[Oz-gifted] Update on L

[Ellen Hrebeniuk]

At 9:14 PM +1100 15/12/06, David Broadfoot wrote:

>  > According to the WSPPI-III he is in the top 0.4% of the
>>  population for language skills, and top 2% generally.  I suspect the
>>  informal comments of his teacher that she'd "never taught a child
>>  quite like him before" kicked things along a bit.
>
>"Top 2%" is not so rare: one in 50 students are in the top 2%. And given
>that "top 2%" means 98th percentile, then similar children would include the
>top 4% say, so that's one in 25 children. Given also that the WSPPI-III
>generally overestimates IQ, and that the tails of the real IQ distribution
>are fatter than the actual Normal distribution, the rarity is further
>reduced: perhaps to one in every 15 children.
>
>So there should be one similar in every class, which makes me wonder how
>long she been teaching.

She's possibly in her early 30s, so not straight out of Uni.  I 
honestly didn't think he was as unusual as she was making out, either 
(I'd put him where I'd put myself and where the test put him), but a 
couple of things have occurred to me:
a)  High intelligence is obscured somewhat when a student has a NESB 
-- and that's 90% of our school, so he would stand out more as a 
result
b)  L's WSPPI mathematical skills mark was a bit lower than I would 
have expected, so perhaps his overall score was lower than it should 
have been (the tester used a spatial subtest that was too boring!!)
c)  L's vocabulary, general knowledge, memory, and the speed with 
which he picks up new information are striking because he is so 
assertive with it.  Perhaps she registers the confidence more than 
the other attributes.

Does everyone here have similar experiences to me?  You think you 
know roughly what your child is like, and then they do something and 
you think, "Whew!  He IS bright!"  While you are recovering, he does 
something else and you wonder whether there is a village idiot in the 
family tree somewhere...
-- 
Ellen Hrebeniuk
Sydney, Australia

Being a librarian is how you change the world.
Nancy Pearl