to identify these pupils?
Anyone with any ideas they are trying to put into practice?

I don't know if the person above was hoping for answers from the teaching profession (the question was not posted in the Teacher Talk section). The replies which follow are from pupils and students, all of them clearly gifted by anybody's definition (to judge from their contributions to NRICH). It may be helpful to know that most of them are from British schools, but Brad is American and Joanna is Australian.

Don't.
Don't single them out.
Give them decent help, but don't let them know that they're better than everyone else. Encourage them as much as you can, but don't fall into the trap of setting a bench-mark to be gifted. What if someone fails it by 1 mark?

Neil M

I don't know that this is what my advice would be. You should not allow a gifted student's gifts to go to waste. That being said, you should not allow an average student's gifts go to waste. The only real way to circumnavigate this is to allow all students to explore their gifts at their own pace. Until fifth grade, I have found, observing my peers, that no one student make significant leaps above his/her peers of the same general intelligence. But, you should definitely find a way to administer accelerated learning in schools as students IQ: +120 generally tend to be able to comprehend things quicker. Perhaps an overhaul of all nations' schooling back to the Socratic method would solve things, but this is not likely to happen soon.

Until then, what can you do but put what students show enormous potential into your gifted program, allow for students to be re-evaluated with parents' consent, and transfer students making progress ahead of their peers in general ed to be moved into the GT program.

As a student from a school that diverted most of its funding away from GT and towards those students causing problems on standardized tests, I can say that without a doubt that a school needs a GT program, or else the students that should have found school fun because of there passion for knowledge, will find school to be boring and not be able to ask questions. But maybe it is wise to try to keep knowledge of their IQ's away from children, this could cause overconfidence that they have to do nothing to get by, thus deeming them failures. But allowing them to actually just sit around in a General ed. program will hurt them any more.(Don't you just wish I would just get to the point?)

What I think you should do:

Judge students for qualification for the program after six weeks of teachers seeing them in a structured environment. See which ones seem to be able to comprehend things quicker. Give all of them some form of IQ test to be sure that you aren't cheating anyone. Don't tell the results except to the parents of children going in the program(unless a parent demands it). Make sure to tell the parents not to tell the children their IQ. If another student not in the program seems to be leaping ahead of his peers, allow him to enter the program (it might be wise to enter a group of students in at a time to not make the student feel alone). This should make a good GT program, so long as you hire good teachers for this group of students.

Brad

Ask them. Someone I know was singled out as gifted. He was asked whether he would like to be pulled forward, do A levels a year early, do more A levels, etc. He said no and used all his free time on electronics, computer programming - the things he was interested in. I know someone else who started sitting their A levels early because they were interested in the subjects that their college could offer. Give your gifted students a choice - perhaps they want to be singled out so that they can get ahead of everyone, perhaps not.

Tom

If I might just put my oar in here, I'm not convinced by everybody's insistence on IQ tests. People have talents in different fields, and just because someone has an average IQ doesn't mean that they can't be extremely talented in one area, or more. Does IQ score necessarily measure anything other than a student's ability to do IQ tests?
In general, I don't think it makes sense to simply lump all "gifted and talented students" together. The needs of a talented artist are worlds away from the needs of a budding historian, or mathematician for that matter!

David Loeffler

I believe that IQ tests do provide a fairly accurate method to judge a student's abilty to learn things quickly. We should clump students who can learn things quickly together so that they may be able to cover material quicker, instead of being "held back" in other classes.

Leaving aside the question of whether IQ tests work or not, they don't pick out all "gifted and talented people." These aren't only those who learn facts and concepts quickly. For example, what about talented artists and musicians?

Good point. That is perhaps why schools should have independent music, art, and academia programs for youth. But, if this cannot be done, perhaps even those people talented in music and art should be in GT classes. I really don't see though, how schools can have separate academic and athletic programs, yet not separate music and art as well. It seems as though this would be wise to do.

Feynman famously didn't get an IQ score high enough to get into Mensa, a fact he was proud of.

I am under the impression that several studies have shown fairly conclusively that IQ has everything to do with cultural upbringing and little to do with inherent intelligence. This impression was confirmed by a friend who sat down with a book that had five IQ tests in it. Did the first one with an averageish score and was into the 200s by the time he reached the end.

Sean

Perhaps that is true, which is why students should be not only given tests, but also observed for about a period of a month before being put into the program. But, a student that scores a high score on an IQ test should be definitely put in the program-they can always leave if they are not able to keep up. To the poster: If you have a limited number of spaces, then perhaps it is wise to judge based upon observation moreso than testing. It may even be best to have a professional psychologist identify gifted students based on an interview, some testing, and some observation.

I'm pretty sure that IQ tests do indentify those who have been taught to observe things originally, (rather than just accept facts as true). These people generally learn things faster because they are always thinking and almost never just listening. This may not be the 'intelligence' children were born with(some studies show that all are people born with the same intelligence spare those with disabilties), but it is the level of intelligence that they emit.

Brad

Sean, my dad wrote a book criticising IQ tests. Also, apparently Marilyn vos Savant has the highest recorded IQ, but reading about her book about why Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is wrong, I get the impression that IQ is probably not that much to do with intelligence at all.

So, Brad, I'm pretty sure that IQ tests do not in fact identify anything other than the ability to do IQ tests well. Moreover, I don't think psychologists are qualified to judge intelligence, and I'm pretty sure both my parents (both psychologists) would agree. My opinion is that a good teacher is the best person to judge the ability of their pupils, but there aren't enough genuinely good teachers.

To the original poster: I would suggest that you don't use IQ tests, let the teachers judge themselves.

About a year ago an IQ test diagnosed me as 97. Recently a different one I had a go at came up with 152! Does that say anything about the IQ system in general? The idea of using these tests as a means of qualification for good schooling (which is effectively what the 11+ exam did in the 1960s) is ridiculous. The results should never be used for anything serious.

I think in maths you probably do need to be streamed though - as Brad said above, everyone works at different paces (NB this is not directly connected to being better or worse at maths - this is a judgement I don't see any need in making).

On the other hand I've noticed at my school that streaming maths students into sets does more to help those in the top sets than the bottom set. Several people I knew were on the borderline for going into set 1-2 (there were 7 sets) and were really close. Invariably the ones in set 2 would end up struggling while everyone in set 1 would sail to A* in GCSE. And I don't think it was particularly a result of better teaching for set 1 - just that the pace was faster and the others in the class were more enthusiastic.

Yours,

Michael

I agree with Brad's view of separate arty/sciency systems as PE is separated.

Dan-

Doesn't that name mean "Marilyn your Scientist"? Anyway, I heard about her and I also heard about a Korean 4 year old who could do calculus and had an IQ of 200+. Is this right? Should these kids be doing calculus, or playing in sandpits?


I agree with Michael's view of the separate ability groups, and that the whole thing should have frayed edges, rather than cut off someone who did badly in the end of year test, but is actually a good but lazy student (sounds like me actually)

I really don't mean to say that IQ tests are a "high and mighty, nothing else even comes close" way to identify gifted students, just that if a very smart student is shy and timid, and likes to only stay with the group, then an IQ test may be able identify him/her better than a teacher. But, I certainly agree with you at least that the majority of screening should occur by observation by teachers. I do however think that IQ tests provide a fair medium for proving your intelligence. But, I do think that most accurate tests are done by a qualified person, not a sheet of paper. I am not real knowledgeable of psychology, but I do think I remember having a person interview me for an IQ test when I was judged for my school's GT program(maybe it was because not all students were literate upon entering school).

I'm not sure it's a question of what we think about IQ tests. The point is that I think it has been shown that they give a higher correlation with level of prior education than future potential. Perhaps Dan you could give us some data or otherwise to show essentially this point?

Sean

I'll talk to my dad, but his data (from his book) will be quite old, he might have a newer reference.

Just found another two IQ tests on the internet by the way: results: 120 and 86. So out of four IQ tests I've had a go at, the first diagnosed me as "just under average intelligence", the 2nd as "in the top 0.5% of the population", the third as "just above average" and the fourth as "significantly below average". Where is the consistency?

Michael

Actually, I just looked at some of my IQ scores, and they look pretty varied as well. So, while I am forced to agree with you that IQ tests show past education, and not potential, what can we judge the future by other than the past. What other ways are there to judge potential? I'm sure that there are better ways to judge, but don't know of any existing methods.

Here is one possible suggestion, allow people to do tasks that require creativity to complete, and see how much the students are willing to just accept fact. Observe them for a few weeks to get your results. If they have a lot of creativity and don't just accept fact, then they will probably both be able to comprehend material quicker and need a different sort of teaching. But I'm not sure that either of these would give much indication of future potential either.

Brad

I think that every human being has a huge amount of unmeasureable potential and that it is high quality teaching that makes the difference. Teachers can, and do in many cases, count.

I am currently part of a gifted students program at my school, which allows people to do yrs 7-10 in 3 yrs, and I have very mixed feelings about it. It has been great working with people who can challenge you, and although the level of work sometimes gets a bit much, I know that if I was in a normal class i would have been really bored. But it tends to seperate you from the rest of the school. All other classes mix a lot, but our class is almost always together, so it really isolates us from the rest of the school. The teachers have tried to fix this by mixing us up during sport and art classes, but this doesn't help as when we get into yr 11 we're with the former yr 10's not the yr 9's.
I guess my point is that there are good and bad points of it, and I really can't say yes or no.