The Gifted: Clinical Challenges for Child Psychiatry

Serving the gifted: A national survey of school psychologists

“…It is not surprising, then, that the great majority of school psychologists reported little or no training in gifted screening or assessment during their graduate studies. Gifted students occasionally have disabilities that mask their gifts, and gifted students who are not proficient in English are often not identified as gifted (Pfeiffer, 2009). One third of our sample indicated that they received no training in gifted assessment, characteristics of the gifted, theories of giftedness, socioemotional needs of the gifted, curriculum considerations, or understanding the twice-exceptional.…”

“…Teachers can easily overlook indications of giftedness and focus exclusively on a student's learning delays, such as difficulties with handwriting, phonetic awareness, reading fluency, spelling, and mathematical calculations. In other instances, teachers can minimize or even ignore a gifted student's learning problem, assuming that the child's impressive cognitive abilities will trump a learning disability (Pfeiffer, 2009). Unfortunately, this is not always the case; many gifted students with learning disabilities go unidentified and untreated, with negative outcomes (Lovett & Lewandowski, 2006;Volker, Lopata, & Cook-Cottone, 2006).…”

“…Four other high-need and neglected areas in which school psychologists can take a leadership role include: consulting with teachers to develop instructional strategies and differentiated curriculum for gifted students in their classroom; championing multidimensional and scientifically defensible gifted identification practices, including appropriate tests for typically underrepresented groups of gifted students; offering workshops to teachers on how to modify general education classroom practices to adapt for intellectually gifted students; and consulting with parents of gifted students on a range of questions and issues, such as child management, academic enrichment, parenting, career planning, and educational decision making (e.g., acceleration, early college entrance, underachievement, low motivation, dual enrollment, home schooling, summer programs). There is a tremendous, unmet need in the schools for local experts on the psychology of the high-ability student (Pfeiffer, 2001(Pfeiffer, , 2009. Graduate programs and continuing education workshops can introduce school psychologists to knowledge and skills specific to serving high-ability students.…”

“…Unfortunately, students who are gifted present unique educational and psychosocial needs that often go unmet in the schools (Neihart, Reis, Robinson, & Moon, 2002;Pfeiffer, 2001Pfeiffer, , 2008Ross, 1993;Tomlinson, 1999;VanTassel-Baska, 2009). A significant number of students with learning problems who are also gifted are misdiagnosed or missed-diagnosed because their gifts mask, obscure, or complicate identification of their disability (Pfeiffer, 2009;Webb et al, 2005). In addition, many students from underrepresented minority groups, rural communities, and families in which English is not the primary language spoken in the home go unrecognized as gifted because of limitations with traditional approaches to measures of giftedness (Ceci & Williams, 1997;Ford & Whiting, 2008;Frisby & Braden, 1999;Sternberg, 2004;Worrell, 2009).…”

Talent as an unintentional agent

“…Talent or giftedness may rather be defined as the causes of outcomes. Moreover, according to van Rossum and Pfeiffer, there is no consensus in regard to the validity of the distinction between talents and gifted individuals both in theory and in practice (Pfeiffer, 2009;Rossum, 2009, p. 758).…”