Let me stick to my area of expertise and experience to give examples of what gifted might look like in science education. I know many who might consider the typical student in AP classes to be categorized as gifted. After all, students in AP classes are working perhaps one, two or three years ahead of their age-group. These students tend to be motivated, do their homework, listen in class, and have a decent amount of curiosity for the subject. These students are about as ideal for a teacher to work with as you can imagine. But in my ten years working with many hundreds of AP caliber students, there may be a handful who I would classify as ‘gifted’ in science. In my definition of gifted, grades are not part of it. Motivation is not necessarily part of it. Rather, insight and the ability to understand a subject at such a deep level as to make connections between seemingly unrelated topics is part of it. Ability and understanding at such high levels that make me wonder how the student came up with an idea or conclusion that the typical accelerated student would not be able to make fits into the definition. That rare student whose abilities can only be related to others through anecdotes rather than single words fits into the definition.

I think that Von has caught the essence of the phenomena of a truly gifted mind in this paragraph. On the sketchiest introduction to a subject, the gifted individual shows prodigious powers of extrapolation to quickly grasp the overarching principles of a field and ask logically incisive questions that test the field’s boundaries. This capacity for intuitively deep vertical cognition is often paired with impressive horizontal cognition, the vision to recognize similar patterns across even seemingly unrelated domains. The character of these insights tend to be “sudden leaps” or ” eureka moments” rather than methodical problem solving as we tend to see from bright students.

One example that may sum it up happened a number of years back. After introducing the concept of electromagnetic induction in class, a student who is truly gifted immediately came to me with a comment. This student rarely appeared to ever pay attention in class, because he would be scribbling things on his paper, or have the ‘day dream’ look on his face most of the time. But after knowing him only a few days I knew he was doing something else. He paid attention the first few minutes of class to get the topic, but then took it to new levels on a daily basis in his own mind. Concepts were understood immediately, as soon as he saw where I was headed and what the topic at hand was related to. His day dreaming was normally him deriving in his head or on paper things I was going to do for the class over a week’s worth of time; he knew where it was headed because he intuitively understood at a deep level where it should go. This is hard to put into words, which is why ‘giftedness’ is so difficult to define.

It’s hard to quantify which is why it is hard to define. While these rare students all have high IQ scores this kind of divergent thinking is not always something that can be produced on command or in reference to a standardized test format. It is a thought process that appears to me to be ” triggered” to a certain extent by new data being integrated rather than consciously developed by pure reason. On the flip side, there are plenty of nominally” gifted” people who lack this imaginative or creative capacity to generate or recognize these kind of insights; instead they often master existing bodies of knowledge or conventional skill-sets to a very high degree.

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