Subscribe to our Blog
The Search for Intelligent Life in Kindergarten
Conventional Wisdom
Intelligence tests are useful for predicting young children’s future academic performance.
NurtureShock Wisdom
Because kids’ brains are a work in progress, intelligence tests are very poor predictors of future academic performance,
————————
On average, only 27% of kindergartners identified as gifted are still top performers by grade 3. But because most school boards labour under the delusion that intelligence is innate and stable, once kids have been identified as gifted they tend to stay in their special gifted programs forever. And of course, the same tends to hold true for special education kids. The problem here is that the gifted classes tend to get accelerated and enriched teaching and benefit from interacting with their academically-able peers, while the special education classes tend to be taught an impoverished curriculum at a slower pace. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Here’s an example of how tenaciously educators cling to the notion of fixed intelligence (p. 103).
“Consider South Carolina. A few years ago, the state hired the College of William & Mary’s Center for Gifted Education to evaluate its gifted screening. south Carolina was concerned that minorities were underrepresented in the gifted programs, but - along the way - there turned out to be an even more complex problem.
“Despite revamping the admissions process to increase minority participation, the program remained disproportionately white (86%). But even more disturbing was the number of kids in the gifted program -regardless of their race - who weren’t functioning as gifted at all.
“When William & Mary looked at the gifted kids’ achievement test scores for 2002 in third, fourth, and fifth grade, the results were disastrous. In math, 12% of the gifted kids scored as having only a ‘basic’ ability level. Another 30% were merely ‘proficient’. In English, the numbers were far worse. You’d expect the researchers would have concluded that those children should be moved into a normal classroom, but instead William & Mary recommended the state come up with gifted interventions - basically, special programs for the kids who were remedial-yet-gifted, an oxymoronic concept if there ever was one.”
I can certainly know the feeling. I asked the question one day at the school, why the educators can quickly identified the gifted, but still insist that it is hit and miss for the children who struggled with language in the primary grades. It does not require a PHD, to identified these children. One responded, children can fake the symptoms. I started to laugh, children who make consistent errors in the say way, day in and day out, should be consider gifted. Puzzled looks on their faces, and I went on, if a child can fake errors in the same way consistently, than these children are much further advance in language, than the so-called gifted children. One would have to be, or otherwise, the jig would be up.
Putting that to the side, in my opinion, based on my own observations, and experience, intelligence is a living evolving entity. Give intelligence the right type of fertilizers, it will blossom over time.
Unfortunately, the school system and many educators think that intelligence is fixed. It is why the system is so willing to write off children as early as possible, and in so doing, funding is taken away from these students, and redirected to more worthy students, who in the educators’ eyes have earned their stripes in primary school.