Despite going through gifted education programs myself, I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of them in general, and I've only become more skeptical as new research emerged. Here's a good example for why I'm skeptical:
>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.
The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.
> and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.
I disagree with this. The fact that some young prodigies proved it early and eventually became productive adult geniuses is not, to me, evidence that young prodigies will show themselves. Rather, I would expect that there are more young Einsteins who do not receive adequate mentorship, resources, or opportunities to become old Einsteins.
Some make it anyway. Ramanujan is an interesting case. By Hardy's estimate, he was one of the best mathematical minds of the 20th century, and he demonstrated clear mathematical talent by high school age. And he still barely made it, thanks to a fragile chain of people who recognized his talent and drive. It's very easy for me to imagine a world in which Ramanujan stays in India and remains a bureaucrat doing math on the side.
But as I understand it, pedagogy for young Einsteins is still not that well understood.
If you think Ramanujan was simply smart or "gifted" as society defines that term, you probably didn't look into his story deeply enough.
A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and stated that the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess.
Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes
Kanigel, Robert (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan
How is Ramanujan’s religion in conflict with considering him simply smart or gifted? Are you saying his abilities are divinely inspired? Are you saying he can’t be religious and smart? I’m really confused by your comment.
If these students go through a process like Project Bright Idea, as I mentioned, they would get the resources and mentorship they need. If they can't demonstrate it after that, they probably don't have it.
This suggests Project Bright Idea is a perfect system without bias or room for improvement.
That strikes me as an unrealistic evaluation of the system. The safe assumption is if a child isn't thriving, we haven't learned how to teach them to do so.
Einstein did receive good education and, perhaps more importantly, personal mentorship from his uncle and a family's tutor, who was a medical student, from an early age. All evidence suggests that his family cared very much about the quality of his education.
I agree with a sibling comment that the world probably misses out on many potential Einsteins because of inadequate mentorship and nurturing of high-potential children.
I agree with you that many ideas from gifted programs should be implemented in curricula for 'regular' and above average kids as well.
According to Wikipedia, Einstein went to a Roman Catholic school and his parents were "entirely irreligious". But that doesn't rule out some Protestant cultural influence, I suppose.
> Central European protestant culture of hard work and valuing education
Is there evidence that such a thing exists? Is there a "Central European protestant culture" at all? A central European culture? That's a big place. Many people in many communities around the world value hard work and education; many Protestants in Central Europe do not.
When I was in 3rd grade, I was placed in a remedial math course. My mother requested I be removed from it. I was. Today, I am a senior machine learning engineer working on my third math heavy degree.
Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
Now, many of my higher performing peers from 3rd grade are lost. Hopping from career to career, city to city without a sense of direction. A few of the high performers have gone on to do impressive things, but nothing shocking, nothing that is any more impressive than what my stoner friends and I were able to accomplish after a few extra years to mature.
It took me more time to find that what I really enjoyed was engineering and math. Of course, this is a first person account, so take it or leave it. Worth noting that there is a whole lot of very bad education research, so anyone whipping out journal articles to prove a point should be cautious.
The problem with treating "gifted" students differently is similar to gender bias in STEM, and racial bias in education overall. Some people are told they can, and other are implicitly told they can't. These messages get internalized by students, especially if you are unlike myself and don't have a mother who will stick up for you, and take you out of that remedial math course.
I have taught a few tens of gifted students. I could identify them based on a short test from grade 1 (5-6 years old) onwards. I could even identify some just by a short conversation.
All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture.
I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids.
I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.
>gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education
If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not?
I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care.
The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes.
Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity.
How well do you think those students would fare if placed in normal class? Most of the normal people I meet either openly make fun of things I know or assume I'm full of shit for the volume of information I can pull out of things I've read. Most people also treat me as if I'm a geek because they wouldn't have a use for the things I remember.
You're thinking about this as if they're taking your resources. Let me turn this around for you. What if they aren't being given special treatment because they need the resources, but because they need an environment where the way they think is acceptable? How many of them would still show any talent or aptitude in normal class with normal classmates? Think about your reaction to negative numbers versus their own. Maybe gifted and talented classes aren't so much giving them more resources as they are giving them an appropriate education. Maybe it's about creating a safe environment for kids who tend to be more abstract to flourish.
They'd do fine, because for the most part, the students who were placed in TAG math were the same students whose parents were on PTA or whose parents had the time and self entitlement to go to the school and not so politely request their child be placed in the program.
The notion that gifted students need a special environment to learn is comical. If they're actually talented and gifted, they should certainly be able to learn effectively in the same environment as "normal" students.
Learning to read and do arithmetic is important in the 3rd grade, but it isn't as important as learning social and communication skills. I don't deny that there are gifted individuals among us, I'm advocating that we wait on trying to identify the gifted ones at least until puberty.
If you look at the biographies of the most esteemed scientists and mathematicians who contributed much to humanity's knowledge, many if not most of them had a chance to get special education, either through mentorship or gifted programs since they were in primary school or younger. The cases of Terence Tao, John von Neumann, and Albert Einstein are some that I know of for certain.
Another data point from a personal perspective: I was fairly gifted (though far less than the names I mentioned) and came up with the idea of limits in math on my own when I was 9 years old. I never got any proper mentorship and the development of my math skills and intuition was held back by the boring classroom materials and routine homework I needed to attend/finish. I did not have access to or even aware of any advanced materials I could learn from, and thus wasted several of the best years to develop those math skills and intuition.
The issue of resource allocation is complex and would take much research to get close to a proper direction.
I was just responding to this paragraph:
> Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
That reminds me of my own story regarding negative numbers. I was super young, maybe second grade (7, 8 yrs old?). Family friends had dinner with us, and their kids who were maybe 5 years older than me were talking about "negative" numbers. I was so disappointed when I realized the same thing you did.
You sound like you have an immense chip on your shoulder over this incident.
All kids would likely benefit from a better form of teaching than the conventional school methods. However if you get a classroom of gifted children and you add a non-gifted child, the non-gifted child likely won’t be able to keep up at the same pace. There’s something to be said about segregating children with similar learning abilities so that the pace of the classes are at good levels for everyone in the class.
I agree, I just don’t think it matters in the 3rd grade. Find the high performers in middle school and high school. If there are students that really need help earlier than that, or have learning disabilities they can either be pulled out, or given extra attention if possible, maybe a tutor. I’d lean towards a bit of extra attention. And yeah, it’s definitely a chip on my shoulder, it’s a motivator for me. When someone tells you you’re not smart, you can accept it or prove them wrong.
I disagree, I think school has a profound effect at an early age. Just like you experienced, but in a negative way, unfortunately. I'm happy you were able to turn it into a positive motivator instead of accepting the prognosis of obviously poor teachers.
My son is already reading at an advanced level and doing math while his classmates barely know the alphabet. He hates school because it's so boring. We are sending him to a class with similarly gifted children so that he won't hate school and will be challenged. Keeping him in a class where kids don't learn as quickly as he does would definitely be a disaster in this case.
But what if you'd given the non-gifted students the same experience? This sounds like selection bias. And it'd be helpful if you explained more about the test, as just claiming that you can isn't evidence that what you did was by any means valid.
There were some kids their parents tried to push them into our gifted class (as a tutoring center, we had regular classes too), and they got borderline scores, so we let them in. They could not follow after a while. I would say they did alright in later schooling but not to the same level of academic success as those in gifted classes.
There are few Academic Olympiad gold medalists from the city. In fact, I only know of these two who were my own students so far and another bronze medalist many years previously. (From his later scholarship--he is now a math professor--I think he would have earned a gold medal had he have gifted education back then.)
That said, it was not a controlled experiment so you can think of it as a case study but not gold-standard randomized controlled trial.
The test was a set of challenge-style math problems for primary kids. Solving them would require more creativity and facility with thought than regular math problems.
Is it fair to suggest though that some kids actually need remedial math?
I was in the “slow” reading group for the first half of first grade, then quickly got moved to the “fast” group and eventually ended up scoring a perfect score on the verbal portion of the MCAT as well as top percentiles on other standardized tests. My point is that sometimes remedial has nothing to do with potential.
I think it is fair, but I think there are ways to give students who need it extra attention without singling them out. Children are smarter than we give them credit for, they know when they're being judged or singled out by adults and peers.
I was in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in California. All I noticed was being pulled out of class for IQ tests. There were no IEPs, no extra homework, no special classes, nothing. The only thing I noticed was the music department of an elementary school tried to get me to play piano like some trained monkey but that didn’t work out very well. Also, being bused around 3 hrs (!) a day to a poor magnet school with gangs whom inherently hate smart white kids when there’s an elementary school a block from your house because of race quotas makes anyone resent affirmative action.
I went to a private school for K-3 so was way ahead of public school by at least 2 grades, and was bored 4-7. Oh and then my parents wouldn’t allow me to participate in grade skips or an internship at IBM Research Bernal Road. fml. I had the same cookie-cutter education as everyone else.
I was similarly disappointed with "gifted" programs. Immigrated to the US and was suddenly far ahead of my peers, so was placed in a gifted program immediately (which I thought was weird since it was clear to me that the only reason I was "gifted" is because I had been taught faster and expected to learn faster and there was no reason the other kids weren't "gifted" except for the school system), and then again when I switched schools. In both cases what I was taught in the gifted program was useless novelties, but then I was required to return to the classes I missed those days and make up the work I missed. Looking back, all the gifted program did was make me even more socially outcast and add to my workload without an equivalent increase in my learning. I went from being an A student with a good group of friends to being a C student with 1 or 2 kinda friends and I mainly blame the gifted program, which I really got nothing out of except I learned the Fibonacci sequence at a young age. Everything else that I credit with helping me learn and be successful was stuff I learned at home.
Yes, exactly - that's one of the points I was trying to make. A curriculum that teaches kids far slower than most of them are capable of learning makes an average-ish student from a better curriculum look "gifted". My experience before and after schooling in the US is that I'm not an exceptional genius, but I sure felt like one in class, and that sucks for all the kids who were just as smart as me but had a shitty education in fairly well-funded school districts. I had the benefit of recognizing I could do better and learning a lot at home. Many other kids would just assume they're not gifted and on-par and not expect more from their education, or wouldn't have the resources to learn better at home anyway.
In switching from private to public in California schools, I had a similar experience. Grade 3 was private, grade 4 public. There was little learning happening in grade 4, but my grade 5 teacher at a public school was one of the best influences in my life.
I think individual attention is the single biggest factor. An experienced and observant teacher will find something in a pupil to drive their interest and enthusiasm. If one teacher has 40 kids to teach, that amount of attention is simply not possible.
I'm not sure why a gifted 8-year-old or 14-year old should have more homework. After all, they are still kids. If you have more difficult subject matter that is suitable for their intellect, the homework shouldn't be an issue.
I got poor grades when the homework started kicking in. I had a little bit of homework in 5th grade. 6th grade I had a few hours per night. In 8th grade, they put me into regular classes and I had zero homework simply because they were so much easier. I was bored all day, but made great grades. I made Ok grades the next year or two, depending on the class. my sophmore year, we moved again. This school had a more balanced gifted program, and my grades stayed up.
Now, I realize I have my own sort of issues with some of this stuff and maybe others word differently: I have a lot of symptoms of mild dyslexia, which would have been easily overlooked in the 80's and 90's (I moved countries as an adult, learned a second language, and made friends with a psychologist with a dyslexic brother. She spotted it with my spelling problems, but I've not been tested). But the point more is that 8 year olds, even intelligent ones, are still 8-year olds and often have the maturity of 8-year olds. 14 year olds still have a normal 14-year old's hormones.
Teaching everyone with high expectations is a great idea. In practice, though, it means that some people flunk. (I'm not talking about the fact that some students require different instruction; for instance, some students are special education students. I'm talking about standard students.)
Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort. There are ways to work through that, but in the end there has to be a public will to do it. At least in the US, there is a very large thread of public discourse that thinks the goal in the education system is to minimize the cost of educating other people's kids, not to maximize what they learn.
Another option is aggressively tutoring students who fall behind. Finland does this to great success. I'm not sure what the ratio is now, but at one point there was a tutor for every 7 students on average in Finnish schools. You're absolutely right that it would be costly and politically difficult.
Yes, there has to be a will to do it. It is distressing that in the US at least there is a widespread movement in the other direction. It threatens to make shittier for us all (except those who are completely insulated, of course).
It depends on what you mean by "failure". Kids need to be confronted with honest evaluations and positive feedback loops about their progress, including things they need to work harder on or redo, in order to reach the expected levels of common baseline education.
In the USA, there's just a general pushing through of all kids to the next step regardless of whether or not they actually learned anything, which is simply broken, too. It's missing any notion of failure.
However, what we shouldn't do is effectively discard failing kids from ever succeeding, dumping them to the wayside. They just need different types of help than was offered by the bulk instruction, either in content or style.
> Teaching everyone with high expectations is a great idea. In practice, though, it means that some people flunk.
No, it doesn't, any more than any other expectations do. (The expectations that are being discussed are the assumptions of ability that set content and instructional approaches. How you respond to differing acheivement is a nearly orthogonal question, and that's the domain that flunking is in.)
> Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort.
Which is why they don't flunk students, even when they fail to succeed with the low expectations that underlie their instructional approach.
Yes. Typically these programs are just better learning environments. Why they are reserved for the very technically gifted is a flaw in out romanticized societal belief that genius is the only way incredibly things can happen. Atleast in my opinion. Everyone can be smarter than they are, it's been hard to argue the efficiency of typically schooling for the past century but there's obviously great room for improvement. A great start would be teaching kids how to be happy, or even improving base education in impoverished areas. Lots of potential being lost.
I suspect you may have been misled on Plomin's paper. You should check it out, particularly the section on "Heritability increases dramatically from infancy through adulthood despite genetic stability". It's very readable.
IQ has a weird characteristic in that heritability increases dramatically as we age. In youth the heritability of IQ ranges from upwards of 40%, but the really crazy thing is in adulthood that number skyrockets to values that recent research is showing may be north of 80%! So perhaps the goal ought not be to find young Einsteins, but 'old Einsteins'!
In my opinion the reason for the success of 'gifted' programs is quite simple. In the US many children have little to no interest in actually learning. That leads to a poor environment for both teachers and the kids in the class that would like to learn. 'Gifted' programs help connect students who are interested in learning and teachers that would like to genuinely teach, instead of those just going through the motions for the paycheck. And that's going to lead to greater outcomes for everybody. Basically, education often devolves to the lowest common denominator, and in public classes that denominator tends to be very low. 'Gifted classes' don't really filter to amazing students, but instead get rid of the awful ones.
> 50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable
Note that this is a population-wide number, however real it is, and it doesn't really have anything to do with upper-end intelligence. You can't take a 95th percentile kid and make him an Einstein. What you can do is try to give every kid a non-abusive education system that treats them like somebody who can accomplish something. I think early age gifted programs are more useful in their role of not boring the smarter kids than, say, causing them to be educated faster.
> The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable."
I can't read the article because I've exceeded my limit, I guess, but how does this follow?
For the purposes of a gifted program all that matters is that intelligence is real and measurable. It could be totally randomly distributed (ie not heritable) and it could still make sense to identify and specially educate smart kids.
Also means that already high achievers get the support to perform even better while eveyone else gets nothing special. Set all expectations high, teach everyone critical thinking skills.
Another way of looking at this data is to observe that the students most likely to outperform on IQ tests are those very students from wealthy backgrounds [0]. Is it any wonder that later life, those born with access to wealth and connections, do much better than those who find themselves in a lessor social cohort?
If we accept the above correlation, there seem to be 2 likely explanations for this, outside of pure coincidence.
One may posit that this relationship is due to some inheritable trait which causes high income earners to consistently produce offspring who make the same sound decisions they made based on intelligence.
If this were true, I would expect to see far more high functioning individuals at the top of the economic pie. Purely observationally, this seems not to be highly correlated. There are lots of exceptions, but high income seems to be associated mostly with a history of high income.
Alternatively, and I believe more likely, this difference can be explained by the difference in access to resources which wealth provides.
If IQ is just a proxy for family wealth, what can or should we do about it? It seems most equitable to simply provide broad access to high quality education to those who can keep pace at a cost (both in terms of money and social friction) approaching zero.
"In twin studies of over 10,000 pairs of twins, monozygotic (genetically identical) twins averaged an 0.85 correlation of "g," whereas for dizygotic (fraternal, like brothers or sisters) same-sex twins the "g" correlations were 0.60. These twin studies suggest that the heritability (genetic effect) accounts for about half of the variance in "g" scores."
"The powerful quantitative genetic design of identical and fraternal twins reared apart (112 pairs) and matched twins reared together (111 pairs) was employed to assess the extent of genetic influence on individual differences in cognitive abilities during the last half of the life span. General cognitive ability yielded a heritability estimate of about .80 in two assessments 3 years apart as part of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. This is one of the highest heritabilities reported for a behavioral trait. Across the two ages, average heritabilities are about .60 for verbal tests, .50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and .40 for memory tests."
I would say that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable" is in no way in opposition to "gifted kind of education is something that would help everyone to achieve more".
1.) 50% is a lot of variance.
2.) There is more to learning and achievement then just where you stack against other kids.
But also, Einstein had good education and his family cared about his education. Moreover, Einstein is effectively outlier - arguing that single most known and popular scientist is repeatable framework does not make sense.
> Likewise, attendance to a given school is also heritable.
No, it's not.
Think about it for a moment, just in the twin study framework. You have monozygotic and dzygotic twins, and twice the difference in their correlation is the heritability. How correlated are the addresses of two dyzgotic twins? Well, they're going to live in... the same house. Just like monozygotic twins are. The exception will be cases of divorce, but the brokenness of their family will have nothing to do with their twinship & genetic relatedness and they will be about as likely to be split up either way (which is minimal). Since there is no difference, twice the difference is still zero, and therefore, the heritability will be zero. Or if that doesn't convince you, consider an adopted child; what address do they live at compared to their adoptive siblings, and what school do they go to?
There certainly will be between-family differences, which will be genetic in the parents, but that falls elsewhere into shared-environment (because all the kids in a family will share the same parents putting them into a better or worse zip code/school) or possibly passive gene-environment correlation.
Heritability is a statistical concept, with established estimation methods. It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic trait, but the same can be said for "giftedness".
Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done. You can estimate the heritability of any trait, with or without twins. Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable.
> It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic trait, but the same can be said for "giftedness".
No it can't. Twins certainly do differ in intelligence, personality, income, level of education, patent count, adult SES, or pretty much everything which could plausibly be lumped into a term like 'giftedness'.
> Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done.
??? Is it possible to measure anything 'directly', under your redefinitions of words?
> Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable.
They would indicate that there are between-family genetic differences, certainly. They would not indicate that they are heritable and it would be wrong or misleading to criticize heritabilities drawn from twin studies on this basis of gene-environment correlation. You can't simply lump together every kind of genetic pattern under your redefinition of the term 'heritability'.
The tl;dr is that the people who trot out additive models of heritability as evidence of anything in particular are by and large those invested in the notion of genetic determinism.
Rose's ancient paper is balderdash and wrong and even Turkheimer wouldn't agree with his claims now. Heritability has been repeatedly vindicated empirically as a guideline to selective breeding, GWAS power and results, genetic correlations, evolutionary development of traits and split between additive & epistasis variance based on selective pressures, and so on. Even human sperm donor donations affect height of offspring exactly as predicted by the breeder's equation - which rests entirely on the concept of heritability! The results of projects like UK Biobank and SSGAC have been a vindication of the entire behavioral genetics research programme, not any kind of refutation.
As they are responding to a comment using 'heritability' in the standard behavioral genetics sense, and espousing a common misunderstanding of the concept, it's not clear to me at all that they meant something entirely different from heritability...
>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.
The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.