We spoke with Carmen Sanz Chacón, who is gifted, a psychologist specializing in giftedness and high abilities, President of the El Mundo del Superdotado Foundation, and Director of El Mundo del Superdotado.
What is intellectual giftedness? How is a gifted child identified?
Giftedness is usually spoken of when a person has an intellectual level that is more than two standard deviations above the population average, which approximately corresponds to a 98th percentile and an intelligence quotient of 130 or higher.
Giftedness is identified by measuring intelligence with the appropriate tools and with a professional with sufficient experience in that field. That is why we always recommend that the assessment be carried out by psychologists who are experts in giftedness and high abilities, such as those who make up the team at El Mundo del Superdotado.
However, in our country there is confusion between this concept of giftedness and the concept of high abilities. The concept of high abilities used in the field of education in Spain has several interpretations, depending on the autonomous communities, because there is no consensus at the national level. Thus, in some autonomous communities an intelligence quotient equal to or greater than 130 is also required, but in other autonomous communities it is sufficient to demonstrate a performance above the 75th percentile in different areas, or to stand out significantly in one or more areas.
Sometimes it is also required that the student, in addition to being gifted, be very creative and highly motivated, which is often incompatible with the lack of special education.
Most gifted children who do not receive special education are bored and unmotivated in regular classes.
Do gifted people possess any particular characteristic that makes it easier for parents or teachers to identify them?
In our office we have been assessing gifted children, adolescents and adults for more than fifteen years, and not as a general rule, but very frequently we find the following characteristics that are part of what we have been disseminating as the decades of giftedness:
Gifted people very often:
- Learn to read very early and have great facility with numbers
- Like to be with older children
- Are in their own world, absorbed in their things and are quite absent-minded
- Are very sensitive
- Think fast, learn fast and have very good memory
- Are very demanding of themselves and others
- Are mentally hyperactive, and have many interests at the same time
- Are children with low self-esteem, withdrawn and/or with behavioral problems, and with little resistance to frustration
- Tend to question rules and authority
- Are imaginative, ask a lot of questions and have a special sense of humor.
On the other hand, gifted people are generally NOT:
- Children with high performance, on the contrary school failure is frequent
- Motivated children, if they do not receive special education they are usually bored and unmotivated
- Children with Attention Deficit Disorder and do not need medication. They just get bored.
- Hyperactive children, and do not need medication. They need to do things that interest them.
- Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. They rebel because no one understands them.
- Children with Avoidance Disorder. They avoid others because they reject them.
- Sick children. Giftedness is not a disease, it is a gift.
- Problem children, if they cause problems it is because they need help.
- Children who do not need anything, have Special Educational Needs according to the Law
- Impossible children, they need love, attention and support to be happy, like everyone else.
When in doubt, we always recommend requesting an assessment with a Psychologist Specialist in Giftedness and High Abilities.
Are there mechanisms in schools for their identification? And to act correctly with these students?
Currently, most teachers do not have the necessary training for their identification, and even when they suspect a case and refer it to the corresponding guidance team, the workload of these teams is so enormous that they cannot dedicate the necessary time to identify them. In fact, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Education, most gifted children are unidentified in our schools because less than 40,000 students have been identified and by pure statistics, 2% of the population, we have almost 170,000 gifted students in our classrooms.
To act correctly with these students the first thing to do would be to identify them, and for this teachers have to have training. For that reason, from our El Mundo del Superdotado Foundation we have been training teachers from all over Spain and other countries for years.
Once identified, their educational needs must be studied and educational programs must be made more flexible so that they can develop their full potential, both by advancing them in course and by enriching the contents themselves.
How should a manager or teacher act before a student who has high abilities?
Once identified, the most recommended educational intervention is course acceleration. A gifted child with eight years has a mental age of more than eleven years and, therefore, educational needs closer to ten or eleven years than to eight years. Also their affective and emotional development, their interests, their way of expressing themselves have more in common with children of ten or eleven years than with children of eight, so they will integrate much better always with children at least two years older than him.
Therefore, our recommendation is early identification, in the Children’s School if possible, early entry into Primary School, with five years, or, at least, a first course acceleration between First and Third of Primary School, a second course acceleration between Fourth and Sixth of Primary School, and a third course acceleration, depending on the evolution of the child and their abilities, during Secondary Education.
In our country, the legislation allows up to three course accelerations, but in other countries even early entry into university is allowed, which we believe that, for exceptional cases, should also be contemplated, because a child with an intelligence quotient of 130, or gifted, is not the same as a child with an intelligence quotient of 145 or higher, or extremely gifted.
On the other hand, it is essential that gifted children, even if they are in a higher grade, can access curricular enrichment in the areas in which they stand out the most. In the same way that when a child stands out in Music, they receive special education at the Conservatory, it would be ideal for a child who stands out in Physics or Mathematics, for example, to be able to access special classes in those areas, either in the Open Classroom of High Abilities of the school, or by attending extracurricular activities. This option is especially interesting so that they can share interests with other children with high abilities, so we encourage the directors of educational centers to create an Open Classroom of High Abilities in each school to enrich the educational options of these children.
To conclude, could you, Carmen, mention a success story in an educational center?
When teachers are trained in giftedness and high abilities, when the director of the center is sensitized, and when gifted children are given the education they need, success is guaranteed and also the results in excellence of the school.
If this were done at the national level, our results in PISA would be much better, both in excellence and in a lower degree of school failure. Currently there are many centers concerned and that are beginning to develop even open classrooms of high abilities and I, as a gifted person, as President of the El Mundo del Superdotado Foundation, and as Director of El Mundo del Superdotado, personally encourage them to continue in that line because the development of our country also depends on their success.
The social development of this century will depend on new technologies, and gifted students are the most capable of innovating in science, mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, everything that leads us to the S.T.E.M. We are not only gambling the education of gifted children, we are also gambling the results in PISA, but most importantly, the development of our country during the next 20 years.
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