Quantifying Intelligence Has Gifted Students Falling Between The Cracks | Scott Barry Kaufman

So not a lot of people are probably familiar with the phrase "twice exceptional," and in the school system, it’s a diagnosis to describe kids who simultaneously have a specific learning disability, whether it’s a reading difficulty, dyslexia, ADHD, or any one of the learning disabilities you could be diagnosed for.

So you simultaneously have a specific learning disability and you’re intellectually gifted, intellectually or creatively gifted. We have this false dichotomy that we’ve set up in the school system between learning disabled and gifted, that if you’re in special education, for instance, it’s kind of hard for us to see how you could also be gifted, right? You could also be extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinarily creative.

And this label of twice exceptional was created to recognize that there are so many people who have been diagnosed with a learning disability, but that is not the totality of who they are. That does not define all who they are, both their strengths – all of us have strengths and weaknesses – and a lot of people who have learning disabilities it can mask their strengths. But their strengths are still there.

And we could still get at it in other ways, through projects, through just recognizing that they are not defined by their learning disability. There’s a lot of research, psychologists, and clinicians that are starting to figure out new ways of finding the intelligence in people that tend to fall by the wayside. And there are new methodologies and new techniques that we’re using to discover the giftedness that lies in lots of students.

There’s been an over-reliance on looking at the global IQ score to assess someone’s intelligence. So, like someone will take an IQ test and you average together their performance on the entire test. Well, it shows that students who are twice exceptional or students who have learning disabilities, that’s not the good reflection of their true intelligence, just averaging together their performance in a testing session.

Because their learning disability can mask and pull down certain areas, but they can still show extraordinarily high areas in other ways that gets lost when you average it all together. So there are new methodologies that we’re using to not just measure someone’s intelligence or creativity just through a testing session.

First of all, we’re using IQ tests to look at specific abilities and patterns of strengths and weaknesses. So not looking at that global or total IQ score. But we’re also going beyond the IQ test, and we’re getting teacher ratings. You know, the more you can triangulate lots of different information from lots of different sources, you get a much better reflection of someone’s intelligence and creativity.

Parent ratings – ask parents what’s a child like at home, you know? Is the child really curious? Is the child constantly asking questions? Ask teachers. Does the child seem like they’re bored with the material that you’re teaching? Are they ready for more intellectual challenges? Do they seem to question assumptions a lot?

A lot of the indicators of creativity – there are lots of other characteristics we can be on the lookout for, intellectual and creative giftedness that go beyond IQ-type competencies. Things like deep sensitivity, a deep caring about the world and about the suffering of others. It doesn’t even have to just be in the academic domain.

And I think we just need to keep our eyes open to as many potential indicators of intelligence and creativity that are all around us, so we can really make sure that we limit the amount of students that fall between the cracks.