How can teachers identify gifted students

I asked:. My mini aths coach said that if I wanted to go faster I had to press back with my big toes. They must have pretty big toes to go so quick. He continued with possibilities about how they might breathe and use energy. She had not considered the possibility he might be gifted.

Mike was solving year 12 calculus problems when he was six. He has never attended regular school but was home-schooled by his parents, who were not interested in maths. He learned about quadratic and cubic polynomials from the Khan Academy. I asked him if it was possible to draw polynomials of x to the power of 7 or 8. He did this without hesitation, noting he had never been taught to do this. People learn by converting information to knowledge. They may then elaborate, restructure or reorganise it in various ways.

Giftedness is the capacity to learn in more advanced ways. First, these students learn faster. In a given period they learn more than their regular learning peers. They form a more elaborate and differentiated knowledge of a topic.

This helps them interpret more information at a time. Second, these students are more likely to draw conclusions from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements. They stimulate parts of their knowledge that were not mentioned in the information presented to them and add these inferences to their understanding. Read more: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

It involves combining knowledge from the two sources into an interpretation that has the characteristics of an intuitive theory about the information. This is supported by a range of affective and social factors , including high self-efficacy and intrinsic goal setting, motivation and will-power. Their theories extend the teaching. Parts of the theory may be incorrect.

When given the opportunity to reflect on or field-test them, the student can validate their new knowledge, modify it or reject it. Marcus and Mike from the earlier anecdotes engaged in these processes. A gifted learning profile manifests in multiple ways. It may be a written narrative, a painting, a conversation or football match. Some students exposed to part of a text infer its topic and subsequent ideas — their intuitive theory about it.

These are the verbally gifted students. In the classroom they infer the direction of the teaching and give the impression of being ahead of it. This is what Mike did when he extended his knowledge beyond what the information taught him. Most of the tasks used in the Child Genius program assessed this. The children used what they knew about spelling patterns to spell unfamiliar words and to unscramble complex anagrams.

The federal definition of a gifted student was first published in There is key terminology in this definition to which educators should pay close attention.

When identifying gifted and talented students, educators should simply ask themselves what is this student able to naturally accomplish with little to no help from a teacher. This allows educators to see the difference between a high achieving student and a gifted student. Gifted students are not only high achievers, but they are also naturally able to add a global context to their learning.

For example, the high achieving student operates like a skilled student with expertise in a subject area. The gifted student functions as an expert by demonstrating the ability to integrate expertise into multiple subjects. They are naturally able to think abstractly and conceptually without much modelling from their teachers.

Because gifted students are able to achieve at high levels without much prompting from their teachers, it can be perceived that they do not need support from their teachers in the classroom. Gifted students need just as much support with their learning in the classroom as any other group. Without this support these students face the risk of showing little academic growth and even becoming underachievers.

This can lead to disengagement from the classroom and even students dropping out of high school or choosing not to attend college. Many times gifted students have very unique and specialized interests. Find out what these interests are and develop lessons and activities for them around these interests. These students will gladly push themselves to deeper depths of rigor because they are learning about something that interests them.

Too often educators create lessons that address content standards only at the grade level. Gifted students are often able to understand content standards above grade level. Educators should intentionally design assignments and activities for gifted students in the regular classroom that allow them the opportunity to access content at higher levels.

The second characteristic of gifted students, their understanding of the subject, can be a bit more difficult to identify. While teachers may often have a "feel" for these students or think they know who they are, a few methods can help make their identification process more scientific.

One way is to begin keeping notes when students exhibit a deeper knowledge of a subject, either through answers on a worksheet or test or through answering questions in class. Another way is to give students an assignment that requires them to use higher-order thinking about a subject. Students who are able to do so could be gifted. The final characteristic of gifted students is their level and types of interests. Gifted students will often exhibit a higher level of interest about a subject and are willing to ask more and better questions.

They are also typically more interested in educational matters than their peers.