Schoolchildren should be classed by intellectual ability in subject groupings rather than lumped together according to age, says Miraca Gross, the University of New South Wales' Professor of Gifted Education.
In the interview below, Professor Gross says that grouping kids by chronological age is the product of an impractical view of human development. She also says that gifted kids often physically develop faster and that they deserve their own specialist schools just as much as highly musical or athletic kids do. After two decades at the University of NSW, Professor Gross retires at the end of this year.
Miraca Gross, Professor of Gifted Education, School of Education, Director of the Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre (GERRIC), University of New South Wales
How do you identify a gifted child?
In Australia we’re very good at identifying kids who have high ability in sport, athletics, music, and we’re pretty good at art. Where we’re not so good is identifying kids who are academically talented.
Most of us agree on what musical giftedness is – they can play well – same with art, same with sport, same with athletics. But there is controversy over what we mean by academically gifted: do we mean someone who is performing very well academically in class, or someone who has the capacity to perform well but for some reason isn’t doing it? And then we have the kid who is very bright but has a learning disability like dyslexia who can think very well but has extreme trouble getting stuff down on paper. That kid may be very, very, intellectually able but her disability is blocking the translation of her intellect into into performance.
It’s an interesting area and it’s fraught with difficulties. If we were talking about intellectual disability you wouldn’t be asking me if one flash-in-the-pan indication that a kid is struggling would mean that he is intellectually disabled.
So what we’re looking for is, across a reasonable period of time, the child showing that she thinks at a level more like kids who are older, or the child who has flashes of insight that she’s able to share with her teacher. It’s a pattern.
Very bright kids often start reading before the entry to school. That’s a very good indicator because the parents can’t sit a four-year-old up on a couch to read. If the kid is able to read she’s able to read. So if you’ve got a kid in kindergarten or preschool who’s a very fluent reader – quite a bit beyond the level of age-peers – that’s a very good indication of high intellectual ability. Also if she spontaneously teaches herself basic maths, addition and subtraction, that’s a good indicator. Kids who are very bright and very intellectually, academically, mature for their age can be good candidates for acceleration.
How should schoolchildren be grouped for classes?
Unfortunately, schools are organised by age rather than subject areas. In secondary school you’ve got departments which are organised by subject or by discipline, so you’ll have the maths department or the science faculty, the English faculty or foreign language faculty. However, there is quite strong organisation by chronological age: 12-year-olds are educated separately to 13-year-olds. It’s not so much that slaves to tradition as [that we are] taking a view that all children of a certain age are going to be at the same developmental level – and that’s just not a practical view to take. Some kids who are in years four to five at school are as mature as a year 6 kid; we want to be able to make her a member of a year 6 class because she wouldn’t have any difficulty with that level of academic work.
In sport and athletics, weight, size, and height have a direct impact on how the kid is going to perform. But in academic work, weight, size, and height don’t make any difference at all. For example, if you’ve got a kid in year 7 who is very bright at maths, his size doesn’t make a darn of difference. If we’re dealing with the education of kids who are intellectually retarded, we don’t look at their height: we look at their capacity to learn and we compare that with the capacity to learn of an average kid. Equally with gifted kids, we don’t say OK I’d love to think about putting this kid up to the grade above but he’s still only average height for his age. We shouldn’t worry about that. We’ve got to be awfully careful when we’re looking at one sort of definition of kids and using it compare to average kids or intellectually disabled kids, that we don’t make comparisons that are not necessary or valid.
Are intellectually advanced kids emotionally mature enough to cope socially when they are jumped up levels?
Emotional maturity in kids tends to be correlated with their intellectual ability rather than their chronological age. A kid who is six but is more like an eight-year-old in the way she thinks is probably more like a seven or eight-year-old in the way she feels. Just like with the intellectually disabled kids: a kid who is 10 but thinks like an eight-year-old generally feels more like an eight year old. With kids, the way they think – the self-talk – and they they feel are very closely correlated – much more so than how it is in adulthood.
Do gifted kids get bullied when they land in a class of older children?
Their reception by an older peer group largely depends on how the older kids have been prepared by the school for the arrival of younger kids in their midst. What many schools do is give the younger child visiting-rights in the older classroom for a few weeks. Say you’ve got a year 5 class and there’s going to be a year 4 kid, a younger kid, coming up to be in that class – what the school often does is say “OK, the younger child will visit the older class on Fridays.” Then when the older class adjusts to that, they say, “OK, what if we have Madeline with us on Thursdays and Fridays, rather than just Fridays?” And the older kids say, “OK, why not?” It’s the psychology of getting the older class to adjust to the younger child that gets rid of the danger of bullying.
We do it in sports teams. A child who has greater aptitude in sport can be playing with the older kids, and after the first surprise of “Oh, there’s a younger kid here,” they see how well she can play and it’s no big deal. It’s exactly the same with the academics. If the older kids see that the younger kid isn’t going to slow things down and be useless, they’ll say, “OK, that’s no big deal.”
Is the age divide more problematic if the older peers are reaching puberty?
That’s less of a problem than people think. This is going to sound strange, but there’s a lot of research than shows this. Girls who are intellectually very bright menstruate earlier than their age peers. Boys who are very, very bright also have primary and secondary sexual changes coming a little bit early. We don’t know quite why that is but we have known it for the best part of 100 years. You tend to find that if you’re allowing a girl to accelerate [up levels at school] you’re putting her in with kids with whom she’s going to start having her periods at about the same time rather than early, and that works well.
Are teachers generally smart enough to do the best for gifted kids?
It’s not so much the intelligence of the staff as how much they know about gifted education and gifted kids. If I was the principal of a school and I was going to accelerate a kid into a class above, I would put her in with a teach who already knows something about gifted kids and is not going to work on stereotypes but rather is going to work on sensible expertise. More and more teachers now have training in gifted education. My centre alone, GERRIC, over the last 20 years has trained almost 2000 teachers in an 80-contact-hour course. I would like to see the good things that are happening, happening in every school across the state, and across the country.
Do gifted children come from gifted parents?
In general, yes. Sometimes children who are very slow have parents of average ability, but sometimes children who are very slow come from parents who are slow learners. Sometimes you find a gifted child comes from a family of fairly average ability but often you find a gifted child coming from a family where the parents are very bright, too. There’s no absolute rule. If parents are not particularly interested in fostering a child’s abilities, the child might not feel permitted to show that she thinks very well.
The most important thing for parents is not to be worried if their child is not showing the same developmental stages as other kids but is going through them faster. Some parents worry a bit that if their child is talking earlier than some other children that they may burn out in later life. That’s just not true. They don’t need to worry.
How important a measure is IQ?
IQ is enormously important in helping us understand whether a child is intellectually delayed or intellectually advanced. So if a school or teacher thinks that a child might be developmentally delayed and is progressing much slower than usual they will get a psychologist to give the child an IQ test, because that allows us to see the degree of slowness that the child has. Similarly, if a child’s progressing faster than usual, intellectually, it’s a good idea to give an IQ test because that gives us a measure of how much beyond her age peers she really is. If a child has an IQ of 120 that means she’s in the top 10% in her capacity to think. In music, art, sport, we don’t calculate enhancement with IQ, but with intellectual ability the IQ test is a very, very useful instrument: not just to see if the child is bright, but how bright the kid is, and how far beyond her classmates she really is. It enables us to present the child with a curriculum that suits her needs rather than one that is designed for just most kids.
Was the push a decade or so ago to spread the study of philosophy in schools an example of a curriculum suited to gifted kids?
The philosophy for children movement was generally regarded as something that was good for most, if not all, kids. Certainly children who were keen, analytical, evaluative thinkers, probably got more out of philosophy for schools, but I certainly wouldn’t want an enrichment program like philosophy for schools to be kept only for the gifted kids. It’s not a matter of giving gifted kids entertaining, challenging, satisfying curriculum as if the others are getting a boring, unchallenging, unsatisfying curriculum. That’s the last thing we’d want to see happen.
Have you noticed a change in the incidence of gifted children over the years?
I haven’t seen a greater incidence of gifted kids, just like I haven’t seen a greater incidence of intellectually disabled kids over the years but I have seen a greater awareness of the needs of developmentally disabled kids and gifted kids. Teachers are much more aware than they were 20 years ago of the range of individual differences in our classrooms and they’re much more responsive to that range.
Is there merit in having separate schooling for gifted kids?
I wouldn’t think of selective schools as separate schools. There is the Conservatorium High School which is a school for children who have towered in music and the performing arts. We don’t talk about that as if it is segregation, because we accept that for kids who have got certain types of talent they may need to have a special education. In NSW we’ve also got schools for kids who have talent in sport and in athletics and we don’t worry too much about the separateness of schooling for that, so why shouldn’t we have schools for kids who’ve got particular aptitudes in what’s extremely serious: maths, English, science, languages? That doesn’t worry me; I don’t think of it as separate education. I think of it as special education with a curriculum designed for kids who differ in a particular way. For gifted kids that means faster learning and learning at a higher level of complexity.
Comments welcome below.
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Comments (17)
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Some years ago I worked in a school where we streamed the yr 7 - 10 students in English and Maths - each independently.
Selection was purely on academic performance, but it was dynamic: students would move up or down if their performance changed.
It was appreciated by the more-able students. However it was even better appreciated by the low achievers. They were happy to be able to ask the questions they dared not ask in a mixed class. Their academic performance did improve but it was their…
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Anna Elizabeth Beniuk
Counsellor (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Your article raises many interesting questions for me. I have a child who read at three, somewhat ironically it was his love of Rugby League that encouraged this as he loved it so much even his father got sick of talking about it and would pass on the sports pages of the Sydney Morning Herald to the three year old. We only realised he was reading them, not just looking at the pictures when he asked us what one of the longer words said. He also developed his love of statistics and mathematics as a…
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Sarah Officer
Nutritionist, PhD student (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
I'd really like to see more than just the possibility of bullying discussed. What kind of research is out there on the social development of gifted children who are placed with same-age peers vs. older children with more similar levels of ability?
I have a little boy who first showed signs of being able to read letters and numbers at 13-14 months old (more noteable, I thought, was his ability to tell rudimentary jokes at that age); at 20 months he is obviously capable of a lot more and speaks…
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Bruce Moon
Bystander! (logged in via email @imap.cc)
I must admit my preference, I prefer streaming to lock-step.
This article is not about differentiating streaming and lock-step, rather it is about separating gifted children into streaming mode while the 'straights' stay in lock-step.
For every child, some aspects of formal education are boring; be it sciences, maths or humanities. They quickly learn that attendance is compulsory, but engagement is not.
Given this, I wonder whether streaming gifted children is but a default method of…
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Rolade Berthier
Dr. (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I agree with your analysis of some important issues concerning intellectual giftedness, which I've discussed in my book and website (www.beingintelligentgifted.com). Grouping students based on interest (subject matter) and cognitive ability have merits but also grey areas, e.g. criteria for the latter. My 2 children have been IQ tested and successfully accelerated. The eldest did Years 8 & 9 in one year in a private school for gifted children, received high honours in Grade 12, and, at 16 years and 3 months old, is happily pursuing a university degree in England. However, I would not have allowed them to jump more than 2 classes or have classmates who are 5 years and older.
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I am uneasy about the claim that children of high ability tend also to be more socially and/or physically mature. This is the basis of the contention made by Professor Gross in the article.
Whilst it would hold for some of the able students I have worked with, it is certainly not the case with others.
It also seems to me that that Mensa has a high proportion of people who are the converse: socially quite immature for their chronological age.
As I wrote earlier, early onset of puberty probably has much more to do with diet than intellect in itself. It would be interesting to know the degree of correlation between early-childhood nutrition and IQ. That would nicely confound any data on age of puberty relative to IQ.
Mat Hardy
(Lecturer in Middle East Studies at Deakin University)
What about the situation in some areas, such as Sydney's North Shore, where every single child in the school is gifted and talented? It's true. Just ask their parents.
Sue Luus
Principal Consultant GiftEd (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Mat, I think this may be called North Shore Syndrome! This is why we need a universally accepted definition of giftedness which is problematic because of cultural perspectives. Miraca has made this plea for children to be grouped according to ability and subject interest for decades now. Grouping children by age for educational purposes makes no more sense than grouping them by shoe size.
Rob Crowther
Architectural Draftsman (logged in via email @westnet.com.au)
I had a discussion on this topic with a Psychologist last month. Her comment to me was the evidence is that being in your age group is more important than dividing by academic ability.
That said, both of my children were dux of their high school. One was, according to his chemistry teacher, ‘probably the lead student he taught over his thirty year teaching career’. The young man left school disliking chemistry because according to him, it’s boring.
I have wondered, if left to his own devices…
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John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
An entertaining reflection of my own experience, although a bit later. It was my fascination with motors and cars, so disapproved by my parents, that was a key factor in my excelling in physics at school and university.
That, I suppose, is an interesting aside in itself. Physics was just one subject in the great range of sciences we studied as part of Agricultural Science and I had not reflected much on it until now.
I could not continue Physics, had I wanted to, because I had virtually no…
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Sue Luus
Principal Consultant GiftEd (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Rob, I think your child's experience with the Photography curriculum is proof enough. I have been worked with a student recently who is not having her educational needs met and so is focused on dancing at an elite level where her need for challenge and expectations of an exceptional standard are being met. She attends school two and a half days a week and in that time is more than adequately covering her curriculum, She will dance full time as soon as she is able to and complete her education through Distance Education courses that will allow her to progress at her own pace and are based on levels of mastery.
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Grouping children by age may make no more sense than grouping by shoe size but at least we can measure those.
I am unconvinced that we can measure ability fairly enough to group children on that basis.
Which ability are we measuring? Or what cluster of abilities are we averaging? How are we measuring? How are we weighting the different abilities relative to each other?
Are we casting out one devil for seven worse?
Dee Ummkopf
Innocent Bystander (logged in via email @yahoo.com.au)
I am interested in Dr Gross' comment: "That kid may be very, very, intellectually able but her disability is blocking the translation of her intellect into performance." 'Performance', in this context, means ACADEMIC performance. Her problem solving abilities will be intact.
In practice, selective education is available only to those who achieve academically. The gifted with specific learning disabilities (sometimes known as 'twice exceptional') are cast adrift; their potential lost (with obvious…
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John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
School is primarily about socialisation.
Being separated out from the group, whether for perceived higher or lower ability, marginalises the child socially.
All children are special, and each has gifts of which their teachers are unaware, or only dimly aware.
Every child deserves special treatment and no child deserves to be put up above their peers any more than any other child should be placed below others. (having been in both situations my myself, as a child)
We do need better education for all children. We should not be trying to do that on the cheap by selecting off for special attention only those few we see as "gifted".
Dee Ummkopf
Innocent Bystander (logged in via email @yahoo.com.au)
Just a couple of questions, John:
Are you familiar with the work of Prof Gross or GERRIC?
If all children are gifted and no child deserves "special treatment", do you favour the abolition of centres of excellence such as the Conservatorium High School, sports high schools and the like because all children can potentially achieve highly at music or sport, given a differentiated education?
Are you aware of the difference between giftedness and talent?
Are you from the north shore? :-]
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I have encountered the work of Marcia Gross and GERRIC.
However I have also worked with one student who was regarded as well below average but worked his way from bottom to top of the class over a period of 18 months, once he had faith in himself.
Another young person's life was transformed when he was able to follow his own interests and learn practical workshop skills instead of academic learning. His IQ and other abilities would rank him well into the "gifted" category but it did not make…
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Rolade Berthier
(logged in via LinkedIn)
I agree with you that each child is special or unique. Since it's not possible to have an individual teaching in public schools, children are grouped using a criterion that is measurable and comparable, i.e. age - which is also used in most activities (e.g. competitors in chess and tennis tournaments are grouped by years of birth). A centre of excellence is not the only way to deal with giftedness; there are practical measures, such as acceleration, completing 2 years of schooling in one year and…
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