10 ms·

Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education (2011) [pdf]

74 points by lainon 8y ago

Bucephalus355 8y ago
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!
- stephencanon 8y 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.
  - gamegoblin 8y ago
    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.
  - taneq 8y ago
    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.
    - luckydata 8y ago
      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.
      - joejerryronnie 8y ago
        I don’t know, name me an average guitar player today who is better than Jimmy Page?
        luckydata 8y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0CjV1QxtQ these are almost all folks making youtube videos, not exactly rockstars (with a couple exceptions).
        chosenbreed37 8y ago
        > 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.
        luckydata 8y ago
        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.
- kaybe 8y ago
  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.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  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.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  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.
droithomme 8y ago
"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 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf
- nimonian 8y ago
  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.
- MRD85 8y ago
  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.
avip 8y ago
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.
- roel_v 8y ago
  Of course, because here in Lake Wobegone, everybody is above average!
  - amatic 8y ago
    Not necessarily absurd, though. Every kid can be above average in something.
    - ralusek 8y ago
      Why?
      - lucozade 8y ago
        Because you've got kids who have more below average marks than everyone else maybe?
    - wenc 8y ago
      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.
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        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.
tyler- 8y ago
I think what is often missed in mainstream discussions on "giftedness" is those gifted but with disabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional 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 https://ods.princeton.edu
- justtopost 8y ago
  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.
  - Regolitch 8y ago
    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.
afpx 8y ago
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.
arandr0x 8y ago
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.

74 points by lainon 8y ago

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!

stephencanon 8y 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.
- gamegoblin 8y ago
  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.
- taneq 8y ago
  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.
  - luckydata 8y ago
    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.
    - joejerryronnie 8y ago
      I don’t know, name me an average guitar player today who is better than Jimmy Page?
      - luckydata 8y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0CjV1QxtQ these are almost all folks making youtube videos, not exactly rockstars (with a couple exceptions).
        chosenbreed37 8y ago
        > 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.
        luckydata 8y ago
        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.
kaybe 8y ago
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.
jdietrich 8y ago
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.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
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.

droithomme 8y ago

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

nimonian 8y ago
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.
MRD85 8y ago
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.

avip 8y ago

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.

roel_v 8y ago
Of course, because here in Lake Wobegone, everybody is above average!
- amatic 8y ago
  Not necessarily absurd, though. Every kid can be above average in something.
  - ralusek 8y ago
    Why?
    - lucozade 8y ago
      Because you've got kids who have more below average marks than everyone else maybe?
  - wenc 8y ago
    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.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      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.

tyler- 8y ago

I think what is often missed in mainstream discussions on "giftedness" is those gifted but with disabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional 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 https://ods.princeton.edu

justtopost 8y ago
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.
- Regolitch 8y ago
  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.

afpx 8y ago

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.

arandr0x 8y ago

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.