I wouldn't dare to label anyone as a gifted. Primarily, because of the way it affects child. You never know whether the label would push or pull them. On the other hand, if the label is hidden and I just make a note to myself, I would be listening to them. Correct answers are less important than right questions. Just listen how they react to inconsistencies, lack of information or inadequate propositions. Extraordinary feedback is one of the most important indicators of the giftedness.

I have two brief comments.

1) One can certainly gain many valuable insights on the individual learning needs of students of all ability levels in an online diagnosis. (We ourselves offer online diagnosis in our Gifted Counselling Centre at the moment, too.)

2) However, like Dr. Verbić, I wonder why the label "gifted" is necessary? (No matter if it is online or offline diagnosis.) Isn't the crucial point of the diagnosis rather how individual learning can best be supported?

A gifted is rasy to identify because the individual concerned will exhibit high level of proficiency in the skill concerned. For example, a child with high mathematical ability may solve complex math problems that children at a certain age cannot solve. Such exceptional ability must be nurtured immediately to ensure that the talent produces positive results for the cjild, organization and country.

A gifted and talanted child should be as charismatic as shy. It's important to notice their aktivity, to provide conditions for them.

And a well-known teacher will help its student to become a great master.

The only question is time, when pupil can pay attention to the task, which you give to him.

Dragan Pleskonjic there are many indicators of giftedness. I have two special gifted children (translates to 130+ IQ in a WISC-test). I am a member of the board on a school for special gifted children.

One of the major issues is testing. If the children are discovered early you can't test a child under the age of approx. 5-7. If you discover them late, it is usually because they have met some challenges in life. And then it can be too late compared to the bad experiences they have with teachers, bullying, getting friends, feeling different etc.

Indicators of giftedness

This will in some cases look like ADHD, Asbergers, ADD, highly sensitivity and other external (some pseudo) diagnosis. And as the children are often discovered when they are seen as problematic they too often get a diagnosis when they should have been handled as special gifted.

Another problem is that girls are often more adaptable to their social environment where boys "stick out". Therefore boys are often discovered - in Denmark - around 2nd - 5th grade and girls around 7th-9th grade.

Mikael Elkan

Just to be sure: Is this ResearchGate, where I can get scientifically qualified opinions or a parent self-help forum?

Albert Ziegler, Srđan Verbić and all: thank you very much for your comments and opinions.

Just to clarify intention: this discussion is primarily for scientifically qualified opinions. I am looking for scientific research and applied science in this area. So feel free to share opinions, links to papers, research projects, practical examples and similar. Suggestions for resources, software platforms, applications and other supporting systems are welcome as well.

There are so many identification methods, Dragan, and each method has advantages and disadvantages. This is one of my own publications in which we did pit several approaches against each other:

Article Conceptions of giftedness and expertise put to the empirical test

As mentioned in the paper, in practice, (and also in research) IQ testing and achievement assessments dominate. However, there are highly interesting alternative methods. Just two examples:

1) Drawings:

Article Identifying highly gifted children by analyzing human figure...

2) Teacher checklist (which proved to be a better predictor of talent development than IQ):

Article Learning resources and talent development from a systemic po...

Albert Ziegler Thank you very much for the links you shared. Very interesting.

Dragan, there are a range of tools/measures that one can use to identify talent in children. One of these includes the use of verbal and non-verbal tests (see for example, Lohman & Gambrell, 2012), screening the classes or groups of students where the potentially talented ones interact within to observe intriguingly talented behaviour and speaking with parents to try and ascertain whether special talents have been noticed from those children from an early age. Interesting stuff.

Perhaps it was a loaded question given our common heritage, or the following accepted and widely known, but please let me state the obvious to some: for nearly 40 years we have been developing the methods and practices, http://petnica.rs/. Every single cohort brought up a few gems yet wider societal questions and puzzles remains, one of them being should the education be publicly or privately funded (thanks to @Vigor Majic)? I have to add my own: what is the best organizational structure or set of norms/regulations to manage the talent in the long run?

No problem. I gave a lecture on tsunamis (all class never heard of this phenomenon before) and next day one student proposed an ingenious method to stop a tsunami wave (and save lives). I call this person talented.

Congratulations, Dr. Issigonis. You solved with your Tsunami test a problem that has plagued talent research for more than 100 years. A stellar hour of science! Brilliant! (All the more so as we can assume in the future that tsunamis will no longer cause any damage.)

;-)

Here is an old conference proceeding of mine focused on this topic: Conference Paper Identifying gifted children and dyslexia early diagnosis: ri...