Unveiling the Behavioral Characteristics of Gifted Students
Gifted children often stand out, exhibiting unique intellectual, academic, and social-emotional development trajectories that differ significantly from neurotypical individuals. Whether you are a parent, an educator, or a student, you are likely here because you have noticed something different about a student or about yourself if you are that student in question. Those without a background in gifted education may feel that gifted children stand out because of their good grades or high achievements. However, many of us who work with gifted children know that they are different for other reasons like their quirky sense of humor, their intense questioning, or their refusal to sit still in the classroom and repeat math facts when they would much rather be discussing the nature of infinity. At its core, giftedness is a brain-based difference that contributes to our vibrant and neurodiverse world. This neurological difference means that profoundly gifted students experience a different intellectual, academic, and social-emotional development trajectory than neurotypical individuals. This article delves into the behavioral characteristics of gifted students, exploring their unique traits, challenges, and the support they need to thrive.
Defining Giftedness
To quote a beloved leader in gifted education, Dr. Jim Delisle, “Giftedness is an innate ability to both detect and comprehend the world in complex ways that differ significantly from age-expected norms.” (Understanding Your Gifted Child from the Inside Out, p8). Importantly, Delisle makes the distinction that giftedness is not always apparent just from looking at a student’s achievements. Like most people, highly capable students are unique individuals with varied and multifaceted talents and interests. Some demonstrate mastery in multiple areas while others excel in a single subject. The National Association for Gifted Children lists additional traits of giftedness that parents may find useful.
The National Association for Gifted Children in Washington, D.C., asserts that though there are many definitions of giftedness, they all include a common element, that is: “A gifted person is someone who shows, or has the potential for showing, an exceptional level of performance in one or more areas of expression.”
When is a child considered among the estimated 2-5 percent of the population in the United States deemed gifted? There are several steps involved in the process of assessing whether or not your child is gifted. Educational professionals at local schools for the gifted said the first step is having your child evaluated by a licensed psychologist experienced in dealing with gifted children. In this process a battery of tests is administered to determine your child’s IQ. It is generally accepted that an IQ of 130 and above indicates giftedness. But that score doesn’t tell the whole story.
“If it’s 130 or above, there’s not much question there. If it’s below 130, then we look at the 12 sub test scores and if we see a 19, which is a perfect score, we might take that child,” said Morse, whose three gifted children led her to found Steppingstone where she now serves as head of school. In addition to the testing, school administrators would invite your child to spend a day at the school to be sure he or she feels comfortable in that setting, while giving experienced teachers the opportunity to further evaluate.
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Common Behavioral Characteristics
Gifted children often exhibit distinct behavioral characteristics that set them apart. These characteristics can be both advantageous and challenging, requiring understanding and support from parents and educators.
- Asynchronous Development: Gifted children develop asynchronously or “out of sync” internally and externally, according to psychologist Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., Director, Gifted Child Development Center, in Denver, Colorado. Their rate of cognitive development is much faster than their physical development, making them more vulnerable because they may become aware of information they’re not emotionally prepared to handle. In her article, How Parents Can Support Gifted Children, Silverman says the brighter the child, the greater the asynchrony and vulnerability. Asynchronous development, or uneven development, is often considered a core trait of giftedness. These students may be college age intellectually but still 12 in terms of their social skills. As a result, it can be difficult to make friends who share their interests or hard to know how to appropriately express themselves in group settings.
- Intense Passion and Focus: Gifted children respond to life with greater emotion than the average person. They tend to be very passionate about an area of interest to them and have the ability to sustain that passion for long periods of time. Sometimes their behavior can even seem obsessive compulsive. When it comes to pursuing their passions, gifted children stick to it. They demonstrate a sustained passion to figure something out and to learn all they can in their area of interest.
- Advanced Language and Communication: Gifted children may or may not speak early, but whenever they do, they’re able to carry on high level and philosophical conversations. As a result, they tend to want to hang around older children and adults because they’re looking for an intellectual match.
- Perfectionism: Gifted children have the ability to understand what is perfect in a situation, which can lead to frustration for them if they believe they can’t achieve that standard. Perfectionism is often related to self-esteem when the gifted child, or those around the child, expect them to be gifted all the time, in every subject. Gifted students frequently set unreasonably high standards for themselves, leading to stress and dissatisfaction with their achievements. This can make completing tasks or starting new projects overwhelming.
- Insatiable Curiosity: "Insatiable" is a word often used when describing the learning needs of a gifted child. They tend to have an insatiable curiosity and appetite for learning. They’re fascinated with books and ask many questions, often more than a parent can answer.
- Unique Perspective: Gifted children see the world in a different way. They have an unusual perspective on life and experiences, and sense earlier than the average child, what’s going on around them. They can see beyond the moment, recognize patterns and have the ability to abstract and problem solve. They’re able to perceive authenticity in people and as result, often have a great sense of humor early on. Gifted children tend to demonstrate a sense of fairness and need for justice born out of a sense of compassion for others.
- Learning Preferences: Gifted children tend to learn via exploration and they don’t like going over what they already know. It’s not that these children don’t like rote learning; they just don’t like it once they’ve already learned something.
- Exceptional Memory and Observation: Gifted children are able to retain great amounts of information and for longer periods of time. They have a keen sense of observation, cataloguing body language, voice inflections and other details that most don’t.
Challenges Faced by Gifted Students
Gifted children, despite their intellectual prowess, often encounter unique challenges that can impact their academic, social, and emotional well-being.
- Underachievement: Oftentimes profoundly intelligent young people are not properly identified and, thus, do not receive an appropriately challenging education. Research shows this can lead to underachievement or even dropping out of school - studies indicate that 40 percent of all gifted students may be underachievers (Handbook of Gifted Education, p. 424).
- Socialization Difficulties: The problems gifted children sometimes face with socializing often stem from their asynchrony and educational setting. Their difficulty making friends with same-age peers may have nothing to do with their ability or desire to socialize, but instead might be a result of not having like-minded peers whom they can form a connection with. Even popular gifted children may feel like they don’t have a “true friend” who understands them. Feeling “different” from peers, gifted students may choose to withdraw into their own world of books, hobbies, or thoughts, making it harder to develop social skills.
- Low Self-Esteem: While parents are the primary way children learn about themselves, negative experiences at school and with peers may harmfully influence the way a gifted child sees themselves. If the child feels unsupported and unaccepted at school, they may develop low self-esteem and feel that their giftedness alienates them.
- Anxiety and Depression: Low self-esteem can contribute to a wide range of emotional challenges, including anxiety and depression. Gifted students often carry the weight of high expectations from parents, teachers, peers, and/or themselves. This pressure to consistently perform at a high level can lead to overwhelming anxiety. Emotional intensity is common in gifted students. They might feel every failure, subtle critique, or even positive attention more deeply than others.
- Decision Paralysis: Gifted students tend to analyze every situation deeply. While this can be a strength, it can also cause decision paralysis or unnecessary worrying about hypothetical scenarios.
- Impatience and Frustration: When gifted students grasp concepts quickly or think at a rapid pace, they may struggle when others cannot keep up with their ideas or pace of learning. This impatience can make collaborative work challenging. It can also lead to frustration with teachers or activities that don’t hold their interest.
- Perceived Arrogance: Being advanced or knowledgeable in certain areas can unintentionally make gifted students come across as arrogant. They may correct others’ mistakes, dominate discussions, or unintentionally belittle peers with less expertise in a topic.
- Questioning Authority: Gifted students often question rules, directions, or authority figures, not out of defiance but because they naturally seek understanding and logic. They may challenge classroom norms, ask countless "why" questions, or debate with adults if instructions seem inconsistent or unfair.
- Burnout: The combination of internal drive, perfectionism, and external expectations can be exhausting for gifted students. These prolonged periods of striving for excellence may result in mental, emotional, or physical burnout.
- Executive Functioning Challenges: Gifted students often have minds that are buzzing with ideas, bouncing quickly between topics and concepts that excite them. However, this intense focus on their areas of interest can leave less engaging, everyday executive functioning tasks (like organizing their materials or completing routine assignments) feeling unimportant.
Supporting Gifted Students
Supporting gifted students requires a multifaceted approach that addresses their unique needs and challenges.
- Appropriate Identification: Oftentimes profoundly intelligent young people are not properly identified and, thus, do not receive an appropriately challenging education. Finding someone to test your child for giftedness, especially when using an individual assessment tools like the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, may help reveal sensory processing issues so that parents and educators can collaborate to provide the appropriate accommodations. Gifted identification may also help families access special programs to support their development or advocate for acceleration. Struggling to identify students in your school because of some of these unexpected behaviors? The Slocumb-Payne Teacher Perception inventory uses both “positive” and “negative” perceptions to identify students. This scale is designed to obtain a teacher’s perception of a student within the context of a classroom or school. Because each classroom is as unique as the teacher conducting that classroom, one teacher’s perception of a student may vary considerably from that of another. The Slocumb-Payne inventory is designed to identify more students, especially those who are underrepresented in gifted education, by allowing teachers to rate both positive and negative attributes.
- Challenging Curriculum: Using acceleration techniques, like ability grouping or grade skipping, can provide students with intellectual peers who get them and want to interact in the same ways they do, like discussing the detailed history of Middle Earth! It may also come as a relief to not feel like they must be the smartest kid in class.
- Social-Emotional Support: If you suspect your child is suffering from anxiety, depression, or any of the issues described above, it might be time to reach out to trusted friends for advice or seek a gifted therapist. Don’t be afraid to talk to your students about what it means to be gifted. Teaching empathy, active listening skills, and awareness of how their words and actions affect others can help repair and strengthen these relationships.
- Focus on Effort and Progress: To support these students, guiding them toward celebrating progress and effort over outcomes can make a significant difference in their emotional well-being. Adults can normalize failure as a part of learning and celebrate the effort, curiosity, and lessons gained from every experience, successful or not. Offering tasks that allow them to struggle productively is beneficial. Productive struggle equips gifted students with the skills they need to face challenges, fostering both academic and personal growth.
- Executive Functioning Support: You can address SO MANY of these traits for all students through your morning meeting.
Research Findings on Mental Health
The study included 49 gifted children aged 9-18 years and 56 age and gender-matched healthy children of normal intelligence. The Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL), and the Children’s Depression Rating Scale were applied to all the cases. The Quality of Life Scale for Children, the Depression Scale for Children, the Trait-State Anxiety Inventory, and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire- Adolescent Form were completed by all the participants. Compared to children of normal intelligence, gifted children described themselves as more inattentive and lively, social functionality was reported to be low and they had a worse perception of their physical health status. Gifted boys were determined to have more depressive symptoms than gifted girls. The parents of boys of normal intelligence reported lower academic performance than the parents of gifted boys. All the findings obtained in this study suggest that gifted children are at risk in respect of mental health.
In conclusions of this study, gifted children have defined themselves more inattentive and hyperactive than children and adolescents with normal intelligence in SDQ self-report scale. In group I and group II, when their quality of life was compared, the gifted children were found to perceive their social functionalities and physical health statuses worse. Normal intelligent boys’ having been perceived as having low school functionalities by their parents is also one of the observed results. According to own evaluations of children and adolescents, another result obtained in the study is that boys participating in the study have reported lower social functioning and higher peer relationship problems than girls. In a way that supports this finding, according to their own evaluations, girls also assessed themselves more social than boys.
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In the literature, there are different datas about the anxiety level of children with high intelligence level. Some of the studies reports increased frequency of anxiety in individuals with high intelligence levels (10, 12, 30-33); while the other part reports that there is not any increased frequency of anxiety (34-38). Perfectionism (39), school changes, high academic expectations (40), future-related concerns, difficulties related to family and friends were often seen to be among sources of stress that can create anxiety complaints for gifted children (38). Good intelligence and problem-solving strategies are emerging as a protective factor against anxiety (35). In our study, while there was not any difference in depressive complaints according to self-report and clinical interview in most of all gifted children by comparison with group II, boys of gifted children group had high depressive scores in CDRS-R.
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