gifted/ld

Sharon,

Read the following article and see if it gives you a clearer picture of GT/LD kids and the problems they encounter.

Gifted and Learning Disabled: Twice Exceptional Students
Dawn Beckley

http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~nrcgt/news/spring98/sprng984.html

Helen

GT/LD generally refers to those who have academic aptitude in the superior range (for example a verbal or performance IQ of 130 or above) but who also have a specific learning disability. These children often go unrecognized for either their LD or their giftedness because their strengths mask their disabilities and their disabilities mask their strengths. You need not be an “Einstein” to fall within the GT/LD category, although I recently read that one in six highly gifted children also has a learning disability.
Andrea

I wonder if that includes cognitive aptitude. For example, academically, my son doesn’t appear or score in the gifted range, but cognitively he has some very high scores (thinking ability, auditory processing, etc….).

Academically, within the classroom, my son could never qualify for a “gifted” curriculum. But I’ve sometimes wondered if in a very limited sense he’s slightly gifted.

In order to have an average IQ whereby one score is severly depressed you would need to have a score that was extremely elevated. These kids can be extremely uneven and have gifts in specific areas and deficits in others. In a word there is nothing “average” about these kids.

Giftedness may not always be picked up in the overall IQ. Some hold the IQ score as the rigid defintion but those who have more knowledge of the twice exceptional use different diagnostic criteria.

Some programs that address deficits specificly claim that the IQ can be raised 20 points or in some cases more. This makes sense when you consider that if you remove the deficit you should not diminish the gifts. I have seen a few people on here report of increased IQs after intervention.

I think left unchecked the deficits can bring down the overall IQ, over time. I have seen this in reports of children who did not develop literacy skills and had their IQs drop.

I will try to give a explanation that is not technical. Although my kid has the #’s of a gifted LD kid this is what he is like.

My son is 14 years old and verbally very bright. He is in the debate club, jr. statesman club and watches the History chanell for fun. He analyzes everything. You can talk to him and it is clear that he is not a “normal” 14 year old, he has adult thoughts and discussions. That being said, he reads 4-5 times slower then the “average” kid. Can’t spell “was” despite years of assistance and if he were to write a sentance for you by hand it would look as though a 8 year old wrote it. I am not exagerating. These differences between strenghts and weakness ARE severe.

Hope that helps.
Leah

And my son who sounds alot like Leah’s also knows it. He’s 8, and he knows that his strengths are unusually strong, and his weaknesses are unusually weak.

What’s interesting, and confusing, is how you define giftedness. My son took the stanford binet at the age of 4 to see if he’d qualify for alocal gifted public preK program which required a score of 90, but some other gifted programs required 97. He got a 94. There were no red flags …

4 years later, after experiencing failure to read at school, he took the WISC and the CAS (cognitive assessment system - another IQ test noone is familiar with). His WISC scores don’t look gifted. He looks instead like he has superior intellectual potential and an LD. But on the CAS there are 4 cluster scores. He scores 97, 99.6, 10 and 12 (percentiles).

So I think whether he’s really “gifted” depends somewhat on the instrument used , and the score you think means gifted.

I agree with all that has been said. The key to identifying a gt/ld student is discovering what that student’s academic or cognitive APTITUDE (not PERFORMANCE) is. IQ scores may not tell the true picture because LD can depress scores. My son spent four years in a gt/ld classroom and as a result I met many gt/ld children. Some are visual spatial learners, some are gifted mathemeticians, some are outstanding readers, some can’t read at all. The unifying factor is their superior reasoning skills and, often, their sophisticated verbal expression.

I don’t think they do do that. Ld/gifted mean the child is truly gifted in one area or areas. It might be that the child would test out gifted in many areas if the LD didn’t impact on those areas but no matter. When the gifted label is applied, it is thought to mean an area of true giftedness - not just ‘freedom from disability’.

There is debate on Einstein but I continue to see him as having been gifted/ld. He excelled in some areas but did poorly in others. He struggled to talk when young and to spell when older - two classic signs of underlying learning difference.

Einstein lived in my town. Word is that he would walk out of the house and forget to put on shoes.

He was apparently a total space cadet.

One of the school psych’s told me that most gifted kids are, “a mess.”

There are some kids who do well in school because of good attention etc. These kids may never set the world on fire. They may peek in grammer school and fall apart when real outside the box thinking is required. Creativity is required in many high level professions but there is little need for it in the lower grades.

So, I see the need to just keep my son’s self esteem intact until the day comes when his true gifts are appreciated. It is sad that some kids have their spirit destroyed before they get a chance to really pursue their gifts.

…