What is giftedness and what does it mean to be gifted?
Until recently, I thought what I think is gifted is simply correct and people who saw it differently were wrong.
I was sure I knew the correct answer. I personally thought that it was an inner quality, a form of intelligence that is different, more intense, and noticeable in how some people are. It’s about their essence.
And when I heard people talk about giftedness as being about getting good grades and being a person of high accomplishment, I simply thought they were wrong and that they didn’t understand. For years I held this view. But then, in 2020, I read Maggie Brown’s doctoral dissertation (linked below) and learned her Delphi study of experts in the field of gifted education and high intelligence indicates experts fall into at least two camps about what giftedness is. A Delta study, by the way, is an anonymous series of questionnaires that the lead author narrows down over at least three iterations to focus on what the respondents think about the topic being reviewed.
I am on the side of giftedness being about how someone is, “how they be.” As an example, someone who is very smart and not a good student is usually referred to as “street smart” and not “book smart.” In my mind, it means they are still smart but either didn’t have the opportunity for a good education or didn’t like and cooperate with the way the education was presented. This means that my approach to supporting gifted children and adults is focused on their social, emotional, and mental health, not their career status.
Others just as fervently see giftedness as measured by good grades, good scores, and adult career success measured by earnings and status. Their focus of support is on improving school performance and dealing with underachievement issues. When parents came to me for help with their under-achieving child, I focused on the environment the gifted child is in and whether it is the right one for that child. [I retired from that role in 2017.]
So, I think giftedness is complex, hard to describe, and confusing to measure. At the same time, you sort of know it when you encounter it, especially at the very highest levels. But, because of these different viewpoints about what people think giftedness is, many people who are gifted, doubt it. My goals around giftedness and the lifespans of gifted people is to give you all kinds of input and ideas that you can use to figure out this part of yourself. Additionally, I am thinking of those of you are in the role of trying to guide and support others with their own giftedness. The “essence” or “who they be” part of high intelligence doesn’t go away with age. It is part of the entire lifespan. How your environment and you support and increase it over time makes a difference, though. Those ads that encourage you to play their games to stimulate your brain are correct. It does make a difference in your brain activity.
Yes, giftedness is generally about high intelligence. People generally see it as about the top 10% of a population and then the top 2% to be really gifted, and “off the charts” on intelligence measures, like well into the >99th percentile ranges, to be phenomenally gifted. But measurement instruments vary. What’s tested by them (the IQ tests, for example) or how they are normed, all matter for telling you what you want to know. How you felt when you took the test or if you had access to how to take tests and learned how to do well on them, etc., etc. I’m not going to give you quick answers as much as give you access to many ideas and answers you have about this topic.
What Does Giftedness Look Like in Preschoolers and K-12 students?
I have spent a lot of my pre- and current professional time trying to learn about what giftedness looks like. One of my first Medium.com story posts is the Ruf Estimates of Levels of Gifted.
I wrote the original Ruf Estimates article as I was gathering anecdotal and test data for my first book, Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind (2005) and which was renamed 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options (2009), both published by Great Potential Press and now Gifted Unlimited, LLC. I started the first book with more than 100 families who either worked directly with me for their children’s evaluations or who knew me through my consulting, speaking or writing. These children were gifted across the gifted range.
Over time, I learned that opportunities in general, and something called “social capital,” greatly impact who shows up for professional help with their gifted children. I learned along the way that there are probably far more people in the gifted range than many people think (sometimes on and off during their own lifetimes for various reasons) and that my Ruf Estimates early milestones for gifted children didn’t have the same predictive powers in some cases as with the people — parents and educators — who aready knew what to look for and how to support their children’s intellectual growth. Honestly, though, most Medium readers are probably in the groups for whom the early milestones are relevant and familiar. And, I’ve done statistical analyses of how well they predict eventual IQ test results. They are as reliable as comparing any good IQ test with another good IQ test. About 84% correlation.
So, what if you are already an adult and wonder if you’re gifted?
Believe it or not, most intellectually gifted people (usually identified by school administered IQ tests that are embedded in your achievement tests) are not directly told they are gifted. Sometimes you’ll get the idea the educators know more than you do when they say things like, “You should be getting better grades” or “You can do better than this.” Sometimes you are put in a special class or ability-grouped opportunity, and if you sense or know the other students are smart, and you’re with them, it means you are, too.
But not everyone likes school or cooperates during their school years. My second big book is about those original gifted children who are now grown. Their age range in the new book (late 2022 publication) is early twenties to mid-forties. These are people who mostly understood they were (or are) “supposedly” gifted, although some of them doubted it because they didn’t do well in school or disappointed their parents. Anyway, if you don’t have a lot of evidence or know for sure about yourself, I recommend you study for and take the Miller Analogies Test. The scoring has changed over the years, but it is still one of the best instruments available to figure out “where you fit” on the overall intelligence continuum compared to other bright people.
Another way to know is to listen to what others tell you. Most gifted people simply attract some attention. It usually shows up in how quickly they figure out how to do something compared to others who also trying to learn a new thing. It shows up in humor. It shows up in the segues you bring to the conversations you have. You make connections between and among topics that others can’t do as well. Sometimes you know you’re smart compared to someone else, so when they compliment you on being smart, you doubt they are enough of an authority to tell you that. You’re waiting for someone “official,” right?
I will unfurl more and more information about these topics, so follow me if you want to see what I post. In the meantime, here is another post to read now, Social and Emotional Issues: What Gifted Adults Say About Their Childhoods. And this article uses information from people who were in their forties and fifties in the 1990s and atarted their own school years in the 1950s and 1960s. The new book will be about people who were in their school years in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
And, if you have found me here or on my website and read this far, you are probably gifted or you wouldn’t even be interested in this stuff.
[i] Brown, M., Peterson, E., & Rawlinson, C. (2020). Research With Gifted Adults: What International Experts Think Needs to Happen to Move the Field Forward, Roeper Review, 42:2, 95–108, DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2020.1728797
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