Gifted students: individual differences among children with extraordinary intelligence.

Factors that explain the manifestation or not of talents in children.

What characteristics define a gifted child?

We can say, in general, that their intellectual development is always ahead of what is expected for their age. For example, if most children are always able to say a few words a year and a half after they are born, a gifted child has a repertoire of words twice or three times as large when he or she reaches that age.

Gifted students: what factors make a child highly gifted?

When the gifted child starts school, basically what you notice is: quick thinking, the ability to create much more elaborate answers, and a very good use of information. These children may require adapted educational strategies, as they may hide their talents in a normative classroom, become bored or drop out of classes.. For these and many other reasons, we could ask ourselves the following question: What guarantees does it mean to be part of the gifted students? gifted students? Is a gifted child a successful adult?

Not necessarily.

Contextual variables

Certain contextual variables that each child may have must be taken into account. On the one hand the support (or lack thereof) from their parents, legal guardians or close relatives. There are cases in which the family does not support them, devaluing the fact of studying and investing time in studies and emphasizing the need to bring home a salary at the end of the month. This can cause the child to put aside their talents and focus on fulfilling what their parents ask of them. The school may ignore the talent, causing the child not to receive an adapted education and the child may eventually become bored and drop out of classes. Or, the environment of friends can lead the child to hide his or her abilities through teasing and teasingwhich could even trigger bullying dynamics.

The economic circumstances in which the person finds himself/herself in the family also play an important role. There are families that cannot finance the studies of their children, since their economic situation does not allow it, even if both parents work and there are certain grants or scholarships. Consequently, the child will have to adapt to the situation and his or her talent will not be able to develop as expected.

Finally, there are other variables to be highlighted, such as the opportunities that life offers to each person, or their own health.

Analyzing real cases

All of the above is reflected in a study conducted by Melita Oden together with Terman, in 1968, where they compared the 100 most successful and 100 least successful men in a group; defining success as holding the jobs that required their intellectual gifts. holding jobs that required their intellectual endowments.. The successful included teachers, scientists, doctors and lawyers. The unsuccessful included electronics, technicians, police, carpenters and pool cleaners, plus unsuccessful lawyers, doctors and academics.

The study concluded that the successful and unsuccessful barely differed in average IQ.. If anything, the differences between them turned out to be in confidence, persistence and parental encouragement principles.

Smart children and parenting

When we talk about intelligent children, the main criteria focus on IQ and academic environments, but we also have to take into account the following factors factors social-emotional factors. In the study carried out by Terman and Melita we can observe a clear bias in the sample since it is only a university population. Terman ended up becoming a convinced geneticist, but he did not take into account the historical variables of the time such as war, etc. Many subjects died there, others from alcoholism, suicides...factors that have to do with socioemotional characteristics.

Alencar and Fleith (2001) pointed out a lesser emphasis on emotional development due to the hegemony of educational plans plans that are little focused on strengthening a positive self-concept and promoting social development. They also remarked that the vast majority of works presented up to that time on the subject were not related to socioemotional development. Terman recognized, however, that children who had an IQ above 170 presented difficulties in social adjustment, which was considered by their teachers as isolation (Burks, Jensen and Terman, (1930), Gross (2002)).

Emotional vulnerability has also been found, referring to the ability of these students to understand and engage with ethical and philosophical issues, before emotional maturity has developed to deal with such issues (Hollingworth, 1942).

Gifted students and school expectations

As external agents we can observe how students with higher intellectual abilities are prone to suffer from what Terrassier called the "negative Pygmalion Effect". This occurs when, because gifted students show greater potential than teachers, the latter tend to expect these youngsters to perform in the average range, and then encourage some students to perform well below their real abilities (Terrassier, 1981).

As a final point, it is worth mentioning a study conducted on the detection of gifted students (Terrassier, 1981). detection of gifted studentsThe study analyzed the structures of the implicit theories of intelligence of educators and explored the relationship between these theories and the beliefs about the identification of gifted students. Educators who scored creativity as an important attribute of intelligence tended to favor multiple methods of identifying gifted students.

In contrast, educators who supported the use of intelligence tests as the primary basis for identifying talent generally agreed that the analytical ability was part of the structure of intelligence (García-Cepero, et al, 2009).