Living With Live Wires

The main ideas of a recent article:

“But the two tasks I’ve described are a real test for children, developed in Switzerland. They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores. On 5- and 6-year-old kids, this simple test is virtually synonymous with a 90-minute intelligence test of their full cognitive capacities; the two tests have a 99 percent correlation. It turns out that kindergartners who are really good at sorting line length and relative weight are the same kids who score highly on tests of conceptual reasoning, memory, and attention. Whatever the neurobiological advantage is, it’s driving performance on both tests?at least at that age.

“This shines a bright light on testing of children’s intelligence, and I’m of two minds about it?two minds that I can’t reconcile. On one hand, it reveals just how premature it is to screen 5- and 6-year-olds for entrance to private schools and gifted programs.

“Conclusion: the tests work for measuring current intelligence. But it’s a bad bet, and a bad investment, if we’re counting on any test to predict a young child’s future.”

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The Rocky View Action for Gifted Children Foundation was formed by a group of interested and motivated parents to support the needs of highly capable students in the Rocky View School District in southern Alberta, Canada.

RVAGC advocates for gifted children and will provide supplementary educational materials that schools cannot afford, but which are necessary for these students to meet their distinctive intellectual needs. The Foundation will also support teachers and administrators as they pursue professional development training to better serve highly capable children.

RVAGC is interested in providing additional enrichment opportunities for gifted children in the district, while providing networking, support and information to parents.

RVAGC will work with the school district on behalf of the highly capable children to expand their gifted education offerings from K-12 in the regular classroom, while advocating for eventual congregated settings. We will continue to work with the District to help find the best solutions for all its children.

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Nancy Robinson, former director of the Halbert and Nancy Robinson Center for Young Scholars at the University of Washington, is the keynote speaker at the Oregon Association for Talented and Gifted’s annual conference, which will be in Salem on Friday and Saturday.

Now retired, Robinson continues to be active with gifted education. Her husband founded the center in 1975, and it has become a national leader in gifted education. Among the ways it seeks to serve gifted students is by identifying them and reaching out to educators on how to best serve them.

Question: What should talented and gifted programs accomplish?

Answer: A good education for any child is what my husband used to call an “optimal match,” the sweet spot where they need to stretch a bit to learn, but not so much that it’s subversive, but not so little that it’s totally boring. That’s true for every single child. More…