Exceptionally Gifted Children

Miraca U. M. Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134377961
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Exceptionally Gifted Children is unique. The first edition of this book, published in 1993, introduced 15 remarkable children, some of the most gifted young people ever studied, and traced their path through school, exploring their academic achievements (and in some cases enforced underachievement), their emotional development, their social relationships and their family relationships and upbringing. This new edition reviews these early years but also follows the young people over the subsequent ten years into adulthood.
No previous study has traced so closely and so sensitively the intellectual, social and emotional development of highly gifted young people. This 20 year study reveals the ongoing negative academic and social effects of prolonged underachievement and social isolation imposed on gifted children by inappropriate curriculum and class placement and shows clearly the long lasting benefits of thoughtfully planned individual educational programs. The young adults of this study speak out and show how what happened in school has influenced and still influences many aspects of their lives. Miraca Gross provides a clear, practical blueprint for teachers and parents who recognise the special learning needs of gifted children and seek to respond effectively.

Chapter 1

The scope of the problem

In the ordinary elementary school situation, children of IQ 140 waste half their time. Those above IQ 170 waste practically all their time. With little to do, how can these children develop power of sustained effort, respect for the task, or habits of steady work?

(Hollingworth, 1942: 299)

Hadley Bond, aged 22 months, was out for a walk with his mother. Although it was late autumn in the southern Australian city where they lived, the sun was still warm, and Hadley was becoming weary. His steps began to falter. Holly, his mother, checked her watch and found that they had been out for rather longer than she had intended. ‘My goodness, Hadley,’ she said, ‘guess how long we’ve been walking?’ ‘About twenty-six and a half minutes, I think,’ said Hadley – and he was right!

Hadley was the third son born to Holly and Robert Bond. Adrian, aged 8 at Hadley’s birth, and John aged 5, were intelligent, quick-witted children; perceptive, intellectually curious and successful at school. The family quickly realized, however, that Hadley’s abilities went far beyond anything they could have imagined. He was a child of truly phenomenal mathematical ability. By 18 months of age he was already fascinated by the maths programs that John and Adrian had used on the family’s home computer. He delighted in simple addition problems. He would squat on the floor working out the answer to a question with plastic beads and then joyously key it into the computer, laughing with delight when the response was verified. He taught himself to read before age 1½ and by his second birthday he had his own library of small books, which he read with great enjoyment.

By the time Hadley turned 5 he had taught himself to add, subtract, multiply and divide. He was fascinated by maths problems and enjoyed developing his own. He had the reading and comprehension skills of an eight-year-old and avidly read everything he could get his hands on. He passionately wanted to go to school where, he believed, his learning would progress even more speedily and he would have access to all the wonderful books in the school library that his older brothers had described to him. Unhappily, Hadley missed the cut-off date for school entry by a mere two weeks; however, in acknowledgement of his remarkable abilities, the State Education Department decided to allow him ‘visiting rights’ in the Reception class of a neighbourhood school. For legal reasons, Holly was required to accompany him as, being underage, he could not be formally enrolled.

Holly was appalled by the simplistic, undemanding curriculum presented to her son. Hadley, who had taught himself addition and subtraction by age 3, was forced to sit, listening quietly, while the teacher introduced the numbers 1–10 to the other children. Far from gaining access to a new and entrancing world of literature, he was taken, with the other five-year-olds, through introductory exercises in reading readiness. Despite having admitted him on the basis of his phenomenal abilities, the school would not permit him to do anything that could not be undertaken by his classmates.

Hadley’s IQ was 178. At age 5½, he had a mental age of 9¾. He was bright enough, and intellectually mature enough, to know that there was something far wrong with the way he was being treated. He was bored, frustrated and resentful. Before the end of the first week he was protesting quietly but firmly to his parents that he was learning nothing at school and did not want to return. He had learned more, and been given more intellectual freedom, in pre-school. Concerned that such a negative experience might leave their son with a lasting dislike for school, Holly and Robert decided to concede to Hadley’s wishes. Hadley became Australia’s youngest dropout, after a school experience of barely two weeks.

Of course, Hadley’s story does not end there. A few months later, at the ‘legal’ age for school entry, his parents enrolled him at a different state school, which promptly recognized his remarkable abilities by allowing him to enter at Grade 1, rather than Reception level, an immediate grade-skip of 12 months. The full story of Hadley’s educational progress is told in this book.

When Ian Baker was 1 year old he would ‘help’ his mother Sally with the washing, counting his nappies as she dropped them into the washing machine. His reading skills developed almost as early and by age 2 he would entertain himself for hours playing music from his much loved collection of old records and audio cassettes. He had taught himself to select his favourites by reading the labels.

By 3½ Ian was reading small books and at pre-school, aged 4, he enjoyed helping the teacher by reading aloud to the rest of the class while she prepared for the next lesson. When he realized that the other children could not see the illustrations, he developed the technique of holding the book upside down so that his classmates, seated round him, could see the pictures and follow the story as he pointed to the words. He was a vibrant, energetic child, enthralled by new knowledge and propelled by a compulsion to learn everything he could about everything that crossed his path.

Australian children enter pre-school at age 4 and formal schooling at age 5, around the same age as British children and 12 months earlier than their American counterparts. By the time Ian entered school he was reading, with keen pleasure and full comprehension, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Difficulties, however, arose in the first few weeks. Although Sally Baker had tentatively mentioned to the reception class teacher that Ian was already an avid and fluent reader, the teacher was reluctant to believe her. The situation was complicated by the fact that Ian had long since passed through the stage of needing to ‘sound out’ words and now read silently and absorbedly; his teacher, even when she did notice him reading, assumed that he was simply looking at the pictures. In consequence, she insisted that Ian work through the reading readiness exercises with the rest of the children. As for maths, which had been a joy and an obsession for Ian since he turned four, by which age he had already mastered addition and subtraction of numbers up to 1,000 – maths in the reception class was limited to the recognition of the numbers 1 to 10.

Ian and Hadley, one thousand miles apart, had virtually identical introductions to the world of school. The first lesson they learned was that school would teach them nothing which they had not taught themselves at least two years previously; the second was that they had absolutely nothing in common with their classmates. Ian in particular found the social isolation hard to take. His reading abilities, his interests, the games he liked playing and the television programs he preferred were all radically different from those of the other five-year-olds. Before long he was disliked, resented and rejected by his classmates. Being a lad of spirit, and furious with the school’s refusal to let him learn, Ian returned the resentment in full measure.

Ian had never been an easy child to live with. His parents had noticed from his early years that when he was bored or frustrated he could become quite aggressive towards other children. Ian made no secret of his extreme dislike of school, but his parents were not at first aware of the seriousness of the situation. This occurred some 8 months into the school year, when the vice-principal called them to school for an interview. In this meeting, Brock and Sally Baker were informed that Ian was uncontrollable in class, that he was displaying bouts of alarming physical violence towards other students, and that the school wanted to refer him to a special school for behaviourally disturbed children, attached to the psychiatric branch of a large children’s hospital. As part of the referral procedure, Ian would be psychometrically assessed by the region’s educational psychologist.

Coincidentally, the psychologist had a particular interest in gifted children, and chose to test Ian on the then current version of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale – the L–M – rather than on a test with a lower ceiling. Ian’s IQ was assessed as at least 170, and tests of reading achievement established that he had the reading and comprehension skills of a twelve-year-old.

The psychologist emphasized strongly to the staff of Ian’s school that he was not behaviourally disturbed. His hostility and aggression arose out of his desperate loneliness, bewilderment, and intellectual frustration. Ian’s progress through school is described in depth in Chapter 8. As will be told, his first few years of schooling were a saga of educational mismanagement. Despite his tested abilities and achievement, he was required to work in lock-step progression, with age-peers, through the curriculum of the grade in which he was enrolled. At the age of 9 years 11 months, for the purposes of the present study, Ian took the Scholastic Aptitude Test – Mathematics (SAT–M), a standardized test of maths achievement taken by American seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds wishing to enter university. The average score varies from year to year but is usually around 500. Ian, 7 years younger than the students for whom the test is designed, made the remarkable score of 560! Despite this, his teacher insisted that he undertake the Grade 4 maths curriculum with the other nine-year-olds.

During his Grade 4 year, Brock and Sally decided to have Ian’s cognitive abilities reassessed. Accordingly, at the age of 9 years 3 months, Ian was assessed first on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC–R) and subsequently on the Stanford– Binet, the scale on which he had first been tested at age 5. Ian ceilinged on the WISC–R, scoring scaled scores of 19 on all subscales of both the verbal and performance subtests. On the Stanford–Binet Ian, in the words of the psychologist’s report, ‘sailed through all the items through to the highest level of all, Superior Adult Three. Here he did start to fail on some items but nevertheless his IQ came off the top of this scale also.’ Ian scored a mental age of 18 years 6 months, exactly twice his chronological age and thus a ratio IQ of 200. In addition, the psychologist administered standardized achievement tests of reading and spelling; in both, Ian scored at adult level.

Children scoring at IQ 180 or above appear in the population at a ratio of fewer than one in one million. Requiring Ian to undertake all his school work with agepeers of average ability was rather like requiring a child of average intelligence to spend six hours a day, five days a week, interacting solely with children who were profoundly intellectually disabled.

The psychologist was appalled to hear that a child of such exceptional talent was being required to plod through a lock-step curriculum with other Grade 4 students. She expressed her concern strongly in her written report:

I was somewhat concerned to hear from Ian and his parents that he has been doing Grade 4 maths along with his classmates. We clearly have here a boy who has extreme talent in the maths area . . . I would strongly suggest that Ian most clearly needs acceleration in his maths program. He is likely to be become quite bored and frustrated by maths at his own age level and it seems to be a real waste of true talent.

Over the years Ian’s parents and teachers have had occasional bouts of difficult behaviour from Ian. He certainly is not a subtle sort of child . . . His parents have found, as is true with many other gifted and talented children, that when Ian becomes bored, and does not have his ‘fix’ of intellectual activity, it is then that the difficult behaviour begins . . . It is important to remember that his behaviour only deteriorates to unacceptable levels when he is signalling that he is bored and is not getting the intellectual stimulation he needs by legitimate means.

It needs to be remembered that for Ian to be intellectually stimulated, the activities presented to him need to be of a particularly high level. He certainly will not be challenged by the types of problems and puzzles which generally interest children of his age. Certainly, working with the Binet, he could dismiss such questions without a second thought, and they obviously hold no interest for him, nor any satisfaction when he has solved them.

In response to Brock and Sally’s pleading that Ian be given some sort of extension or enrichment work to keep his mind alive, the school principal stated frankly that it would be ‘political suicide’ for her to establish any differentiated program for the intellectually gifted students in her school. Two years later, a letter from Sally to the Director-General of Education of the State drew the response that ‘all children have gifts and talents’ and that ‘a policy which treats gifted and talented children as a discrete group is likely to be rigid and divisive in its application’.

Christopher Otway has been rather more fortunate. Like Ian Baker, he was a child of quite remarkable intellectual ability. At the age of 11 he achieved a mental age of 22 years on the Stanford–Binet, and a ratio IQ of 200. At 11 years 4 months his score on the SAT–M was an astonishing 710 – more than two standard deviations above the mean for this test normed on students six years his senior. Fewer than 4 per cent of college-bound eighteen-year-olds could expect to gain such a score.

From his earliest years Chris displayed prodigious abilities in both maths and language. Like Hadley and Ian, he taught himself to read before age 2 and by age 4 he was reading children’s encyclopaedias and had acquired a range and level of general knowledge that most teachers would be happy to encounter in fifth or sixth grade students. His maths ability was equally remarkable. By the time he entered pre-school he was capable of working, in maths, at Grade 4 level.

In contrast to the debacle which greeted Hadley’s and Ian’s entry into formal schooling, the principal and teachers of Chris’s primary school recognized, within days of his enrolment, that this was a child who would need a radically different educational program if he were to fulfil his astonishing potential. This school, and the larger school which he subsequently attended, designed for Chris an individualized program which incorporated, at various points in his schooling, grade-skipping; subject acceleration in his areas of major strength; general in-class enrichment; a pull-out enrichment program in English, creative thinking and problem-solving; and participation in a cluster group program for gifted students arranged by a local university.

The combination of acceleration and enrichment permitted Chris to work at something approaching his own pace, while broadening his knowledge base by taking on a much wider range of subjects than is usually permitted or practicable. In October 1991, aged 14 years 11 months, Chris took university entrance examinations in mathematics, physics, chemistry and economics, gaining an average mark of 98 per cent. The following year he repeated this remarkable performance – but this time in legal studies, accounting, Australian studies, English and biology. He completed his final year of high school just before his sixteenth birthday, having undertaken a remarkable range of subjects from which he was able to choose those which he would study at university.

The first 9 chapters of this book trace the childhood and adolescent years of 15 remarkable young people who have been the subjects of a twenty-year longitudinal study, the first decade of which was reported in the first edition of this book. Chapters 10 and 11 bring their stories up to the present day, and introduce a further three equally gifted children and adolescents who did not appear in the first edition or who entered the study after the publication of the first edition in 1993. These 18 young people have been selected, to have their stories told, from a larger group of 60, each equally remarkable, each equally at risk because they differ quite radically and in many ways from the great majority of children in our schools.

In special education – the education of children with special needs – each field employs specific terminologies which are used both to indicate the degree to which a child differs from the norm for his or her age-peers, and, by association, to suggest techniques which educators might use to assist the child to attain his or her educational potential. Teachers working with children who are intellectually disabled, for example, recognize mild, moderate, severe and profound levels of intellectual disability. Similarly, teachers working with hearing impaired students acknowledge four levels of hearing impairment – again termed mild, moderate, severe and profound. The use of these quantitative terminologies is not a matter of simplistically ‘labelling’ the child; on the contrary, educators working with these young people are aware that the level and type of intervention that will be required are dictated by the degree of severity of the condition.

Teachers of hearing impaired and intellectually disabled children have avoided the temptation to treat their clientele as if they were a homogeneous group. No one would suggest that a child with a profound intellectual disability should be expected to master the curriculum designed for a student who is mildly or moderately disabled. Until comparatively recently, however, teachers and psychologists working with intellectually gifted students have been trapped in precisely this mind-set. We have developed identification strategies, designed curricula, and established special programs based on the assumption that what works for a moderately gifted student will also work for the extremely gifted. Fortunately, this perception is breaking down and we are beginning to acknowledge the need to recognize degrees, as well as types, of giftedness (Silverman, 1989; Morelock, 1995). However, this awareness of levels of giftedness arose too late to assist Hadley, Ian and many of the other children in this book during their elementary school years. Indeed, the first edition of this book did much to raise that awareness.

Giftedness is much more than intellectual precocity. As early as 1957 DeHaan and Havighurst proposed six domains in which students might excel; these were intellectual ability, creative thinking, scientific ability, social leadership, mechanical skills and talent in the fine arts. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, in subsequent years a multiplicity of definitions arose, all acknowledging several domains of ability but, in the majority of cases, also acknowledging intellectual giftedness as a highly important domain. It would be simplistic to define intellectual giftedness solely in terms of IQ scores; nonetheless the intelligence quotient is a useful index of the relationship (and in the case of the gifted child, the discrepancy) between mental age and chronological age. A moderately gifted nine-year-old with a mental age of 12 and thus an IQ of approximately 133 is ‘out of synch’ by a matter of three years before he has even passed through elementary school; however his exceptionally gifted age-mate with a mental age of 15 and an IQ of approximately 167 looks across a chasm of six years from the age at which he is capable of reasoning to the grade level in which he is likely to be placed on the basis of his chronological age. The IQ can assist us to understand the fundamental differences in mental processing between moderately and extremely gifted students.

Silverman (1989: 71) has defined the highly gifted as ‘those whose advancement is significantly beyond the norm of the gifted’. By ‘advancement’, she implies aptitude or potential, rather than performance; as will be discussed later, research on the school performance of highly gifted children suggests that the majority are required to work, in the regular classroom, at levels several years below their tested achievement. Silverman suggests that any child who scores three standard deviations above the mean on a test of reasoning ability should be termed highly gifted; that is, children of IQ 145 or above.

The present study, however, is concerned with two subsets of the highly gifted: children who are exceptionally or profoundly gifted. The term ‘exceptionally gifted’ refers to children who score in the IQ range 160–179 (Kline and Meckstroth, 1985) while ‘profoundly gifted’ refers to those very rare individuals who score at or above IQ 180 (Webb et al., 1983).

Levels of intellectual giftedness, as defined by IQ ranges, and the level of prevalence of such children in the general population, appear as follows:

Level

IQ range

Prevalence

Mildly (or basically) gifted

115–129

1:6–1:40

Moderately gifted

130–144

1:40–1:1,000

Highly gifted

145–159

1:1,000–1:10,000

Exceptionally gifted

160–179

1:10,000–1:1 million

Profoundly gifted

180+

Fewer than 1:1 million

Just as the properties of the normal curve of distribution dictate that there will be many more students of average ability than gifted students, so the moderately gifted will outnumber the highly gifted, and the highly gifted will considerably outnumber the exceptionally and profoundly gifted. Over the last 70 years several researchers have proposed that the number of children scoring in the extremely high ranges of IQ may somewhat exceed the theoretical expectations derived from the normal curve (Terman, 1925; Dunlap, 1967; Jensen, 1980); however, even the most generous over-prediction would affirm that exceptionally and profoundly gifted children comprise a tiny minority, even among the gifted.

Because moderately gifted students so greatly outnumber their highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted counterparts, the identification procedures and programs developed for gifted students are generally based on the characteristics, learning styles and needs of the moderately gifted. Yet researchers have noted profound differences between moderately gifted and exceptionally gifted ...