Success Strategies for Parenting Gifted Kids

Expert Advice From the National Association for Gifted Children

Kathleen Nilles, Jennifer L. Jolly, Tracy Ford Inman, Joan Franklin Smutny, Kathleen Nilles, Jennifer L. Jolly, Tracy Ford Inman, Joan Franklin Smutny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000503579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

When parents need guidance on raising gifted kids, they can turn to Success Strategies for Parenting Gifted Kids: Expert Advice From the National Association for Gifted Children. This collection of practical, dynamic articles from NAGC's Parenting for High Potential magazine:

PART I

CHARACTERISTICS, IDENTIFICATION, AND TALENT DEVELOPMENT

DOI: 10.4324/9781003238287-1

This opening section includes chapters that discuss several issues that beguile parents in their journey of raising their gifted and twice-exceptional children. Parents or caretakers are often the first ones to observe their child’s behavior, which provides an inkling that alternative and/or additional interventions, accelerated and/or challenging curriculum, or outside-of-school opportunities will be required. Each author combines research-informed approaches to offer best practices and strategies in regard to identification, characteristics, and talent development.

In Chapter 1, Matthews and Foster offer an overview of intelligence tests, their role in gifted identification and programming, and how to use IQ test results in obtaining appropriate services. In addition, the authors provide suggestions for translating results into meaningful ideas for children. The practical information presented can help parents navigate the use of IQ tests.

In Chapter 2, Hasan details how she balanced her daughter’s advanced learning ability and challenging behavior. Drawing from her own experiences as a high school student at a specialized math and science high school, Hasan realized that some of her classmates had failed to thrive due to their rigid approach to challenging situations. She applied these lessons when parenting her own daughter, particularly when her daughter wanted to attempt activities that she was mentally ready for but perhaps did not have the fine motor skills for yet.

Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 address talent development. Welch delves into the demands and intricacies of those students who are both academically and musically talented. Her background as a music teacher, an accomplished musician, and gifted education professional provides a unique perspective to help guide parents, caretakers, and dually talented students on their developmental trajectory. Kiewra uses his extensive research on talented youth across a number of domains to present seven ways parents can support and develop their children’s talent. These practical strategies provide a foundation for parents to begin a talent development journey with their child.

Taken alone or used as the introduction before reading the remaining chapters, this section offers a primer on characteristics, identification, and talent development with the opportunity for additional resources and readings.

—Jennifer L. Jolly

CHAPTER 1

INTELLIGENCE, IQ, TESTS, AND ASSESSMENTS: WHAT DO PARENTS NEED TO KNOW?

by Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster

DOI: 10.4324/9781003238287-2

What is intelligence? Do intelligence quotient (IQ) tests really measure intelligence? Are there better ways than measuring IQ to decide who needs gifted programming? What can parents request by way of results of any assessments and their interpretation? What should parents tell their kids about the results? These are some of the thorny questions that parents ask about testing, and rightly so, because their child’s educational future can hang in the balance. Here are some fundamentals.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

There are hundreds of definitions, many from people with serious expertise in one field or another. Here’s the perspective we advocate, based on evolving findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology (Matthews & Foster, 2014):

Intelligence is the ability to understand complex ideas, adapt effectively to the environment, overcome obstacles, engage meaningfully in various forms of reasoning, and learn from experience. It develops incrementally, and varies across time, situations, and domains. (pp. 24–25)

Considered like this, intelligence isn’t as mysterious as it sometimes seems to be. Current research shows it to be far more dynamic, accessible, and vibrant than people once thought.

DO IQ TESTS MEASURE INTELLIGENCE?

There are many tests that describe themselves as IQ or intelligence tests, and provide the score in the form of an intelligence quotient. Some of these are solidly respectable, but many are questionable. Our recommendation is to steer clear of any but the most comprehensive, valid, and reliable tests—the current editions of the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet tests of intelligence. These are administered one-on-one by trained psychologists, not done on the Internet or administered by a classroom teacher. They assess vocabulary, general knowledge, different kinds of reasoning, and short-term memory, all of which contribute to academic learning.

Some of the less reliable tests can be interesting when done for personal information, and others can provide useful information in the hands of an expert, but too often these less reliable tests provide misleading scores, and add confusion to a topic that is already more confusing than it ought to be.

A very high score on one of the strong IQ tests (especially Wechsler and Stanford-Binet) can confirm a child’s need for gifted education, but a lower score doesn’t necessarily mean a child would not be well-placed in gifted programming. A score that is below a gifted cutoff can reflect a problem at the time of testing, such as illness, emotional concerns, hunger, a creative or contrarian attitude, test anxiety, a learning problem, or one of many other reasons that children don’t demonstrate what they can do, as fully or as well as possible.

Another concern with IQ testing is the narrow range of skills assessed. Many important dimensions of real-world functioning are barely touched upon, including social and emotional abilities, creativity, motivation, drive, and persistence. According to what’s known about how intelligence develops, and how assessment results might be used to inform programming, it makes better sense to say, “Her mathematical and scientific reasoning skills are highly advanced for her age,” than, “She’s highly intelligent.”

Contrary to many people’s belief, IQ is not stable. And for many reasons, the younger a child when assessed, the more likely the scores will change substantially over time. Alfred Binet, a pioneer in intelligence testing, recognized the changeable nature of intelligence long before today’s findings on neural plasticity: “With practice, train-ing, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before” (as cited in Kaufman, 2013, p. 28).

Another important criticism concerns the persistent IQ differences across race, geography, and socioeconomic status. These differences reflect many factors that are unrelated to intelligence, including differences in test-taking ability and sophistication, attitudes toward testing, and opportunities to learn the kinds of things that are included in IQ testing.

Finally, IQ scores have little to do with current definitions of intelligence—how effectively children adapt to different environments, how well they learn from experience, whether they’re likely to invest the hard work over time that’s necessary for success, or how they deal with obstacles. Yes, an IQ score has something to do with how well a person understands complex ideas and is able to perform certain kinds of reasoning tasks on a given test on a given day, but it’s not a great measure of a person’s intelligence. Nor does it have very much to do with whether or not someone needs gifted-level academic programming, or whether his or her abilities have been assessed within the broader scope of talent development identification processes: “Although giftedness is typically associated with schooling, gifted individuals exist across academic and non-academic domains” (Worrell, Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Dixson, 2019, p. 551).

ARE THERE BETTER WAYS THAN IQ TESTS TO DECIDE WHO NEEDS GIFTED PROGRAMMING?

Parents with concerns about whether their child’s learning needs are being met sometimes ask for a gifted assessment. It can be more productive for the child, however, if parents ask the teacher these practical questions:

• What are my child’s areas of strength, weakness, and interest?
• What does my child need right now in order to be both challenged and supported in learning?
• How can I help?

The best way of answering these questions is not with an IQ score, but by carefully considering academic achievement, reasoning, interest, and persistence, as each of these components applies to specific subject areas.

Generally speaking, IQ tests make sense only when a child experiences learning problems that interfere with the ability to do well on standard measures of academic achievement and reasoning. Children with learning or attentional problems usually have difficulty with these kinds of paper-and-pencil tests and do better with the oneon-one oral format of top-tier IQ tests. Parents should also be aware that large gaps in subscores (particularly in the areas of working memory or processing speed) may indicate a learning disability or twice-exceptionality.

WHAT CAN PARENTS REQUEST BY WAY OF RESULTS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION?

After an assessment, parents often ask, “Is my child gifted?” However, it’s far more productive to ask, “Does my child have abilities that are advanced compared to others of the same age?” and then to inquire, “Now what? Are there areas needing special educational adaptations in order for my child to get suitable and meaningful learning challenges?” In order to answer these questions, parents can request:

1. Results by academic subject areas. Knowing the score breakdown by subject area helps parents ensure their child is being given the level of programming that matches ability and domain going forward.
2. Degree of advancement. Knowing that a child is “mathematically gifted” is a start. The next questions to ask are, “How far advanced? What level of programming would be best?” A third-grade child who scores at a grade 9 level mathematically needs different challenges than a third-grader who scores at a grade 5 level.
3. Scores in percentiles. Percentile scores are more user-friendly than raw scores or standard scores. A child who scores at the 60th percentile in language skills (that is, better than 60% of same-age others) and better than 99.9% of others mathematically, will require mathematical advancement, but probably not verbal advancement. That sort of discrepancy is much easier to determine from percentile scores than any other kind of score.

WHAT SHOULD PARENTS TELL THEIR CHILD ABOUT THE TEST RESULTS?

When parents realize—and explain—that ability develops over time with opportunities to learn, and they position tests as useful tools for decision-making purposes, they can disclose test results without worrying about damaging or inflating their child’s confidence. Some suggestions include the following:

1. Be open and honest. Give as much information as the child wants, sharing the numbers if asked.
2. Translate results into practical implications. A parent might say, “Your verbal reasoning scores were exceptionally high. I guess that’s why you’re so great at arguing with your sister. It also means you’ll need more challenging work than most kids.” Or, “Your science scores weren’t so strong. Maybe that’s because you haven’t had a chance yet to learn what was on the test. What would you enjoy learning more about?”
3. Remind your child that everyone has areas of strength and weakness. No matter how well your child has done on a test, you can chat together about people who are exceptional achievers in one or more areas, but not necessarily in others. Discuss how some strengths show up in academic assessments, and some don’t.
4. Emphasize the hard work component of learning and achievement. This applies both to your child’s areas of strength and relative weakness.
5. Steer away from the gifted label. Keep the emphasis squarely on test scores as indications of learning strengths and challenges.

If your child meets the scoring criteria for gifted identification, this indicates some excellent reasoning and test-taking skills. But if your child misses the cut, nobody should conclude that he or she is not a gifted learner, or (if it was close) presume to use the term “almost gifted.” Nobody is “almost gifted”; that is a nonsensical term suggesting a dichotomy between those who are gifted and those who are not. A child may have advanced learning needs in one or more areas, either now or in the future—abilities that just didn’t show up in the particular assessment at that point in time.

No matter how your child scores, remember that intelligence develops step by step with the right kinds of supports and opportunities to learn. High-level abilities develop when children engage meaningfully in various forms of reasoning and a range of learning experiences, confronting challenges, overcoming obstacles, and developing resilience along the way. Parents can encourage their children’s interests and nurture their creativity and critical thinking. Parents can also help kids build their children’s skills by modeling patience, persistence, and hard work in their own pursuits.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What sort of additional challenges do you think your child might benefit from in one subject area or another?
2. What other learning opportunities might be best suited for your child (e.g., mentorships, extracurricular programs, acceleration)?
3. How does your child respond to testing situations? Which kinds of assessments do you think might provide the best information about your child’s abilities and educational needs (e.g., one-on-one orally administered IQ tests or other forms of assessments, such as oral presentations and real-world problem-solving activities)?
4. How might you work with your child’s teacher and school to help implement the adaptations your child needs?
5. In what ways can you advocate for gifted education, and perhaps collaborate with other parents in advocacy efforts?

REFERENCES

• Kaufman, S. B. (2013). Ungifted: Intelligence redefined. New York, NY: Basic Books.
• Matthews, D., & Foster, J. (2014). Beyond intelligence: Secrets for raising happily productive kids. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
• Worrell, F. C., Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Dixson, D. D. (2019). Gifted students. Annual Review of Ps...