Gifted Testing Can Tell If Your Child is Gifted
Parents of precocious children everywhere will delight in telling you of the many gifts and talents life bestowed upon their very own little genius but many of these exceptional children never undergo a formalized gifted testing procedure to determine where, exactly, on the scale of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) these whiz kids land.
One of the reasons for this lack of testing is that gifted testing programs are not a regulated industry and the standards of giftedness vary from one entity to the next. This variation in standards makes it a little bit difficult to determine if one child who can call up instantly the day of the week Lincoln signed the Gettysburg Address is a genius or if his little sister, who can make color dance across a canvas when given a little paint and a brush or two, is the true family genius.
The term, giftedness, covers a lot of ground, with talents demonstrated across many fields of educational discipline when a comprehensive gifted testing regimen is undertaken. Some students are gifted with a very high level of understanding of the abstractions and formulas of mathematics but can't draw a straight line. Others have the vocabulary of a statesman but my not be very well versed at all with a musical instrument at hand.
For a gifted testing program to be an honest representation of the learning aptitude and academic skill level, the child needs to be tested in several areas. Most of the well-known IQ tests are written with the average person in mind and they offer little, if any, measure of intellect for the truly gifted. These tests are excellent ways to measure mathematical and vocabulary skills but they are not very useful at all when it's musical acumen or other creative forms of expression in which the child may be truly gifted.
When undergoing a gifted testing process, different areas of academic excellence will be identified, too. Gifted children who are especially talented with words would then be placed in learning environments designed to enhance the child's reading and writing skills. If the mechanical aspect of the world is identified as a child's area of giftedness, the child will most likely thrive in a learning environment where engineering, mechanics, and design are encouraged.
One way to tell, over time, if the precocious child is truly a gifted child, without undergoing an extensive series of gifted testing systems, is to see if the child remains sharp and quick as he or she matures. In due time, the precocious child usually falls into the same learning patterns as the majority of his or her peers. The truly gifted child continues to excel.