Gifted – what does that mean????

My daughter is in kindergarten, and was recently referred for an initial assessment for eligibility to the gifted program at her elementary school. The screening is called Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (K-BIT). I asked her how she liked the first evaluation, and she said she was a little bit shy, but that she knew the teacher from our church. She didn’t remember her name, but knew that she has three children, and proceeded to relate the age and gender of each.

She passed, and we’re expecting to hear from her teacher about the next step in the evaluation process. According to the school district web site, she will be referred to “the school psychologist for an individual psychological evaluation using the Stanford-Binet V, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition, the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales, the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test, or similar test.”

The web site goes on to say, “According to the State of Florida criteria for gifted, students must score at least two standard deviations above the mean on the individually administered standardized test of intelligence. In addition, a student must demonstrate a majority of the characteristics of a gifted student according to a standard checklist and show a need for programming beyond the regular classroom.”

So what does all that mean?? What are the characteristics of a gifted student, what checklist do they go by, and how do they determine whether my daughter shows a “need for programming beyond the regular classroom?”

The school district website was not helpful at all. The gifted program falls within the Exceptional Student Education, which devotes the lion’s share of resources to students with disabilities. This makes sense because in our county, there are about 5,500 gifted students and more than 16,000 students with a wide range of disabilities and needs. However, it was a bit disheartening that the above quoted paragraph and links to a few teacher websites was the sum total of information available about the county’s gifted program.

I kept my attitude extremely low-key for the first assessment. I didn’t want to spook my daughter – even at her age, she has strong opinions about what is cool & I also didn’t want to give her performance anxiety. When she first started learning to write her name at age three, her teachers told me to have her begin her name with an uppercase letter and use lowercase letters for the rest of her name. While she was practicing one day, she printed a lower-case ‘e’ upside-down one time. I corrected her briefly in a matter-of-fact way, and tried to move on, but she boycotted little ‘e’ on the spot. She wrote her name with two capital letters and two lowercase letters for two months, until she started pre-kindergarten. The following summer, just before she started kindergarten, I bought several “I can read” books on a friend’s recommendation. I got her to try reading them exactly twice; as soon as she got the idea that I wanted her to read, instead of me reading to her (which I continued offer as well), she refused to sit and read with me for about three weeks, until school started. And although I am strict about my kids behaving, I don’t put pressure on my kids to perform academically, athletically, artistically, etc., and neither does my husband. We encourage them when they are working hard at something, we cheer them on if they do well, and we try to instill the idea that it is okay to make mistakes.

However, I’m starting to feel a bit anxious at the idea of an IQ test. What if she is gifted? Maybe all this sensitivity is the glaring sign of giftedness that we’ve been attributing to the fact that she’s a first-born girl. As parents, will we have to change our parenting approach to accommodate her needs? If so, how will it affect the rest of the family? What if she isn’t? Will she be disappointed? Is this a big deal or what?

When I was in school, I was evaluated for the gifted program, and passed. However, I was already in 7^th grade, and so I was only in a single gifted class for one year before I reached the end of the gifted offerings. It was an advanced economics class, and I didn’t do well. My mom asked me if I was interested in the academically-talented high school, but I was adamant that I wanted to go to the regular high school with my friends and not stand out in any way. I did pretty well in high school, but never developed solid study habits, and I mostly limited myself to subjects where I excelled without much effort. My husband (her dad) attended both middle school and high school at a county-wide school for academically talented students. He was evaluated prior to admission, and accepted, but his performance was pretty average throughout – he was part of the cool crowd in a school of geeks. And neither of us turned out to be rocket scientists.

As a result of our experiences, my goal as a parent is not to focus on my kids’ academic talent, but to focus more on the work ethic that she is developing. To that end, I’m trying desperately to keep my job to a maximum of about 30 hours a week so that I can pick the kids up from school every day (or most days) so that I can help with homework, get them involved in activities if they are interested, etc., through elementary school and possibly middle school. So far, both of my kids are happy to sit and do some schoolwork every day – at ages 6 and 4, they enjoy learning.

The only thing I know about the gifted program thus far is that gifted students are taken out of their regular classrooms one day a week for enrichment activities. So will the disruption be worth it? How can I evaluate such a program? How can I encourage my daughter to challenge herself without becoming one of those parents everyone loves to hate – the ones that are trying to re-live their own lives more successfully through their kids?

On the one hand, I am a librarian, and my tendency when an issue like this arises is to research it to death, then follow the directions of whatever source I decide is most authoritative. On the other hand, with parenting issues, it is often detrimental to read too much – I know from past experience that I will certainly find multiple sources of information that completely contradict one another, and then unless I find one strategy that seems to make sense to me, I’ll be left more torn than when I began. And in any case, six years of parenting have worn the sharp, anal corners of my personality down a little bit – just enough to be able to scan the latest parenting book, The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills, note that they advocate a very specific, scientifically proven behavior modification strategy that includes me doing a lot of upfront work like making reward charts and buying little junky toys and candy (stuff I hate to buy!), and think, hmmmm, maybe my kids aren’t that defiant!!

I had planned to write a column that was informative, answering questions for potential readers. Instead, I’m ending with questions. However, the first step to finding information is to determine the appropriate questions. Far too many people flock to Google and type in extremely vague queries, only to be frustrated and uninformed after hours of searching. Initial Internet searches for information on gifted programs yielded mostly for-fee private psychology firms who provide a limited amount of teaser information, often in the form of Frequently Asked Questions. There is no good way to assess the reliability of this information aside from comparing it to lots of other sources of the same type of information. The next step for me will be to go back to my school district’s web site and find the state association of gifted programs. From there, I should be able to locate one or more subject portals with resource lists. Although portals are limited in scope, they are often vetted by people with at least a passing knowledge of the topic. I saw in passing an Exceptional Education glossary – that might help me to locate some keywords that I can use to search Google more effectively. Duke University has a substantial series of articles related to gifted children that I plan to review – large research universities are often a valuable source of reliable, free information. At this point, I’m not ready to commit $20 to the latest popular book on parenting the gifted child, scientific or not.

Of course, I’ll hopefully get additional information from her school as she goes through the process. Either way, I’ll get some answers

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Powered by Wordpress | WP Premium theme by WP Remix
Copyright 2007-2008. EDK Consulting. All rights reserved

• Home
• About OFM
• Contact Us / Email Notification
• Equipment