Tag Archives: gifted children

Is math privileged for gifted children?

By Jonah Sinick

Cross-posted from the Davidson Institute Gifted Issues Discussion Forum and Quora

In Underconfidence in gifted girls I suggested psychology, philosophy, economics and evolutionary biology as candidate subjects for gifted children to learn. I’d add history of science. Thomas Percy wrote:

As a practicing researcher in one of the areas you mentioned in point a, I actually don’t think a child should focus too much in them. I think social science is still relatively subjective and requires experience even a PG child would not necessarily have an easier time acquiring beyond their age. Time is better spent in mastering a more foundational subject. Math and etymology are both fine use of time.I think that learning math is very important for gifted children, as I argued in Gifted children could learn math much earlier. See also Cognito Mentoring’s page on mathematics learning benefits.I’d like to address the question of whether gifted children don’t have enough life experience to be ready for the other subjects that I mention, relative to their readiness for math. I’ve worked primarily with gifted young people of ages 10 and higher, so my remarks are primarily of relevance to that age group, though they may be relevant to exceptionally gifted children who are younger than that as well.

  • Study of Exceptional Talent has found that many more children qualify based on the math section of the SAT than on the verbal section of the SAT. This suggests that gifted children can, on average, excel more in math than in subjects that require verbal reasoning. (On a recent thread it was suggested that the modern SAT’s verbal section isn’t a good measure of verbal reasoning, but many more people qualified for Study of Exceptional Talent before 1995 as well.) It’s been hypothesized that this is because high performance in math can come either from strong verbal reasoning or from strong abstract pattern recognition (of the type that the Raven’s matrices test measures).
  • The case for learning the other subjects that I mention is stronger for verbally gifted children than for gifted children whose strengths are nonverbal.
  • Because math is a subject that’s taught in K-8 school whereas the other subjects that I mentioned aren’t, one would expect gifted children to learn more math independently of whether they’re more developmentally ready for it. It can be argued that the reason that math is taught in schools when the other subjects aren’t is because children are more developmentally ready for math. But there are other possible explanations for this, such as the practical importance of arithmetic. In any case, one would have causality in both directions even if it were true.
  • Similarly, the fact that there are more math enrichment activities (largely in the form of contests) available for gifted children makes them more likely to excel in math than in the other subjects. My understanding is that math contest culture originated at least in part from the Cold War, when the Soviet Union worked to train children in preparation for quantitative occupations in research and development to feed into the Soviet Union’s military power.
  • It may be that life experience enables one to understand economics more deeply. But it’s equally true that learning economics early could prepare one to learn more from one’s early life experiences, on account of seeing relevant economic concepts in them.
  • I think that for children, improving reading and writing skills is more important than learning the subjects that I mentioned. But one can pick up reading and writing skills through them.

Nontechnical, nonfiction books aimed at adults that have few prerequisites such as:

may be well-suited to gifted children with broad curiosity who are reading at the adult level.

Underconfidence in gifted girls

By Jonah Sinick
The 1996 study Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Mathematical Problem-Solving of Gifted Students found thatAlthough most students were overconfident about their capabilities, gifted students had more accurate self-perceptions and gifted girls were biased toward underconfidence.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg discusses high potential women being underconfident in her book Lean In.

I’ve had many gifted female students and classmates/colleagues who have struggled with intellectual insecurity.

Parents sometimes ask me if I have any suggestions for what they might do to help.

For those of you who have daughters, does this sound familiar? If so, are there resources / strategies that you’ve found helpful for improving their self-confidence?

 

Managing your time spent learning

By Jonah Sinick

Cross-posted from Less Wrong and Quora. Related to the information wiki page managing your time.

This article is written for people who are looking for advice on prioritizing activities, in particular, what to spend time learning.

In thinking about how to budget your time, it’s helpful to explicitly prioritize the activities that you engage in in terms of their relative importance, and distinguish between what’s important and what you find interesting. Sometimes we exaggerate the usefulness of interesting but only slightly useful activities in their minds, on account of wanting to believe that time spent on them is productive. If you think about how useful an activity is and, how interesting the activity is separately, you’re less likely to do this. It’s helpful to consider the following four categories of activities:

  • Important and interesting: Do, and take your time. Get it right!
  • Important and not interesting: Do as much as necessary, and maybe a bit more; look into ways of overcoming procrastination. Also consider ways to make them more interesting.
  • Not important and interesting: Do only if you feel like it, don’t try to press yourself, and consider substituting with activities that are interesting and important.
  • Not important and not interesting: Avoid.

More below

Interesting and important

When you find an academic subject interesting, and when it’s important (e.g. for your future job, as a prerequisite to courses that you’ll take in the future or otherwise related to your future goals), you should delve deeply into it. Gaining deep understanding takes time, and you shouldn’t feel as though you’re working inefficiently if you find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of time on it.

Interesting but not important

Intellectually curious people often have intellectual interests that don’t advance their career goals. Such interests can absorb a lot of time and hinder one’s professional success.

The question of how to balance these interests with one’s career goals is a very personal one.

In general, if there are two activities that are of comparable interest to you, but of unequal importance, you should choose the more important one.

If you find that your time is uncomfortably crowded with things that are interesting but not important, you should look for instances where you’re exerting willpower on them, and cut back on those, reserving the time that you spend doing things that you find interesting to activities that require relatively little energy, to conserve energy for doing things that it’s more difficult to get yourself to do.

Important but not interesting

Sometimes you have to do things that are uninteresting to achieve your goals. If you have trouble motivating yourself to do these things, you might benefit from our recommendations for overcoming procrastination (forthcoming). Also, consider ways that you might find these specific activities more interesting, by checking out targeted learning recommendations for those activities.

Not important and not interesting

These activities should be avoided. This point might seem obvious, but despite this, people often do engage in activities that are neither important nor interesting. This most often happens when:

  • One hasn’t carefully considered the question of whether the activity is important. For example, one might uncritically internalize the view that it’s important to learn a language because learning a language said to keep the mind sharp, without considering that there might be other more interesting or important activities that keep the mind sharp to an equal or greater extent, and therefore try to learn a language, even if one doesn’t find it interesting. There are benefits to learning a language that one can’t get from other activities: the point here is just that keeping one’s mind sharp specifically isn’t a good reason to learn a language rather than do other things.
  • The activity seems interesting at first, and one sets a goal connected with it, but then the activity turns out not to be interesting, and one feels an obligation to continue on account of having already set the goal. For example, one might hear good things about a long novel and set a goal of reading it, find that one doesn’t enjoy it, and feel pressure to plow through to the end.

On the first point, it’s important to critically reflect on whether the activities that one is involved in are important. On the second point, all else being equal, fulfilling commitments is good, because it’s good for one’s self-esteem, but one should still consider whether the cost of fulfilling the commitment is worth it, and also try not to set ambitious goals when the value of fulfilling them is questionable.