Spot the brainiac

Greg Callaghan 

From: The Australian

June 18, 2011

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SNAP quiz: who's the best judge of whether a child is gifted or not: their parents or their teachers?

Answer: their parents – by a huge margin. Parents are between 66 per cent and 100 per cent accurate in spotting giftedness in their child, while for teachers, the figure hovers at a humiliating 4-10 per cent, as borne out by a raft of recent surveys. “Parents see their kids performing a range of tasks in a variety of contexts, while teachers would be lucky to get one lecture on gifted children during their entire training,” says Dr Louise Porter, a respected child psychologist and education expert based in Queensland.

Porter’s research has helped demolish many of the myths about gifted children, most notably that parents rosily overestimate their offspring’s intelligence. While the exact meaning of the term “gifted child” has been a source of heated debate, most experts now agree that they total no more than 3-5 per cent of the child population. Gifted kids have high IQs, ace their peers on other standardised tests, and are usually high achievers in most fields (maths, language, science, music) because of the sheer processing speed of their brains, a product of their genetic inheritance. It’s been found that parents with a tertiary education have a one in 10 chance of having a gifted child, while for those who never finished high school (because of a lack of academic ability, not economic hardship), the figure drops to about one in 10,000.

And it seems the 21st century’s digital world is giving birth to a new type of gifted child. “This is the first generation of children learning by means other than listening,” notes Porter. “A mother of two from Hong Kong recently came to me; she knew her young daughter was gifted but was worried about her son, who she suspected might be autistic. It turned out both children had an IQ of 140 – the boy was visually gifted, the girl language gifted.” The next masters of the universe may well be the visual learners, Porter says: engineers, architects, film directors, sculptors.

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