Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education (2011) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education (2011) [pdf]

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74 pointslainon72 comments

One thing which stands as obvious to me is that we should, as a society, strive to provide the "special education for gifted" to everyone. Then we'll magically have more "gifted" children. At my kids' school, there's one day a week where all the "gifted" kids are going on "special program", where they do chess, some electronics, robotics, math, in a very free atmosphere. This should be the standard education, not some elite program for selected kids.

Of course, because here in Lake Wobegone, everybody is above average!

Not necessarily absurd, though. Every kid can be above average in something.

Why?

Because you've got kids who have more below average marks than everyone else maybe?

If you constrain population to that of Lake Wobegon, it's not logically possible for everyone to be above average in anything.

If you take the reference population to the world population, then it's possible for Lake Wobegonians to be above average in some things.

No, because there is more than one thing to be good at. One may be above average in piano, another in cello. One may excel at baseball, another at chess. All may have some exceptional performance.

Ok, that is one interpretation that logically works.

Sure but what Garrison never told us is that there is a rigorous application process to be selected to live in Lake Wobegone.

I wouldn't be so sure that you'd suddenly have many more gifted children. Intelligence isn't entirely nurture.

You would get some additional gifted children, but it's a question of cost vs returns. I agree that programs like that would be cool to have for kids, but I'm not entirely sold on whether they would help.

> You would get some additional gifted children, but it's a question of cost vs returns. I agree that programs like that would be cool to have for kids, but I'm not entirely sold on whether they would help.

What you say is true. As much as some don't want to admit it not everybody has the same potential (at least academically) and that's okay. With regards to the programs I don't think the aim should be solely to unearth some hidden geniuses. I think it should be to give every kid a rich and broad learning experience as an aim in itself. And secondly to enable to fulfill whatever potential they might.

I'm a fan of the Mathematician's Lament by Lockhart (might be misspelling his name). The idea being that we need exploratory learning. It expands outside of math as presented in his essay.

My best friend, while in highschool, had routine problems in core classes. Simple algebra? Forget about it. Spelling? Grab a bunch of letters and pray they slam together right. Instead, let him at something that interested him, and it was amazing. When he was 15, he had already rebuilt a couple engines and a transmission and was getting an old Corvette up and running that he was giving by family. If you heard a plane go over head, he could identify the sound of the engine, name the model of the plane, and rattle off the history of it, leading back to ww2 or whatever. At junior college, he took a geology class and suddenly he was academic. He saw how math helped and passed through trig. His spelling and essayship became solid as he saw the value in communication about geology.

The long story short: people, even those who might not appear promising, can shine when exposed to something that interests them. Education should be broad and varied at the beginning to help kids find what interests them. A few lucky ones will learn to be interested in most things and for them, most schooling will be easy.

Folks, I doubt anyone actually believes that just attending a gifted program will make everyone equally gifted.

The statement that you’ll get “more” gifted students if all the programs run that way is mostly just a clever way to observe that current efforts to identify which students are gifted, are probably missing some kids with untapped potential.

In addition there is plenty of evidence that more engaging pedagogy will get more out of students, even those of average potential. The biggest impediment to that is probably finding teachers who are capable of teaching that way consistently across the required range of subjects.

Yes. Thank you for phrasing my thoughts more clearly.

This isn't as obvious as you might think. I've had the opportunity to teach kids of a variety of ages. Something I found surprising is that even by primary kids show remarkably different aptitudes. And this is not some aberrant thing. These differences tend to just continue to grow year after year. This can making teaching remarkably frustrating because it leads to a stark polarization in the class room. You have some kids that do not have any interest in learning, others that browse their textbook for entertainment, and then a good chunk in the middle.

So how do you teach to a class like this? The current trendy solution for this is supposed to be 'differentiation'. [1] There's a lot of fancy research and terminology associated with it, but it's a very simple idea - approach topics in a way appropriate to the aptitude of the group whom is learning. It's an extreme burden on the teacher and there's scant evidence of it providing any benefit.

However, tracking [2] is another solution. Tracking is essentially dividing a single group of children based on aptitudes. And unlike differentiated instruction there is substantial evidence of this in both directions. By both directions I mean that above average aptitude students tend to overperform even more when also surrounded by other above average students. But there is also substantial evidence showing that these students start to underperform once placed back into educational environments with lower performing students. The main argument against tracking is are primarily related to equality of result instead of equality of opportunity. E.g. - aiming for everybody performing the same as a goal, rather than everybody performing to the max of their individual potential. That is, in my opinion, very literally a 'Brave New World' style dystopia - hamstring overperformers to try to bring everybody down to the same scale of performance.

And so tracking gets back to the question at hand. When you jam everybody together, 'gifted for everybody', it's not the case that you retain the same level of achievement with even more people able to express their aptitude. Instead you end up a situation where everybody starts getting pulled down by the lower performing individuals. In effect instead of the desired result of "magically seeing more gifted children" you may very well end up seeing fewer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_instruction

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29

It always seems to me that views on this nature vs. nurture topic are very clearly divided, between people who've ever taught other humans (and tend to believe that, while training is important, nature plays a strong role in determining peoples' abilities) and those who haven't, and believe all humans are blank slates and aptitude is all down to training.

(Of course, now I'll get a bunch of teachers commenting that they believe in nurture over nature, but c'est la vie.)

The real challenge of teaching is reaching everybody - not just the kids who want to learn, and are effectively teaching themselves with a little guidance.

And this goal is laudable when you're teaching basic literacy and numeracy. If you're trying to teach mathematics or professional software development then it's less practical and probably not even possible.

I'd be sad if in ten years time children aren't being taught via software that's pushing them exactly as much as they can be pushed, and adaptive to the way the child enjoys learning and modes of explanation that have proven effective for the child in the past.

There's (I believe) plenty of value in exposing children to other children for socialization, but I'm not sure this needs to be at the same time as they're learning, rather than via play and activities designed to promote interaction, rather than learning per-se.

About 10 years ago, I started to design a learning system like this. It was before I had heard of Khan Academy. The idea is like that, but on steroids. Imagine a wiki where every lesson is available as a lecture and in writing (and where possible, an interactive lab, either in app or in real life). Every topic forms a graph that is explorable via links to get proper scaffolding. See or hear a word or topic you don't remember or understand? Click and follow the rabbit hole. The system would provide different styles of lecture and reading that align with a given student's preference. Educators could upload new content and students could rate that content as to help the best content raise to the top for other students to explore. To advance up the tree of a subject, a student would have to pass quizzes and the system would identify the holes in the student's understanding and provide content to fill the hole.

Such a system could effectively flip teaching where teachers facilitate and help with questions while the software ensures the "best in class" content is provided and assessed.

I still think about building that from time to time, but life and work don't leave me with the time to start building that. 10 years ago, I got a little ways into the engine for it for an algebra course and that was it.

Of course software can play a bigger role, but don't underestimate the importance of contact with human teachers and colleagues of high expertise, as well as feeling valued by other humans instead of making a virtual skill-level go up

There are some pretty effective adaptive learning systems for elementary schools. Here is one I am familiar with, from The Netherlands, in 2800 schools, around 25% of the total:

* https://nl.snappet.org/

(Apologies that it is only in Dutch).

The adaptive software pushes each child optimally for their individual learning rate. Their teachers can monitor their progress at a very granular level and give individual attention in a targeted way. The overall progress of the class can be compared with all other classes across the country.

One thing about the "gifted program" I may have failed to mention, is that it's a free space with lots of different activities and variety of teachers to support them (and not only in STEM). That is what I would like to see replicated without pre-filtering. It's the opposite of "jam everybody together" (which I agree does not work). Aptitude is not craved in stone, aptitude can be shifted (for some, for the generally healthy kids) given the right ecosystem.

Tangent - if you haven't read Holt's "how children fail", it's a must-read (for teachers and parents alike).

There is „gifted“ children and then there are gifted children. To give you an example there are more than a million university students in Germany but only roughly 5000 are supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. You just won’t find enough students with 3 sigma deviation in a typical high school. What is more a typical teacher won’t be able to support them in any meaningful way because they quickly run out of things to teach them. Students like that are best supported individually by extracurricular activities and direct contact with PhD and Professors, as well as participation in competitions.)

I agree with your general point that normal education could be made much more interesting as well. Although it would partially defeat the purpose of education to not prepare students for the boredom and rigid schedule of ordinary work early on.

> I agree with your general point that normal education could be made much more interesting as well. Although it would partially defeat the purpose of education to not prepare students for the boredom and rigid schedule of ordinary work early on.

I think you're right about the need to support the specially gifted kids and that generally means treating them differently as you suggest. However I think there is scope for altering the current system to make it more interesting for the rest of the kids and possibly stir up/inspire/awaken whatever more limited "giftedness" they might have. If the aim is solely to prepare kids for the the boredom and rigidity of ordinary work I'd say we're not getting value for money. This is particularly so in places high percentage of people graduating with Bachelors or even Masters degrees.

There's no point in designing schools for "three sigma". Schools should be designed to push the median upwards. "Three sigmas" should be homeschooled, any sufficiently large system will only inhibit them.

"Three sigmas" and above aren't distributed only in the population of people capable of home schooling very bright children.

Funny thing though - home schooling so easily beats the institutional kind, you don't have to be very good at it to school very bright children.

Further, if the teacher at school with their class of 30 did nothing but tutor the students, each student would get 10 minutes (in a 5-hour school day). You as a parent can beat that the 1st 11 minutes of your home-school day. That leaves you hours of the day for moving ahead of the classroom.

>"Three sigmas" should be homeschooled, any sufficiently large system will only inhibit them.

Many (most) parents don't have the resources to do that. If we don't make adequate provisions for the exceptionally gifted, we're squandering a lot of valuable talent. Nobody would tolerate a child with an IQ of 55 being made to sit in a mainstream classroom, because it's obvious that they wouldn't get anything vaguely resembling an education; we should be equally outraged about a child with an IQ of 145 in that mainstream classroom.

You’ll have enough gifted students in any reasonably sized metro area to fill a special school. That’s what should be done, IMO.

Doesn't even have to be 3 sigma. Even in a "tiered" secondary school system like in Germany (students are split up to three different levels of school after elementary, about 50% in the highest tier), you maybe have a handful of 2 sigma students per regular year of around 100-150 students per school.

Getting bored and actually having worse grades for these students is a real thing. Especially in classes that need effort and not intellect. On the other hand, forcing intellectual challenging activities (like solving math puzzles, playing chess or building robots) isn't fun for a lot of people that do not like to challenge their brain for fun.

Personally my school grades skyrocketed from slightly above average to the 95% percentile in the last two school years, which was at the same time as I was allowed to participate in a junior student program and was spending one day per week at campus instead of school. I wasn't doing more for school, based on attendance actually less, I was just more inclined to listen and interested in learning, while I was being challenged by my university lectures (basic algorithms, data structures, databases and data modeling).

My son (9 years old) goes to a special school one day per week. Another day he's in the school's own gifted program. He has to do the regular 5 day school week in the remaining three days. This seems to be working quite well.

But it has to be done the right way.

"What may surprise you are the implications for teaching that follow. You'll learn why it's more useful to view the human species as bad at thinking rather than as cognitively gifted."

Quoted from Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham.

The whole point of "special education" is that it does things that don't scale to everyone (so it involves guessing who's going to get the most benefit from it, and these are the students you regard as "gifted"-- although in practice commitment and "grit" are a lot more important than supposed aptitude). Individualized teaching for each student, with a "mastery learning" model (i.e. no fixed time-based curriculum; you keep working near your current level in any given subfield until you achieve mastery at that level, then move on) is what gives the best results, but it can only be achieved practically via computer assistance.

You won't magically have more gifted children if you treat all children as such. Different children have different needs. Some learn better in a classroom like situation with a teacher presenting the material, others learn better when they figure stuff out by themselves. Some need lots of hand holding, others don't. Some have talents and interests in specific areas, others in other areas.

One school we visited has decided to try a different direction to present the material: normally they start with the basic concepts and build bottom-up to the big overview. For gifted kids, they want to try the opposite: start with the overview and zoom in on the basic concepts from there. I can see how that might work better for gifted kids, as they know what they're working towards and trying to figure out what it's made of, whereas other kids might get lost along the way.

I think the best education system is one that keeps an eye on individual children's needs and talents.

> Different children have different needs.

Which is what most "education for the gifted" programs boil down to: meeting individual needs.

Any teacher will tell you that not all children are gifted. Academic ability is normally distributed.

In Norway saying stuff like that is sadly extremely politically taboo, so not every teacher will say that.

It's the same in the U.S., for the most part. But they'll say it to you privately.

Academic ability is a small and not especially important portion of what humans can be gifted with.

I agree with you. But gifted has a particular and widely used meaning with respect to children's education and that's the sense of the word that I'm using.

"Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration and Nonacceleration" by Miraca U. M. Gross is an extremely illuminating long-term nationwide study of the exceptionally gifted and what differences result between accelerating or mainstreaming them.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf

I teach on a 'gifted programme' and I will read this article, but could you say what you think are the most important findings in the article? I'm always interested in what other people take away from literature.

That hit home fairly hard, though it can be hard to talk about since most people respond negatively to claims of ability. I was identified as a gifted child in primary school and was transferred school to a gifted school where I completed my primary education. I graduated dux (top of the school) and was years ahead in every subject.

My parents then chose to send me to the impoverished local high school, a school with median grades well below average. It was horrible, in year 7 at age 12 I would help my 17 year old brother with his homework when he struggled. I struggled to make proper bonds with other kids and I was horribly bored. It led to a bunch of psychological issues that I didn't get sorted out until my late 20's. I was incredibly interested in computers but I was pushed away from them (this is the early 2000's) as they were a waste of time and I should focus on skills so I can get a trade. I completed a trade in my early 20's and was depressed due to social isolation. I had nothing in common with my peers.

My parents did the best job they knew how to, I don't hold it against them. To them, a trade sets someone up for life. I'm in my early 30's now and I am finally starting to live a great life. I've been studying for a few years and I am preparing to transition to life as a software developer. I'm finally meeting people that I share interests with!

I don't care about missing out on career achievements I may have possibly had. I do regret I missed most of my teenage years and all of my 20's to major depression. They are supposed to be the best years of your life. My 30's are turning out fairly amazing though, every year I become happier and happier with how my life is shaping up. The best decision I ever made was seeking help from a proffesional to identify why I was so unhappy.

My story's not far off from yours. High school was a social struggle for me. I didn't start to get good social skills until I got jobs in my late teens...and I went through a series of jobs and trades before going to college at 25 for a C.S. degree. Now I've been in the business 7 years now, loving it still very much. But I do wish I had learned it when I was younger.

My impression is that most schools don't like accelerating kids, because they can end up way too young among much older class mates in a completely different phase of their lives. The Dougie Howser idea is terrible; Dougie is not a doctor, he's a child and should get the chance to live as one.

Better is challenging children in other areas: find things outside the regular school curriculum to challenge them with. Robotics, philosophy, science, politics, or other projects that are interesting and challenging but don't make them bored about next year's school curriculum.

My son did skip a grade despite his school not being a fan, and he did so at a point where next year's curriculum would have been mostly a repetition of the previous year's. That would have been a recipe for boredom, so it makes sense to skip that. But other than that, he just does a bit extra in less time and gets other interesting challenging stuff to keep him occupied.

When I was a kid, my schools did nothing of the sort, and I ended up bored and demotivated. By the time I went to university, I still hadn't learned to do homework, because I never needed to. Turns out being able to work is rather an important skill in university. I plan to make sure my son learns it on time. But not by skipping too many grades.

The phase of the life issue is touched upon in the link. It discusses how the accelerated kids are often happy because they have new peers who have similar interests. It's a difficult issue to solve. A 7-year-old who is 4 years ahead of his age group peers has little in common with his peer group but is very much younger than 11-year-olds.

The study in the link appears to indicate that the accelerated kids ended up happier and more fulfilled as adults. I think that's a very good argument for acceleration.

If the best years of somebody's life are their teens and twenties, then they didn't have a great life, imho. There are also all sorts of ways very smart people can go permanently off the rails, even when given every opportunity. With the speed at which computing in particular is developing, I doubt it matters that much that you jumped in a bit later - this just means you've learnt the latest stuff - and the rest of your life is ahead of you to enjoy - which is what really matters.

Having the rest of my life ahead of me is a great feeling. I'm still only 33 and I already see people my age that appear to have given up on living their best life. I feel what makes the 20's great for most is that they have the energy and motivation to live their life but they enter a rut once adulthood is fully under way.

Being an expert violinist takes about 4 hours of “purposeful practice” per day from 5 until 18. Really even this just means “good enough to get into the school that can then maybe get you into the Berlin Philharmonic”. This is also where Malcolm Gladwell got and then sort of over-simplified the 10,000 hour rule.

Of course, being a violinist takes that long because we have a well defined training platform that has been developed for 400 years. Being an expert cloud architect, a relatively new field, would take less time. Once someone gets into the Berlin Philharmonic and then plays for a few years, they are closer to 30,000 hours. Can’t imagine being an expert of cloud architecture couldn’t be done via 2 hours a day for 8 years, which is 6,000 hours. It barely existed 8 years ago!

> Being an expert cloud architect, a relatively new field, would take less time.

This is non-obvious. It seems at least as likely to me that there are no expert cloud architects yet.

Depends on how you would define expert. If you define it relative to one's peers (e.g. top 0.1% of practitioners), it makes sense.

You're both right. Being an expert (relative to other living humans) is easier, because the bar is lower. In 500 years I bet it'll take 15+ years of daily deliberate practice to be a world-class cloud architect too.

Of course, the bar will probably remain lower because there are far more jobs for cloud architects than there are for high-end professional concert violinists.

Your average violinist now is much more proficient than 100 years ago. The phenomenon is particularly evident in electric guitar where the average player now would have been considered a GOD in the 70s. The bar keeps getting higher, but our ability to teach is also getting better, especially thanks to youtube.

I don’t know, name me an average guitar player today who is better than Jimmy Page?

Jimmy was an innovator but also an extremely sloppy player. I can play his parts note for note better than he ever could. That's true for a LOT of people playing the guitar for fun at this point in time. Take a look at this to get an idea of what's "technically proficient" nowadays:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0CjV1QxtQ

these are almost all folks making youtube videos, not exactly rockstars (with a couple exceptions).

> Jimmy was an innovator but also an extremely sloppy player. I can play his parts note for note better than he ever could.

Hard to argue with that. Except to say that ultimately it's not always the virtuosity that captures people's affections. Some have postulated that soon we'll have music made by machines. Perfect pitch and tempo. But it would appear that the irregularities in human performances actually produce the music we all enjoy listening to.

Agreed, but here we're talking about how difficult it is to become "technically proficient" and my answer to that is "not very with current tools and education methods". The biggest obstacle for most people is drive and interest. If you spend the time, you will get good at playing.

Good point, if you're talking technical proficiency rather than pure artistry you may be right.

There are random dudes on youtube who are virtuoso guitar players. So many in fact that they will never get signed because it's not a differentiating or marketable factor.

I have noticed the 'Virtuoso Performers' are seldom creative to the extent their less talented brethren are. Many of my friends, who can play by ear or sight read, have never composed a single tune. As with any live art, the beauty is not in the perfection of rendering as much as the style of execution. Many can imitate, few can generate.

But we're talking about execution skills because that's the metric for a violinist, not composition. Hence the comparison.

‘Better’ is an extremely imprecise comparison here. Music is not objective, for one. If it were touch typing, we could measure wpm and accuracy. This is not the case with evaluating how ‘good’ guitar playing is.

Not average, but Davy Knowles cut his teeth doing Hendrix and Clapton covers in his garage. Now if only someone could convince him that guitar solos don’t have to be that long, he’d be a god.

I think that depends on what you take as a baseline for a non-expert. For the violinist you seem to take somebody who does not know how to play the violin at all.

For the cloud architect however, what do you use? A person who has never touched a computer? An average programmer/system architect? I'd argue that the time to cloud architecture expertise is far lower for the second than the first, and those things are older than 8 years.

Classical music is a somewhat silly zero-sum game and we should be cautious about using it as an analogy. The supply of classical musicians outstrips demand by several orders of magnitude, hence the requirement for exceptional levels of virtuosity - if you're not the best, you're unemployable. That is absolutely not the case for most professions.

Austen Allred has shown that you can turn willing adults into employable software developers in a matter of months. It is entirely plausible that if we abandon credentialism, many other professions could be taught in accelerated bootcamps at a fraction of the cost of a college degree.

Purposeful practice can take far less than 4 hours - that's the whole point. My youngest was interested in cello at 4, did some practice daily kind of, took years of lessons starting with fun exercises and games. He was 1st chair in state orchestra 3 out of 4 years, played as backup in local and state orchestras during Jr High and High School for money, and ultimately went to conservatory.

I credit 'purposeful practice' because he would work his way through a piece a phrase at a time in slow motion until he understood what it was trying to do. Once he reached the end of the score he'd not need it any more, he'd learned each phrase like a friend.

So did he have any gift? Was it all about practice? Well, ask his classmates in college and at conservatory, he was the best of them and they all did that and more.

I think its easy to see opportunity and money get someone into the elite class of performers, and say "See! Its not giftedness at all!" Yes there's a scale in that group (that outsiders may have a hard time distinguishing) that shows something is different among them.

I think what is often missed in mainstream discussions on "giftedness" is those gifted but with disabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional

These are students that are gifted, but due to their disabilities underperform. It isn't uncommon for them to not be identified as gifted, and thus never be put in gifted classes despite being very intelligent.

Imagine having someone 140+ IQ that is stuck in a standard classroom all 12-years of their pre-college education because they weren't ever identified. They typically are the students that enroll in special services and get exam accommodations in colleges.

At least colleges recognize these sort of students. For example Princeton has such services: https://ods.princeton.edu

I was in both disabled and gifted programs concurrently in elementary in the 80s and 90s. Public school, in California. Its not missed, so much as parents seem to pidgeonhole their kids faster than the schools do.

Same.

I remember having to be pulled out of my 'special needs' class to go to the auditorium for a small celebration recognizing the students who has scored highest on the standardized reading comprehension exams.

I won a pizza party for my english class because I had the highest score of any student in the entire middle school.

The two eighth grade honors classes had been competing to see which of them would get it.

They were pissed to loose it to the sixth grade remedial english class.

That was about the time I started to lose respect for the US school system.

The original big push for gifted education in the US was primarily a response to the Soviet Union’s scientific and technology advances after the 1950s. During these times, gifted programs were well-funded, and they provided smart but poor or unconnected kids vast opportunities that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

After these funding programs died down, the “gifted” label was usurped by upper middle class parents for obvious reasons. As far as I know, gifted programs today are much different than they were before the 90s. And, as Gifted has become a status label in upper middle class communities, one can see that politics has become more important than natural abilities. For example, in some large, well-funded school districts (like Fairfax Virginia), it’s common for the number of students in gifted education programs to be quite higher than statistically likely. In fact, parents and students compete for these positions using test prep systems, cheating, political maneuvering, and even fraud. So, in my mind, gifted education in the US is mostly a dead concept.

Gifted education is, I believe, an area that has rather too much funding compared to gifted mental health services. (Mental health services generally, of course, but often gifted children are functional long enough and just enough that debilitating conditions that have nothing to do with intelligence, but could end their life, are not identified in them.)

A lot of the gifted education policy discourse seems to treat gifted children as resources where the yield must be increased. But they are, like all children, humans and the primary problem of their condition is not "not achieving according to their ability", but indeed it is suffering. Policy should strive to address, first, suffering, and only then be concerned with achievement. (Again, as with all children. For example, this is what is done with education for children that don't have the intellectual abilities for regular schooling.) And I don't really wish to tell actual experiences here, but gifted children have plenty of suffering that is not simply due to being bored in school or not told they're smart often enough.

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