IQ vs achievement - it's not the same thing!

Before I write this, I just want to say that in case any parent reads my previous post and thinks that I'm trying to brag about my gifted child or elicit sympathy for what is often perceived as already a privileged position, that it is not so. I've mentioned this before, every child is different, you just have to work with what you're given. And anyway, a gifted child is not any reflection of a parent's "accomplishment", so there's nothing to take credit for.

Ok, now that we've gotten that out of the way, this is a follow-up post on my last entry. Some parents may be curious as to what are the different levels of giftedness. Here is the range (please note that the numbers can vary depending on the scale that's used).


Average IQ is between 85-114.

I wrote in an earlier post about how to tell if your child is intellectually gifted. An example of a profoundly gifted individual is Bobby Fischer, whose IQ is estimated to be 180. He was obsessed with chess since the age of six and spent hours everyday studying the game. By 15, he became a Grand Master, the youngest ever in history.

But IQ is just a number. And it's important to always remember that life is so much more than numbers. Giftedness is complex because the variation is so wide. A child can be extremely gifted in maths and not languages or vice versa.

The issue I want to address is that of IQ vs achievement. A mother reminded me the other day that it's not the same thing, ie higher IQ does NOT automatically translate into higher achievement. I briefly addressed it in my previous post but I think it warrants a separate post.

People tend to imagine gifted children happily embracing their abilities and continuously adding to their accomplishments. You might therefore be surprised to hear this: research has shown that a large proportion of highly gifted children seriously underachieve in the regular classroom and that by the end of elementary school, many have almost completely lost the motivation to excel (Pringle, 1970; Painter, 1976; Whitmore, 1980; Gross, 1993).

Aside: I found most of the relevant information and research on the Hoagies Gifted Education site. It's a terrific resource although I personally found the navigation a little confusing.

Research by Miraca Gross found that gifted children are aware from a young age that they are different from other children around them. Instead of feeling superior however, more often than not, gifted children feel uncomfortable about being different and feel the pressure to change their behavior to fit in with their peers. Gross's study (1993) found that highly gifted students with advanced reading abilities, on entering school and realising that no other children could read, deliberately decreased the quality and quantity of their reading after a few weeks. Some even stopped reading altogether.

Anxiety and depression often occur in misplaced gifted children. Self-sabotage or deliberate underachievement to fit in can lead to the "imposter syndrome", where gifted adults believe their success is due to luck rather than their own abilities and worry about being found out.

"The “imposter syndrome” strikes people everywhere, especially high achievers... The more successful you get, the greater the inner stress. Now people have expectations of you that you may not be able to meet. Now each decision you make should be perfect because there’s much to lose." - Simran Bhargava, The Imposter Syndrome: Feeling Like A Fraud

One of the biggest issues is the discrepancy between the mental age and the chronological age. The higher the IQ, the higher the mental age, therefore with exceptionally or profoundly gifted children, the gap between the mental and chronological age is enormous.

“Precocity unavoidably complicates the complexity of social adjustment. The child of 8 years with a mentality of 12 or 14 is faced with a situation that is almost inconceivably difficult. In order to adjust normally, such a child has to have an exceptionally well-balanced personality, and has to be well nigh a social genius. The higher the IQ, the more acute the problem” - Burks, Jensen, & Terman

Sometimes, underachievement could simply be due to boredom due to lack of interest in too-easy classes, the negative connotation of being seen as smart ("geek"! "nerd"! sounds familiar?), or unrealistic perfectionism.

While these are social or emotional reasons, there's also the possibility of biological reasons for underachievement. Many gifted children are twice exceptional, ie children who are gifted and have a learning disability like ADHD or dyslexia. Twice exceptional children are especially common among the exceptionally or profoundly gifted. Because gifted children are more able to compensate or mask their learning disabilities, these disorders often are left undiagnosed or discovered much later.

Experts generally agree that an effective way of reversing underachievement in gifted children is to provide accelerated education and placed in intellectually stimulating classes with appropriate mentoring and enrichment. Gross's study found that gifted children who attended school in the regular classroom had frequently quashed or moderated their own abilities. Their early curiosity and love of learning were eroded or completely eradicated by the time they became teenagers, and they displayed disturbingly low levels of motivation and social self-esteem. Ironically, education administrators took the decrease in academic achievement to mean that the child has "leveled out" and is no longer gifted.

In contrast, gifted children who were more appropriately placed in an accelerated environment displayed higher levels of motivation and self-esteem, and significantly reduced pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance. They also had more friends and enjoyed closer social relationships than before the acceleration.

See? Not that I want to keep harping on the GEP but this research again supports my view that the GEP is a necessary part of our education system. It is not the be all and end all, but it does serve the needs of a segment of the population that would otherwise have been underserved in the current education system.