Advanced Placement for talent development

Since we are in the middle of AP testing for this year, it is timely that Hoagies’ Gifted has just posted Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska’s keynote speech from August 2000: The Role of Advanced Placement in Talent Development.

In this speech to teachers of Advanced Placement courses, Dr. VanTassel-Baska argues that AP courses are critical for gifted students, as a means of differentiating instruction for them. She said things like

In the late 1970′s gifted students reported AP to be the most beneficial program taken during their high school years. This perception has not changed appreciably over the intervening decades (Kolitch & Brody, 1992).

Of course, since she gave the talk in 2000, there has been a big push to get more students into AP courses, so that many of the courses are no longer all that suited for gifted kids.  Even at that time, she pointed out

One issue that Advanced Placement teachers need to be aware of is the different levels of aptitude for a particular AP course. The range of ability in AP classes is typically very great. Even if all students were identified as gifted, the range would be as broad as in heterogeneous classes. Such differences in aptitude level require more attention to addressing individual needs. Because AP course work probes depth of understanding, it tends to reveal greater disparity in student learning. Level of aptitude may predict how much material students can handle well, how capable they are to work independently, and how strong they are conceptually with the material. Use of various forms of flexible grouping for in-class work may be an antidote to this problem. Organizing sections of AP by ability levels may also be useful in subjects where enrollments are sufficiently high.

The trend to lower the barrier to entry for AP courses over the last decade has made this problem worse. The teaching strategies that are most effective for the bottom half of a current AP course may be quite unsuitable for the kids in the top quarter, who don’t need many routine practice problems, but rather a smaller number of more challenging questions that stretch their minds.

While AP courses may still be the best option available to most gifted high school students, many need to look elsewhere for teaching at their level. Community college courses sometimes provide this, though that varies enormously, as many community college courses are intended to remediate inadequate high school preparation for college, and may be taught in an even less suitable way for gifted students than AP courses.

Sometimes sufficient challenge can be found by skipping prereqs—the review built into the beginning of most courses can serve as a fast-paced introduction to the material for a gifted student.  This is essentially what we did by teaching my son a course that covers AP Physics C: Mechanics, with no previous physics courses.  He had picked up almost everything from a conceptual physics course by reading various popular books about physics, and his math was strong enough that he did not need the crutch of algebra-based physics, but could jump right into calculus-based physics.  (Actually, I think that calculus-based physics is somewhat easier, if you have the math, since there are fewer formulas to memorize—a lot can be trivially rederived from the definitions of force as the derivative of momentum with respect to time and of potential energy with respect to displacement, for example.)

I think that one problem with AP classes as a primary means of teaching gifted high school students is an extension of a common problem in gifted education in lower grades: what the students need is work that is more complex and sophisticated, not more work.  Too many AP courses pile on drudgery, in the mistaken belief that this makes them more like college courses. (See my analysis in How many AP courses are too many?)  This overload of marginally useful work prevents them from taking on more independent, non-curricular projects (like science fair, debate, theater, or internships) from which they would actually learn more.

I’m not saying that I think that AP courses are a bad idea, nor that gifted students should avoid them.  There are times when an AP course is precisely what a gifted student needs and other times when it is the best available choice. Taking AP courses is one of many ways for gifted students to learn, just not always the best way.

CS Summer Camp

On the mailing lists for parents of gifted kids, people often ask about the best computer summer camps.  Even more often, they ask for people’s experiences with nationally advertised programs.  So far, the general consensus has been that none of the computer camps work particularly well for gifted kids:  the pace is too slow, the teachers don’t know enough, and most of the kids in the camp aren’t passionate enough about computers to be good peers.

That was my son’s experience a few years ago when he tried an idTech camp, and it seems to be a common experience for gifted kids in almost all the summer computer camps, no matter who is providing them.

There are several summer math camps that don’t have this problem, so it is not just a matter of gifted kids being hard to please. Rather, I think it is a deliberate attempt to reach the “average” kid that makes the usual computing summer camp useless for gifted kids.

Mark Guzdial, in his blog post The Best CS Summer Camp Paper: Sustainable, Effective, and Replicable, talks about a paper by his wife, Barbara Ericson, Sustainable and Effective Computing Summer Camps.  The paper talks about programs at Georgia Tech that are self-supporting and not very expensive (after a whole lot of initial expenses covered by grants). Since this was a paper for SIGCSE (special interest group in computer science education), the paper talks about the measurable outcomes as well as how the camp was funded and organized.

There is good evidence that their summer camp programs are doing what they set out to do:

improve access to computing, increase students’ confidence in their ability to succeed in computing, increase students’ knowledge of computing concepts, and change students’ attitudes about computing.

The programs themselves sound a lot like all the other summer camps: fun for average or above average kids, but offering nothing for the passionate gifted kids who want something more than playing with Scratch or App Inventor.

Where are the computer equivalents of Awesome Math Camp  (which I blogged about a couple of year ago) or RSI (Research Science Institute)?  I’ve not found them.

Tamara Fisher’s “Walking a Tightrope”

Tamara Fisher, in her Unwrapping the Gifted blog, had a nice post about the balancing act needed as a teacher and program coordinator for gifted education in a small district: Walking a Tightrope.

I was interested to see that most of her challenges were not in dealing with gifted kids, but in dealing with ungifted teachers and parents.

She ends with the question “Which fine lines do you walk for the gifted youth in your life?”

Most of her challenges do not resonate with me, as I have no need to educate administrators (a hopeless task—those who have a chance of understanding don’t need educating), correct teachers, choose who gets gifted services, and all the other challenges that come from working within a school system that barely admits that gifted students have a right to exist.

Some of her questions do resonate with me as a home-schooling parent of a gifted child though:

How do I teach my students about what it means to be gifted without also unintentionally “giving them the big head”?

We have been using advice based on Carol Dweck‘s work (though we’ve not read Mindset yet, just shorter summary articles) of praising effortful accomplishment rather than traits that may be innate, and encouraging a “growth” mindset.  We want to foster pride in accomplishment, rather than pride in ability.  We’ve not been as successful at getting him to try things he believes he is not good at  as I’d like, but he probably has a better balanced view of his capabilities than I had at his age.

How do I stay ahead of dozens of kids who are ahead of me?

I only have to stay ahead of one student, and then not in all subjects. Some things have required my brushing up on old skills (like integration by parts and trigonometric identities), some have required acquiring new skills (like calculus-based physics). It helps that in some of the subjects he is interested in (like linguistics), my wife is knowledgeable enough that I don’t have to be ahead of him—I just have to learn enough to follow the conversation.  There are a few topics he knows better than either of us (like HTML and Javascript), but he is capable of teaching himself when he reaches his limits in those areas.

How do I think outside the box to get their needs met within the box that is our current reality of School?

I finally gave up on this one, which is why we’re home schooling now.  We managed to squeeze all we could out of 10 years of public and private schools, but the “box that is our current reality of School” finally became too awkward a fit.  Getting his educational needs met is still a difficult problem, but removing the “within the box” constraints has simplified some things (by removing the need for accreditation and removing slow-paced pre-requisites, for example), while making others more complicated (like the 2-hour roundtrip to the community college for Spanish classes, and the difficulty of finding or making lab equipment at home).

How do I help my students to navigate the fine lines that they walk, too, because of being gifted?

I’m not sure which “fine lines” she is referring to here.  There are many challenges associated with being a gifted teen, but the challenges are not greater than those facing non-gifted teens.  Different perhaps, but a lot of the worst pressures on teens are from schools with unhealthy cultures, so simply by home-schooling and allowing him to form his own associations based on shared interests (with kids in his theater classes, for example) rather than the forced proximity of schools reduces the number of “fine lines” he has to walk.

How do I help the parents of my students find that balance between letting their children “run” and not pushing them?

This is indeed a challenge, though I am not opposed to a gentle push now and again, to get him over a barrier (see above about getting him to try things he believes he is not good at) or to help him manage his time more productively.  Like his mother and me, he generally has more things to do than he has time for, and suffers occasionally from being overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done. Deadlines help prioritize the tasks and a gentle push to get him started is sometimes needed.  (I need someone to help me that way sometimes.)

Contacting home-schooling parents and parents of gifted kids

On Mark Guzdial’s Computing Ed blog, I commented

The ‘gifted children’ mailing lists are full of parents looking for computer science courses (on-line, textbook, summer camp, … ) for their kids. So are the home school mailing lists. There is a large under-served market—the best known player is iD tech camps, and their material tends to be rather light on content and unsatisfying to the brighter students.

Someone asked me where to find these lists and how to market to them.  I responded there, but I thought that the information was useful enough to put it here on my blog, and not just buried in a comment elsewhere.

The best lists I’ve found for parents of gifted kids are the “tag” lists at http://www.tagfam.org/ but marketing is prohibited on the lists.

The best clearinghouse for info about gifted students is Hoagies (and they will take advertising, I think, though most of their material is non-commercial). They have a pretty good list of on-line communities. Listing resources at Hoagies is a great way to reach a lot of parents and teachers of gifted kids, as it is the most commonly referred to resource site. (So far as I know, listing stuff at Hoagies is free—they are interested in being as inclusive as possible of resources.)  The resource lists cover a lot of different subjects (books, toys, games, courses, support groups, training materials for educators, conferences, jokes, schools, psychologists, testing, … ).

One of the three home-school lists I’m on is tagmax (one of the tagfam.org lists)—the other two are small local lists and not appropriate to point to here. There is a lot of discussion of curricula and on-line courses, and endorsements of particular classes are ok (as long as they are real endorsements by people on the list whose kids have taken the courses—advertisers are quickly banned).

I have found quite a few useful pointers on the mailing lists, but traffic on some of the lists is overwhelming.  I generally divert the list traffic to separate files, and only look at the messages once or twice a day.  Some of the lists have many readers—I often get a big spike in readership on this blog when I mention one of my posts there.  (I try to do that sparingly, with only the posts that are really of wide interest to the readership of the mailing lists.)

Another mailing list that I’ve found useful, but overwhelming, is the ap-bio mailing list for teachers of AP Bio classes (mentioned on College Board’s teacher’s corner page).  I’m not an AP bio teacher, but I’m working to get bioinformatics into AP bio classes—a group of grad students and I tested one lesson last week at Pacific Collegiate with 3 AP bio classes and will test another in about 2 weeks.  We’ll be releasing them as soon as we get feedback and clean up any rough spots.

I’ve just joined the AP Physics teachers mailing list, since I find myself needing advice about low-cost lab setups for the home-schooled physics classes fairly often (and I’d like to share some of the labs I’ve posted in this blog).

Related articles

• How many AP courses are too many? (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)
• Debate about how schools treat gifted students (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)
• The “Bright Child” vs. the “Gifted Learner”: What’s the Difference? (my.psychologytoday.com)

What is giftedness?

Over the past two weeks, I’ve read two articles talking about gifted children more from the standpoint of defining what giftedness is than what needs to be done for them educationally:

• From the New York Times: Sorry, Strivers – Talent Matters.
• From Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12(1):3–54, Jan 2011 Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education. doi:10.1177/1529100611418056

In the NYTimes article, David Z. Hambrick  and Elizabeth J. Meinz argued that the “10,000 hours of practice” documented by K. Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers were not a sufficient recipe for excellence. In their own research “working memory capacity, a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities” One study on sight-reading music by piano players (a similar, but not identical task to the evaluation of musicians in Ericsson’s work), they found that amount of practice had a large effect, but that there was also a “medium-size effect” from working memory.  Their claim appears to be that working memory is largely independent of practice time.

Furthermore the “smart enough” meme that Gladwell pushes (that IQ over 120 does not correlate with better performance in the real world) does not hold up to careful study.  They cite work by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow that ‘compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile—the profoundly gifted—were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal, or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.’

While Hambrick and Meinz seem to be arguing for the value of innate intelligence as contributing to talent beyond what practice alone can provide, the paper in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by Rena F. Subotnik, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, and Frank C. Worrell seems to be arguing for different definitions of giftedness based on age:

Giftedness is the manifestation of performance or production that is clearly at the upper end of the distribution in a talent domain even relative to that of other high-functioning individuals in that domain. Further, giftedness can be viewed as developmental, in that in the beginning stages, potential is the key variable; in later stages, achievement is the measure of giftedness; and in fully developed talents, eminence is the basis on which this label is granted. Psychosocial variables play an essential role in the manifestation of giftedness at every developmental stage. Both cognitive and psycho-social variables are malleable and need to be deliberately cultivated.

“Eminence” seems to me to be a very weird criterion for giftedness in adults, as it usually means “fame or recognized superiority.” Fame and recognition rely more on luck than on talent. Is someone not gifted if they choose to do good work in obscurity? Of course, the authors do not use the standard definition of  “eminence”, but they “characterize [it] as contributing in a transcendent way to making societal life better and more beautiful,”  whatever that is supposed to mean.

I don’t think of myself as “eminent”, but I’m certainly in the upper 1.6% of my age group for educational attainment (according to the 2010 US census there are about 300,000 people 55–59 years old with a doctoral or professional degree, out of a total of 19,172,000 [http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/2010/Table1-01.csv]). I’m one of 164,843 faculty at a PhD-granting university in the US [http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/], which puts me in the top 0.12% academically of 30–64-year-olds.   Does this make me “gifted” by their definition?  Probably not, since I’ll never have a Nobel prize (and probably not even a lesser prize). I’ve contributed to society—a couple of patents, dozens of journal papers (some of them well cited), a number of students taught, … —but not in a “transcendent way”.

For the authors, the whole point of gifted education is to produce eminent adults (according to their rather nebulous definition). The authors begin with this production of eminence as a premise, not subject to discussion and certainly not open to scientific testing: “outstanding achievement or eminence—with its attendant benefits to society and to the gifted individual—ought to be the chief goal of gifted education.”  This premise seems to argue for a pressure-cooker approach to teaching the gifted—that it is better to burn out dozens of gifted kids if one eminent individual results, rather than getting them all to be productive and happy, but not getting any superstars.

At least they recognize that they are outliers in their insistence that eminence is the only worthy end goal: “Disagreements in the field emerge about what the underlying causes of gifted performance are, where the line between gifted performance and performance that is not so labeled should be drawn, what the best way to turn childhood potential into outstanding accomplishments in adulthood should be, and whether the development of eminence should even be a goal of gifted education.” [italics added]

The paper by Subotnik et al. is very long (51 pages) and full of inflated diction. Who uses “psychological science” rather than “psychology” in normal writing—someone with an inferiority complex about being a psychologist, perhaps?—this is further illustrated in their choice of examples: “it is important to distinguish between those whose talent is expressed by way of (a) creative performance, as exemplified by athletes, musicians, actors, and dancers, and (b) creative producers, such as playwrights, choreographers, historians, biologists, and psychological scientists.” [italics added]

They start by defining giftedness somewhat differently from  everyone else.  They describe (with what looks to me like fairly accurate summaries) five previous definitions: “high IQ; emotional fragility; creative-productive giftedness; talent development in various domains; unequal opportunities; and practice, practice, practice”, then introduce their own idiosyncratic definition:

Our focus here is on giftedness as a developmental process that is domain specific and malleable. Although the path to outstanding performance may begin with demonstrated potential, giftedness must be developed and sustained by way of training and interventions in domain-specific skills, the acquisition of the psychological and social skills needed to pursue difficult new paths, and the individual’s conscious decision to engage fully in a domain. The goal of this developmental process is to transform potential talent during youth into outstanding performance and innovation in adulthood.

They base the need for a new definition on their claim that children identified as gifted often don’t achieve eminence and that eminent adults were often not identified as gifted when they were children.  Since eminence of (some) adults is the only endpoint they care about, all parts of their definition must serve that goal.

Some of the policies they propose make sense:

This process of talent development can be conceptualized as having two stages. First is talent identification: continuous targeting of the precursors of domain-specific talent and the formal and informal processes by which the talent is recognized and identified. Second is talent promotion: how the person demonstrating talent is instructed, guided, and encouraged—a process too often left to chance rather than to strategic and targeted societal effort. This process also involves recognizing that domains of talent have different developmental trajectories and that transitions from one stage to another are influenced by effort; opportunity; and instruction in content, technical, and psycho-social skills.

But the underlying reasoning seems to be circular—they define their terms so that they will support the conclusions they want to reach.

The authors frame the discussion in terms of 4 questions:

• First, what factors contribute to giftedness?
• Second, what are potential barriers to attaining the gifted label?
• Third, what are the expected outcomes of gifted education?
• Fourth, how should gifted students be educated?

I wonder a little about the significance of the second question.  Why should the “label” matter, and why should barriers to getting the label matter?  Perhaps they meant to ask how gifted children can be identified, but phrasing it as “barriers to attaining the gifted label” seems to presuppose that the gifted label is a thing to strive for.  The other questions seem more normally phrased.

In discussing whether or not IQ is innate or environmental, they correctly point out that both genetics and environment are involved, but they use the technical term “epigenetics” incorrectly, and make the somewhat bizarre statement: “General ability or g is derived from both genes and environment. Both are modifiable.”  Sorry folks, but gene therapy is certainly not at the point where we can modify genes in order to improve general intelligence.

Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell do address the “smart-enough” meme,  which the refer to as the “ability-threshold/creativity hypothesis”.  They cite several studies that refute it, pointing out the studies that supported it generally had low ceilings for performance and short time frames, so that differences in adult performance at the high end were not distinguishable.

One rather terrifying aspect of the article is that they serious consider whether emotional trauma is important to achieving eminence and whether parental push to achieve eminence is crucial: “However, encouragement and stimulation were not necessarily accompanied by emotional support. Despite this, and to the extent that outstanding achievement was the goal, the parents seemed to have contributed to their children’s attainment of eminence.”  Given the authors’ single-minded insistence on eminence as the only worthy goal of gifted education, this section of the paper sounds remarkably like they suggest child abuse as a form of gifted education!

I eventually finished the 40-page article, though I did not bother with the additional 14 pages of citations (far too many of which were self-citations [Correction: only 43, about 9%, were self-citations]).  I found the authors rather narrow-minded about the goals of gifted education, and so their policy and research suggestions seemed rather narrow-minded as well. I hope that Subotnik et al.’s document does not become a guideline for future gifted education policy and research, though that was clearly the intent of the authors.