Thanks for your sharing your discussion with Colleen, Deborah. I really appreciated you mentioning the problem of fixating on scores. Like the experience of your profoundly gifted son, IMO, someone can really be profoundly gifted (level five), but for whatever reason (e.g., unclear directions, emotionally distracted, unmotivated to take the test, lack of sleep, anxiety, hunger, etc.) he or she may miss the Mensa or Triple Nine Society cutoffs (130 and 146 respectively, assuming a standard deviation of 15 and mean of 100) on intelligence tests. There are some incredible people (levels 4 and 5) in your longitudinal study whose deviation IQs would miss the TNS cutoff and would be gate kept from joining and interacting with other exceptionally and profoundly gifted people in this group: IMO, they clearly belong in any group of intellectual outliers and would have unique and enriching insights to contribute.
That said, IMO, it is interesting to consider high IQ society and gifted program cutoffs from the perspective of true scores. For example, a person in a high IQ society qualified by obtaining a particular result among many possible hypothetical results that go into computing a true score. However, it is also possible that, on a different day with a different mindset, he or she could have obtained one of the hypothetical results that did not meet the cutoff (something similar can be observed going the other way: a person who missed the cutoff one day, could obtain a qualifying result on a different day). Hence, this is another reason why one should not fixate on scores, and why qualitative means for examining a person’s giftedness can be very meaningful, helpful, and invaluable tools.
Eager to listen! We are a couple months into our gifted home Ed journey, though we've always been on team "learning happens everywhere and anywhere" but as we've developed understanding of gifted neurodivergences and they're entering middle school, I didn't want them to have to struggle in the system and risk the pathology paradigms of public schooling... Knowing our own selves and how we "work" is tantamount to serving our communities better, but I'll say more once I've listened!
Fantastic listen and added a couple more names to my resource pool, thank you!
It was refreshing to hear an expansive mindset regarding schooling, however we come by it. In our world, I like to remind the kids that "school" is a very new concept as it's currently iterated. I'm still pretty new to shedding my identity as a high school dropout, and surely many things may have been "easier" for me had I taken a conventional route, but it put me ahead of the curve (or as my Z quips "free falling downhill" and I counter with well "we can look at it as exhilarating or lonely and have freedom to dream about what and we land might look like!" We can look at it as lonely quicksand or as diving into a deep, beautiful lagoon or anything in between!)... Anyhow, less emphasis on "schooling" had been my jam before I took the plunge into home ed and it's serving us all so very well right now!
Thanks for being a true elder as well as expert in this field, I'm so glad I found you! (Thanks to Chris Wells and the team at the Dabrowski Center/positive disintegration podcast for bringing you to the front of my new map on this journey!)
Thanks for your sharing your discussion with Colleen, Deborah. I really appreciated you mentioning the problem of fixating on scores. Like the experience of your profoundly gifted son, IMO, someone can really be profoundly gifted (level five), but for whatever reason (e.g., unclear directions, emotionally distracted, unmotivated to take the test, lack of sleep, anxiety, hunger, etc.) he or she may miss the Mensa or Triple Nine Society cutoffs (130 and 146 respectively, assuming a standard deviation of 15 and mean of 100) on intelligence tests. There are some incredible people (levels 4 and 5) in your longitudinal study whose deviation IQs would miss the TNS cutoff and would be gate kept from joining and interacting with other exceptionally and profoundly gifted people in this group: IMO, they clearly belong in any group of intellectual outliers and would have unique and enriching insights to contribute.
That said, IMO, it is interesting to consider high IQ society and gifted program cutoffs from the perspective of true scores. For example, a person in a high IQ society qualified by obtaining a particular result among many possible hypothetical results that go into computing a true score. However, it is also possible that, on a different day with a different mindset, he or she could have obtained one of the hypothetical results that did not meet the cutoff (something similar can be observed going the other way: a person who missed the cutoff one day, could obtain a qualifying result on a different day). Hence, this is another reason why one should not fixate on scores, and why qualitative means for examining a person’s giftedness can be very meaningful, helpful, and invaluable tools.
I truly enjoy and appreciate your insights, Alex. Thank you for all your wonderful contributions to the discussion!
Eager to listen! We are a couple months into our gifted home Ed journey, though we've always been on team "learning happens everywhere and anywhere" but as we've developed understanding of gifted neurodivergences and they're entering middle school, I didn't want them to have to struggle in the system and risk the pathology paradigms of public schooling... Knowing our own selves and how we "work" is tantamount to serving our communities better, but I'll say more once I've listened!
Thank you, Deb!
I think you'll see that Colleen Kessler and I are on the same page as you, Bee. Enjoy!
Fantastic listen and added a couple more names to my resource pool, thank you!
It was refreshing to hear an expansive mindset regarding schooling, however we come by it. In our world, I like to remind the kids that "school" is a very new concept as it's currently iterated. I'm still pretty new to shedding my identity as a high school dropout, and surely many things may have been "easier" for me had I taken a conventional route, but it put me ahead of the curve (or as my Z quips "free falling downhill" and I counter with well "we can look at it as exhilarating or lonely and have freedom to dream about what and we land might look like!" We can look at it as lonely quicksand or as diving into a deep, beautiful lagoon or anything in between!)... Anyhow, less emphasis on "schooling" had been my jam before I took the plunge into home ed and it's serving us all so very well right now!
Thanks for being a true elder as well as expert in this field, I'm so glad I found you! (Thanks to Chris Wells and the team at the Dabrowski Center/positive disintegration podcast for bringing you to the front of my new map on this journey!)