Diagnosis of giftedness: concept, methods and results

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Diagnosis of giftedness is a long process that can be monitored by competent persons: parents, family doctors, therapists, social workers. Family psychologists, teachers and educators of school and preschool institutions are also involved in identifying such children. Methods for diagnosing giftedness of a person are selected individually. They depend on the creative success of the child, his ability to perform mathematical actions and behavior in society. However, the talents of little geniuses have nothing to do with their behavior, just as mental abilities have nothing to do with completing difficult tasks or solving the questions posed.

Methods for identifying special abilities in a child

The most innocuous and effective way to identify special abilities in children is observation, which is not complete without setting up an experiment. This should not scare parents, becausethe process is connected with the gaming theme, conducting classes with a specific bias. The object of study is a baby - it can be a baby, a schoolboy or a child visiting a garden. A gifted person at any age expresses himself differently than "ordinary" children.

Analysis and experimental technique of observation

Getting a holistic characterization is indispensable in this matter. It helps to establish the degree of ability to behave in society, interact with other children:

1. Longitudinal research is a borrowed English word for long-term action. It is noteworthy that all observations occur in the natural environment, and not when the baby is asked to do something for a candy or encouragement of a different nature. This method allows you to objectively accept things and situations.
2. Individual longitudinal is a collective characteristic, which is obtained from information for specified periods. If in the first case we are talking about many years of experience and observation, then in the second it is enough to choose a few weeks a year to observe the child. It turns out a picture in the "section": before and after observation for a specific period.

The second diagnostic method can be compared to teaching people. For example, you went to a driving school, and did not perform very well on the exam, despite the fact that you drive quite well in the natural environment. Here we are talking about giftedness in terms of academic performance "grasping" information and applying knowledge in practice. In difficultpsychological conditions (exam) abilities are blocked due to overwhelming emotions of fear.

Diagnosis why needed

Diagnosis of giftedness is not the end goal. This is an intermediate point, after which a line is set for the child: these are opportunities in communicating with peers, the ability to absorb new knowledge. If the baby is very smart, he is checked for the presence of dyssynchrony in the development of the brain, since it is believed that some mental abilities are the result of developmental disabilities.

Nonverbal exploration

Diagnosis of the giftedness of younger students is carried out by means of non-verbal communication techniques, when conversations are still tiring and are not able to reveal the child's disposition and trust in adults. An integrated approach is important here:

• Watch how a child behaves in a team game.
• Watch his behavior during psychological training.
• Take into account the expert assessment of the child given by parents and caregivers.
• Conduct trial lessons for special programs.
• Create technically complex models: drawing, the technical structure of machines, writing poetry, etc.

Also, attention should be paid to participation in olympiads, intellectual games, conferences, sports competitions, festivals. This is not a method of diagnosing giftedness, but helps to identify some features in the brain.

Conducting psychodiagnostic studies

To reduce the chance of error, the criteria should include positive and negative points. The values of each indicator will indicate the degree of that side of giftedness, which manifests itself to a greater extent.

1. Psychodiagnostic methods and diagnostics of giftedness cannot indicate the presence of abilities if the criteria are entirely positive.
2. It is also impossible to talk about the lack of giftedness, if the negative character of the criterion is traced everywhere.

High or low values are not proof of a child's ability or lack of any specific skills. That is why it is important to competently understand the issues of personal growth and development.

What influences psychometric data

There are a number of factors to consider when assessing a child's abilities. This is:

• Degree of creativity.
• Innate abilities, such as the ability to draw beautifully.
• Cognitive position of the child (desire to learn).
• Specific intensity of thought process.

In psychodiagnostic practice, too high indicators may indicate neuroticism, a violation of the selectivity of thought, a desire to achieve more for the sake of quantity, not quality. This is caused by psychological protection, when in the family the child is forced, not motivated to study.

General principles for diagnosing creativity in children

Diagnosiscreative giftedness is relative, as the baby is observed according to the degree of involvement in creative thinking. Thus, there are several types of assessments:

• Productivity index is the sum of the number of answers to the number of tasks.
• Degree of originality - the sum of the indices of originality of individual answers in relation to their total number.
• The uniqueness of answers is their number in relation to the total number of answers.

In the first case, we are talking about the collection of data in relation to the questions asked. The last two methods show and display some parallel between "special" and general answers.

Sampling of creative abilities according to the methods of the scientific school of D. Gilford and Torrance

John Gilford identified a pattern when he tried to distinguish between several types of memory and types of mental operations: convergence and divergence.

1. Diagnosis of giftedness begins with convergence, when the brain is updated. For example, when solving a problem, you need to find one solution. This is the same as the identity of the solution on an IQ test.
2. Divergent thinking is diagnosable, but not quickly. Thinking goes in different directions: answer variation, solution options, jumps, multiple correct answers, multiple outcomes.

The latter gives rise to unusualness, which is equated with originality. This is one of the directions in the diagnosis of gifted children. Creativity is judged bythe last type of thinking. Therefore, the mental abilities tested by IQ tests cannot be applied to identifying creativity, to assessing creative abilities, since a child with convergent thinking will quickly find a single correct solution, and a child with divergent thinking will be prone to diversity, which initially requires more time.

Creativity setting options

This indicator is a certain trait of a person that allows him to move away from stereotypes and rules. Sometimes such personalities are called indigo children. The degree of giftedness will never be associated with the country of residence, innate talents, DNA chromosomes and other biological and physical characteristics.

Methods of diagnosing giftedness reveal attitudes:

• Verbal - verbal thinking, the ability to speak talentedly, produce speech smoothly, master oratory.
• Non-verbal - pictorial creative thinking, which shows how talented a person is "inside" his world.

This division is justified by intelligence factors. There is figurative and verbal - what we can imagine, but are not able to express in words. "Not an artist" - cannot literally describe something until he verbally describes the problem statement. The video below shows what to highlight when it comes to the term "gifted kid".

Scope of testing

In our time, people are used to thinking in such a way that every decision is madequickly, it was uniform and correct. Each implies a previous process in which the person has already chosen associations, used patterns and phrases from stereotypes. It is unreasonable to measure the creativity of such a person, since her ability to think against the rules has been lost.

There are no multiple solutions for office workers. The client needs to be given a single correct one that will be satisfactory for him. This needs to be done at high speed. Only a day later, an office worker will be able to come up with the best option. What's wrong with the parameters of creativity? Why do they "sleep" when they should help a person in stressful situations?

Creativity parameters relative to the distance from reality

Gilford singled out only 6 variants of different creative thinking in children. Despite his young age, he was not mistaken, since testing in an experimental form was then carried out again after a dozen years. We put the results of the check in the table:

Abilities	Junior grades	Middle classes	High school students
Problem detection and labeling	Truth is born in a dispute. The children easily coped with the task when they began to contradict each other.	Teens could not cooperate. Everyone wanted to pass off their answer as the correct one, not wanting to listen to others.	They gave several answers, assuming that there are correct ones, indicating the causes of the problem, which was required of the students. The group of subjects coped with the task.
Generation of ideas or solutions to a problem	Children gave a wide variety of answers, each of which was to a small extent suitable for the task. Due to age, responses were considered optimal.	The middle classes offered few options, but everyone agreed on the most "best" answer, not wanting to think any more.	In high school, students provided multiple answers that were judged to be correct.
Flexibility and originality	The simplest answers were indeed correct, but in unusual situations, children answered as if the problem was the main thing in their lives.	In adolescence, the subconscious mind weakens, especially the instinct of self-preservation. However, schoolchildren were able to come up with an original approach to the sample of answers, without giving a single correct one.	Diagnosis of children's giftedness among high school students was successful: the generation of ideas was high, the production of different answers also took place.

During the testing process, it was also suggested to respond to the situation adequately when it was necessary to cope with the irritant. It consisted in the impossibility of solving the problem in a simple way (it was necessary to look for other options, apply divergent thinking).

D. Gilford noted that with age, a person loses the ability to distinguish the simple from the cunning, the complex from the unsolvable. Children who mistook tasks for play did well on the test. Adults, imposing complexity on themselves according to the patterntests, they didn’t manage at all, but sometimes they tried to “get out” of an awkward and unusual situation (to act not quickly, but multifaceted).

Test "ARP" for establishing divergent thinking

Diagnosis of a student's giftedness is revealed by conducting a special test, which was developed by Guilford. The essence lies in the use of words and the image of the subject. The children were asked to do the following:

• Write words that contain the letter "K" or "O".
• Write ways to use the selected item.
• Draw objects using specific geometric shapes of different sizes.

Each test has subtests that are used to diagnose the development of giftedness in the senior and middle grades. Torrance pointed out that the most logical and ideal test should measure the process of all stages. However, in fact, he could not project the idea in any way, so he added a figurative-sound evaluation parameter to the main test of Guilford.

The reliability of Torrance's tests is high: from 0.7 to 0.9 points on a scale of 1 point. He asked the students to associate sounds with animals that irritate humans. Guilford assessed the originality of the answers. Together, science has come up with an optimal solution for how to test and find a creative student who can be considered gifted.

Methods are divided into different levels of complexity: for kids they use only non-verbal testing model, for adults - both options. DiagnosticsThe giftedness of preschoolers helps to establish the child's abilities in early childhood, and prepare the high school student for exams at the university and the choice of a profession.