When I was in Grade 4, I was identified as “gifted” by my school board. As a result of that, I started going to a separate gifted program at another school for one day a week from Grades 5 to 8. It was a great program that allowed me to explore many neat things not really provided in the regular school setting, such as creative group projects, puzzles, logic games, independent-study projects, etc.
When school boards administer these tests to identify students as gifted, it affects students emotionally and mentally. The main reason for this is because it creates labels, and subsequently, it creates an imaginary divide between students: “gifted” and “non-gifted”. A lot of people seem to associate the term gifted with intelligent, and so to some students, it’s almost as if you are saying that they are not intelligent because they are in the “non-gifted” group. Conversely, students in the gifted group are often expected to do well in school because people now assume they are “intelligent” – so anything less than academic excellence is a disappointment.
I don’t really want to go into a whole discussion of intelligence because that’s not what I want to focus this article on. What I will say is that I am personally a believer in a form of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I believe that everyone has a distinct combination of different types of intelligence, which is why humanity has been able to produce and do so many different and amazing things.
The test that my school board used to identify gifted students largely rested on analyzing only a student’s logical-mathematical and verbal-linguistic intelligences– and not surprisingly, these are the types of skills that help students do well in traditional school subjects. It’s nice that school boards help develop these particular skills for students highly gifted in those areas, but at the same time, it could also be argued that students who excel in other intelligence areas aren’t receiving equal treatment.