Many people have difficulty comprehending that a child can be gifted and also have learning disabilities. As a result, children with special needs that result from both their high abilities and their learning problems are rarely identified and are often poorly served.
Jim Delisle, Ph.D., is a Professor of Special Education at Kent State University, where he directs the undergraduate and graduate programs in gifted child education. Jim is a former classroom teacher, special education teacher, and teacher of the gifted and talented. In 1992, Jim took a sabbatical from university teaching to return to full time teaching. He taught a regular fourth grade class.
When I was ten, my family moved to California, where I had to attend a school with a new experimental program. All students were grouped by I.Q. for academic classes. After my I.Q. test placed me in the highest class of the grade above mine, I lived in fear that someone would finally find out what I had struggled all these years to hide.
In 1964, Dr. Frostig began promoting theories and findings that were truly “cutting edge” for her time. She proposed the belief that “perceptual development precedes conceptual development” and identified the strong correlation between learning and visual/perceptual abilities. Her theories and her assessment tools were used extensively for over a decade to identify and remediate children’s learning problems. Her pioneering work spawned hundreds of research projects … and some of those studies debunked and contradicted her early theories.
Thomas West builds a case for the scientific study of gifts and talents thought to be associated with dyslexia. Such research would supplement the current research on correcting deficits, by discovering ways to maximize talents to overcome these deficits.
This digest discusses the identification of students who are gifted, the difficulties in the identification process, appropriate identification practices, and procedures that can help with identification.
