Giftedness and Genius: Crucial Differences

Giftedness and Genius: Crucial Differences
Arthur R. Jensen (1996)

Some Bodily and Medical Correlates of Mathematical Giftedness and Commensurate Levels of Socioeconomic Status

Some Bodily and Medical Correlates of Mathematical Giftedness and Commensurate Levels of Socioeconomic Status
D. Lubinski & L. D. Humphreys (1992)
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/CorrelatesOfMath.pdf


Abstract

Four groups of 10th-grade students were selected from the upper tails of four distributions based on a stratified random sample of the nation's high schools (N = 95,650): Two groups consisted of mathematically gifted subjects (boys n = 497, girls n = 508); the remaining two groups comprised environmentally privileged students (boys n = 647, girls n = 485). The former represented approximately the top 1% on a standard measure of quantitative ability, whereas the latter represented approximately the upper 1% of a conventional SES index. These four gifted/privileged groups were then compared to one another, by gender, and to their gender equivalent normative cohorts on 43 indices of medical and physical well-being. Although higher levels of physical health are found in both gifted and privileged groups (relative to the norm), medical and physical well-being appears to be more highly associated with mathematical giftedness than extreme levels of socioeconomic privilege. To the extent that these findings may be linked to the construct general intelligence, they confirm and extend the view that the nomothetic span (network of correlates) of general intelligence permeates a variety of important and valued nonintellectual domains (cf. Brand, 1987).

INEQUITY IN EQUITY: How "Equity" Can Lead to Inequity for High-Potential Students

INEQUITY IN EQUITY: How "Equity" Can Lead to Inequity for High-Potential Students
Camilla P. Benbow and Julian C Stanley (1996)


Abstract

Over the past three decades, the achievement of waves of American students with high intellectual potential has declined as a result of inequity in educational treatment. This inequity is the result of an extreme form of egalitarianism within American society and schools, which involves the pitting of equity against excellence rather than promoting both equity and excellence, anti-intellectualism, the "dumbing-down" of the curriculum, equating aptitude and achievement testing with elitism, the attraction to fads by schools, and the insistence of schools to teach all students from the same curriculum at the same level. In this article we provide recommendations for creating positive change—recommendations that emphasize excellence for all, that call for responsiveness to individual differences, and that suggest basing educational policies on well-grounded research findings in psychology and education. Educational policies that fail to take into account the vast range of individual differences among students—as do many that are currently in use—are doomed to be ineffective.