My 4 Yr Old Son's FSIQ is 131, Now What?

[Anonymous]

Another example: a kid who really LIKES to read is going to spend a lot of time reading, maybe even 10,000 hours by the time she takes the CTY test in middle school. And is it really surprising that this kid gets 700s or higher on the SAT vocabulary and writing tests that the CTY administers to middle schoolers?

So, does this mean this kid is "smarter" than other kids? Or instead that this kid (a) has a particular passion, and (b) the focus/time/family resources to pursue this passion?

I don't know the answer.

[Anonymous]

Just to clarify, and beat back some of the snarkiness: I believe gifted means over 120. Yes, as somebody pointed out, in any test like this there could be a deviation of 5 points or so. But this means the true score could be 126 to 136.

Oh really! giftedness in a 4-year-old is now a number? What about a WPSSI 119? Near giftedness in a 4-year-old!

This is a joke. What happened to plain ole common sense. Common sense beats out gifted sense everytime.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Just to clarify, and beat back some of the snarkiness: I believe gifted means over 120. Yes, as somebody pointed out, in any test like this there could be a deviation of 5 points or so. But this means the true score could be 126 to 136.

Oh really! giftedness in a 4-year-old is now a number? What about a WPSSI 119? Near giftedness in a 4-year-old!

This is a joke. What happened to plain ole common sense. Common sense beats out gifted sense everytime.

If we let DCUM parents tell us if they "think" their kid is gifted -- or if schools let parents do this on applications -- we might as well sign all our kids up for Mensa right now!

If you had any "plain ole common sense" you'd also realize that if you have a tool, however imperfect, why not use it? And if you had any "plain ole common sense" you'd realize that people here are using these numbers as one indication, not as black-and-white proof of anything.

[Anonymous]

Does it matter?

In a way, I think that's where the whole IQ debate is going. Basically, everybody has seriously untapped mental capacity. The challenge is to get people to use theirs. It's hard to tell whether people who are smart start out with more capacity, use more of what they have, develop additional capacity through use (and neuroscientists seem pretty inclined at this point to believe that's at least part of the equation) or some combination of all of the above. By the time we get to the point where we think we can measure intelligence, environment has already played a major role in shaping it.

For me, two striking things have come out of the research on gifted kids/gifted education. One is that IQ doesn't predict achievement in a straightforward way -- it may help you pick out the best students, but it doesn't help you identify the true geniuses at an early stage. And the second is that the same types of education/curriculum recommended for gifted kids also benefit "non-gifted" kids. Bottom line, from my POV: IQ doesn't measure what we're interested in (how you put your brain to work/what you can/will accomplish with it) and conventional schooling in the US isn't maximizing anyone's potential for learning.

I'm the product of a different era and of public schools, so I've BTDT with gifted education/emphasis on IQ. It's interesting for me to watch my DC who seems every bit as smart as I am/was (maybe more -- she's growing up in an even more enriched environment!) and whose progressive private school experience takes all the labelling and tracking issues off the table. I honestly think that she (and her peers) are getting a better education than I did as a result.

[Anonymous]

Oops, 13:10 was meant as a response to 12:49's question re smarter vs. more passionate vs. more resources/focus.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:9:54 keeps posting, but others continue to challenge her. If I could take a stab at the underlying assumptions, it's a continuation of the age-old "nature vs. nurture" debate.

If I could characterize 9:54's assumptions very generally, it seems to be that IQ is mostly innate. That kid doing Algebra in 4th grade is there because her brain just works more efficiently. Her mind is like a steel trap, and although the other kids in the class need to hear the multiplication tables over and over, she is bored stiff by this.

Others point to the 10,000 hours research. That kid is doing Algebra in 4th grade because she started doing it in K and has since put in 10,000 or so hours. This is because of certain personal characteristics besides just intelligence. These personal characteristics could include (a) an innate love of math, and (b) the persistence, drive, and focus to pursue this particular passion for 10,000 hours.

Please correct me if you think I've misrepresented your assumptions.

Interesting issues. First, doing Algebra in 4th grade may just signal that the kid loves math and wants to spend his or free time doing -- not that the kid is a genius.

Second, are the qualities of "persistence" and "focus" that lead a kid to do 10,000 hours of math somehow associated with intelligence? And should we say that a kid who puts the same persistence into hitting baseballs (see the Genius book) is somehow "less intelligent"?

I don't have the answers. I think this is a developing field.

Also the child doing algebra in 4th grade may be doing it because the school she went to introduced basic algebra ideas in kindergarden.

[Anonymous]

I think Everyday Math has them all doing "algebra" in 4th grade -- that's what the number machine (I think that's what they called them) problems are about. Similarly, I think you can teach any Kindergartner to divide -- it's actually something they've very interested in (what's a fair share) and there are a variety of different ways you can teach it (counting off (or dealing out) are a couple of very simple approaches).

In all this, it's important to remember how much curriculum is just convention. It's not always the case that you have to be a certain age to understand certain things; it can be that that's the age certain things are typically taught. Are you "advanced" if you learn them earlier? Not necessarily.

One thing that cracked me up about the 10,000 hours stuff was that I used to joke that my indefatigable preschooler wasn't a genius; DC was just 1/3 older than her peers if you measured life in waking hours. Sometimes you see lists of traits typical of highly and/or profoundly gifted kids that include "needs less sleep." Makes me wonder if it's a chicken and egg thing. e.g. maybe it's not that wakefulness is a sign/symptom of giftedness so much as that it creates the opportunity to learn substantially more in the same number of days, months, years, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oops, 13:10 was meant as a response to 12:49's question re smarter vs. more passionate vs. more resources/focus.

I'm 11:56 and 12:49 and I phrased my point as a question because I wanted to highlight the differences between your approach and the other poster's approach. Also I didn't want to bring down upon myself a shower of links from a single school of thought, and then feel (or not feel) a duty to read them all.

But basically, I agree with you that there's a lot of untapped mental capacity for any kid. I guess where I may differ is that you seem a little farther along the spectrum than I am, in thinking that mental capacity may be infinitely elastic. I may get there, but haven't yet seen enough research to get me there. Here are some questions I'm waiting for a body of research on:

(1) Can persistence raise measured IQ in an area (math, verbal ability or sports) from 100 all the way to 150? Or are there innate limits for some people, so that 10,000 hours of math/reading may raise measured IQ from 100 to 120, but no higher?
(2) How closely does persistence correlate with measured intelligence, or with some other definition of intelligence?
(3) Are the "average" kids the ones who just haven't found a passion for the very specific subjects of math or reading, to the point where they spend all their time on these specific subjects? Especially if the the IQ tests require kids to rotate those 3-D shapes, and the CTY tests for math and verbal skills. So that an 9-year-old with a passion for birds or baseball isn't going to wow the testers?

But yes, in the end you're right that "it doesn't matter" because each kid needs an enriched education that meets them where they are at this moment. Too bad all we need is infinite money....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

One thing that cracked me up about the 10,000 hours stuff was that I used to joke that my indefatigable preschooler wasn't a genius; DC was just 1/3 older than her peers if you measured life in waking hours. Sometimes you see lists of traits typical of highly and/or profoundly gifted kids that include "needs less sleep." Makes me wonder if it's a chicken and egg thing. e.g. maybe it's not that wakefulness is a sign/symptom of giftedness so much as that it creates the opportunity to learn substantially more in the same number of days, months, years, etc.

There's a lot of research showing that the best student athletes were born in December or January. Why? Because they are the oldest in their classes. These
apparently has a feed-back effect. These kids start out being the best in the class, they get lots of encouragement from the coaches, they get lots of playing time, and this makes them even better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess where I may differ is that you seem a little farther along the spectrum than I am, in thinking that mental capacity may be infinitely elastic.

I'm probably more agnostic on that question than it might seem in this context. Basically, I think that the binding constraint right now is cultural. Until we get beyond that (which, given your point re resources, we're probably not likely to do any time soon), I don't think we'll see what role our biological limits play. If claims like we only use 10% of our brain are anywhere near true, we've got a long way to go. And if recent work on genetics that suggests that what genes can do is, in part, a function of environment, we may be talking about moving frontiers rather than brick walls.

So I guess I may be more culturally pessimistic and/or more biologically optimistic than most... I do believe that many more people could be what we now consider gifted. Whether in that world they'd still be left in the dust by the top fraction of percent of the population (and how that fraction would be defined/identified), I don't know. And, really, I probably don't care. There will always be exceptional people and the truly exceptional will always be rare enough to be irreducible to a formula. And they aren't the people you build the world around -- it'd be a disservice to everybody else and besides they'll probably build their own worlds (or want to), regardless.

[Anonymous]

Of course persistence improves performance. IQ is a measure of innate ability. If you have more innate ability, you won't need to persist as long as somebody else to achieve at the same level. This why school, which is all about persistence at tasks that very bright kids don't need persist at to master, is such a disaster for some.

[Anonymous]

We don't know if IQ is a measure of innate ability -- as Terman discovered, it not infrequently misses the folks who turn out to be considered geniuses. And, of course, at this point IQ is only measured after experience has clearly already shaped minds/abilities -- we don't have ways of measuring it in the womb or at birth or at by looking at DNA. We also know that IQ test results at some ages have a limited ability to predict IQ test results at other ages (which shouldn't be the case if they accurately assess something innate and static).

IQ isn't a thing -- it's a test result. Whether IQ tests actually measure what we want to measure (and, frankly, whether we even agree what should be measured) and what form that thing exists in are tricky questions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:131 is not out of the ordinary at the local private schools. I would not be concerned.

Ditto.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We don't know if IQ is a measure of innate ability -- as Terman discovered, it not infrequently misses the folks who turn out to be considered geniuses. And, of course, at this point IQ is only measured after experience has clearly already shaped minds/abilities -- we don't have ways of measuring it in the womb or at birth or at by looking at DNA. We also know that IQ test results at some ages have a limited ability to predict IQ test results at other ages (which shouldn't be the case if they accurately assess something innate and static).

IQ isn't a thing -- it's a test result. Whether IQ tests actually measure what we want to measure (and, frankly, whether we even agree what should be measured) and what form that thing exists in are tricky questions.

IQ testing is a measure of innate ability. That doesn't mean that that the current tests don't have limitations and won't fail to identify certain children. There are certain tests that are better suited for certain individuals and a good tester will know this.

There are certain windows of time in a child's life that experts agree will result in the most accurate results.

IQ scores are not designed to predict future success in school or life. Things like persistense, drive, environment play equal or bigger roles. That is why it is important to give all children, included advanced children an appropriate school environment so that they can meet their potential. IQ testing, even with it's limitations is the best way to identify these kids for services. Teacher recommendations have proven to be pretty flawed for identification as teachers are more likely to recognize high achieving students and will likely miss the advanced learners from at risk environments, ESOL, and minority groups.

[Anonymous]

Wow, you really don't get it. We hypothesize the existence of innate/static intellectual ability or capacity that's distributed throughout the population along a bell shaped curve. We then create a test and tweak it until we get it to produce a bell-shaped curve of results when given to a sufficiently large and randomized population. That doesn't validate our initial hypothesis. Arguably, IQ is an artifact of the test rather than something the test measures.