Gifted and Talented Children
Tristram Jones, Ph.D.
Unit III Exceptional Children
Kaplan University
What the heck is giftedness?
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Genius is three things: Intellectual
capacity, zeal, and the power of working!
--Sir Francis Galton, 1890
“Genius is madness waiting to
happen!”
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The popular view of 19th Century physician
Cesare Lombroso. Cesare also believed that criminals were
identifiable by physical type. They had big
ears, sloping foreheads, long arms, lots
of tattoos and weird personalities. He
pretty nearly nailed down the symptoms of
anti-social personality disorder, but he
wanted such people eliminated through
eugenics as he believed all criminality was
inherited from parents who were less
evolved on Darwin’s scale! Genius???
Then Came the Termites!
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This is Lewis M. Terman.
If you
ou
took Intro to Psy you may recall he had a lot to
d
do with the IQ test, so naturally he knew all a
b
about the subject! He wrote a paper called
“Genius and Stupidity” (couldn’t say that these
d
days!) rebutting all the myths surrounding high
a
IQ and insisting that really smart people were
much better adjusted than almost anyone! To prove it he undertook
a longitudinal study of 1500 subjects, called “termites,” people with IQ
scores in excess of 140. He gave up the notion that high-IQ kids were
“immune to mental health problems” and acknowledged that his
termites were also susceptible to mental health problems, declaring
that social and family environments were powerful determinants of
behavior among the brilliant, pretty much like everyone else!
Perhaps the Gifted are EXCEPTIONALLY
VULNERABLE?
Leta S. Hollingworth is probably
best known for refuting the
Darwinian theory of variability
as it was applied to proving women weren’t as
smart as men. She also did pioneer work at
Columbia with “mental defectives” (sorry!) but
switched to gifted kids whose vulnerabilities as
sensitive personalities she fully appreciated!
Bringing us up to today…
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NOBODY CAN AGREE ON INTELLIGENCE
at least, not exactly! According to good old Terman,
gifted means an IQ of 140+, whereas PAUL WITTY (that’s
his real name) insisted that gifted is anyone “whose
performance is consistently remarkable in any potentially
valuable area! So Here are two gifted people:
Joseph Renzulli
believes that
giftedness is only
to be gauged
by product!
Nancy Ewald Jackson agrees, defining giftedness
“simply as exceptional performance or…rapid
learning”
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So, that would mean
that chess champion
Bobby Fischer and
hotdog eating champion
Takeru Koboyashi are
pretty much peers,
wouldn’t it!
And then of course
there is Howard Gardner!
Meet Howard Gardner!
THIEF!
Howie is the Harvard guy who thought up multiple
intelligences, if you don’t count Carl Jung, that is! So
let’s review them, shall we….?
The many IQs of Howie Gardner:
 LINGUISTIC written oral poetry etc
 LOGICAL/MATH
reasoning/numbers
 MUSICAL pitch/harmony/composition
 SPATIAL design/color/perspective
 KINESTHETIC coordination/athletics/balance
 INTERPERSONAL
Instruct/lead/inspire/empathize
 NATURALIST good at identifying/classifying objects
in nature.
And then there’s…..
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INTRAPERSONAL self actualized
EXISTENTIAL contemplates place in the cosmos
---------------------------------------------------------------------And then we have
Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory:
THIEF!
Later Sternberg discovered WISDOM as a
form of intelligence, but who, exactly
is wise?
Identifying Gifted Kids
How does an educator spot the gifted child?
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Learns rapidly, easily, and efficiently
Has a vocabulary in advance of his or her classmates
Displays curiosity and imagination
Goes beyond minimum required in assignments
Follows through on tasks
Is original in written and oral expression
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But scholastic success is no proof of genius!
According to researcher Doug Lennox, half of Americans
with an IQ over 140 never graduate from High School.
Sir Isaac Newton never did well in school
Charles Darwin’s teachers considered him “rather below the
common standard of intellect.”
Thomas Edison was considered hopelessly slow by his teachers.
Albert Einstein did not read until age 7 and was expelled at least
once.
Sir Winston Churchill flunked the 6th grade and barely passed
other grades.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.
And there are hundreds of other examples!