High Cognitive Minds

…knowledge of a content domain may be one important determinant of whether that child demonstrates gifted performance on memory or reasoning problems that tap that knowledge. …these studies do not address the equally interesting question of how some children have managed to acquire rich and extensive knowledge… Conceptions of Giftedness, Robert Sternberg, Janet Davidson, eds.

Gifted research has been plagued by its emphasis on quantifiable data; the result is that important areas of giftedness remain a mystery to this day. The problem is that testing is entirely dependent on and limited to the questions you’re able to ask.  If you fail to ask the right questions, the tests aren’t going to reveal anything useful. And if you limit testing to just one subset of a population—in this case, school children, extrapolations to other subsets—adults—may be not merely wrong, but irrelevant. The statistics mindset prevents researchers from asking open-ended questions that could evoke a wider variety of responses.

One of the unsolved problems is the developmental process that takes place between childhood and adulthood. What leads to failure or development of talents? How do talents develop, particularly in domains with no formal teaching structure? The other problem, which isn’t so much a problem as an overlooked (or ignored) aspect of giftedness, is the different types of mental processing which are possible. Linda Silverman has made a stab at this with her distinction between visual-spatial and linear processing. But she also acknowledged, partly in response to her readers, that there are other, unexplored and poorly understood processes.

Why has educational psychology relied strictly on quantification? Why has it not gained insights from field research—observation and interviews—that has contributed so much to other fields? Why has it rarely inquired into the experience and understanding of the population that is the ultimate object of concern—accomplished adults?

The simple answer is that the very concept of giftedness is an invention of and a subset of the educational establishment. The original motivations for its development were the problems of who could benefit by education, and how they were to be educated. IQ testing brought into existence a specific group of students—the intellectually gifted—which presumably could profit by a more advanced curriculum.

Group testing is comparatively fast, easy, and cheap, and it could be justified, if that was necessary, by the assumption that young children—even gifted children—could offer little useful insight into the workings of their own minds. Giftedness research became a subset of educational psychology, essentially an industry, with little application to or relevance for adults.

So, questions such as “how some children have managed to acquire rich and extensive knowledge” remain unanswered because they are never asked. Authorities on giftedness can state, without any fear of criticism, ludicrous assumptions that are a result of never asking. Gifted adults lack the information they need to understand their minds and themselves because the necessary questions were never asked.