In the 1960s, psychologist Julian Stanley realized that if you took the best-testing seventh graders from around the country and gave them standard college entry exams, those kids would score, on average, about as well as the typical college-bound high school senior. However, the seventh graders who scored as well or better than high schoolers, Stanley found, had off-the-charts aptitude in quantitative, logical, and spatial reasoning. In other words, they were gifted.
In the 1970s, Stanley and his team launched a full-scale study, identifying many of America’s gifted kids and tracking them throughout their lives.
The study, called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), never ended and is now more than 50 years in the making. It has followed more than 5,000 kids from middle school into adulthood. The study’s first two groups of participants, about 1,650 people, were identified as being in the top 1% of mathematical reasoning ability. When researchers checked in on them four decades later, 4.1% had earned tenure at a major research university, 2.3% were top executives at name-brand or Fortune 500 companies, and together they had secured 681 patents. Needless to say, a lot has changed with how students are today compared to 50 years ago.
Stanley died in 2005, but the study continues at Vanderbilt University, where psychologist David Lubinski helped bring it in 1998. Lubinski, now a professor emeritus, and Camilla P. Benbow, dean of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, still co-direct it.
Why this study matters so much
It’s not a stretch to call this one of the biggest and longest-running studies on intellectual “precociousness.” The results of the study thus far are both fascinating and genuinely surprising, a deeply insightful look into the minds and lives of brilliant children.
1. Some of what we used to think about gifted kids turned out to be wrong
Ever heard the saying “early ripe, early rot”? It basically means doing “too much” to foster a kid’s special talents and abilities at too young an age could actually cause harm in the long term. That’s not even remotely true, at least not according to Lubinski. A 35-year SMPY study published in 2020 found that skipping grades and other forms of academic acceleration had no negative long-term effects on gifted kids’ psychological well-being at age 50.
That saying might be an outdated example, but Lubinski says there are plenty of other misconceptions still alive today, like the idea that gifted kids are so smart that they’ll “find a way” to excel even if those smarts aren’t nurtured and developed.
Not so fast. “They’re kids,” he explains. “They need guidance. We all need guidance.”
2. Intelligence is not the same as passion
Quick, what’s the “smartest” career you can think of? Doctor? Scientist?
While you do have to be pretty brilliant to work in medicine or science, those are far from the only career paths gifted kids choose later in life. “Quantitatively, gifted people vary widely in their passions,” Lubinski says. Many of the students in the study did end up pursuing medicine, but others went into fields like economics or engineering. Others still were more gifted in areas like logical or verbal reasoning, making them excellent lawyers and writers.
“There are all kinds of ways to express intellectual talent,” Lubinski explains.
When it comes to doing what’s best for a gifted student, it’s just as important for parents and educators to know what the student is passionate about rather than pigeonholing them in traditionally “smart” fields and registering them in a bunch of STEM courses.
3. Hard work definitely still matters
Measuring a student’s aptitude, their natural abilities, is only one part of the equation when it comes to determining how successful they’ll be in life. Aptitude scores can identify a particularly strong natural skill set but tell us very little about how hard that person might work to excel in that field.
Effort, Lubinski says, is a critical factor in determining how far someone will go in life. “If you look at exceptional performers in politics, science, music, and literature, they’re working many, many hours,” he says. (And for the record, there are a lot more important things in life than just career achievement, like family, friends, and overall happiness.)
The idea that hard work still matters echoes the “10,000-hour rule,” popularized by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell argued that people like Bill Gates and The Beatles excelled in part because they put in roughly 10,000 hours of practice. The psychologist whose research inspired the idea, Anders Ericsson, has said Gladwell oversimplified it: what matters is deliberate practice, not a magic number of hours.
4. Regardless of aptitude, every kid deserves to be treated as though they were gifted
The study’s focus is specifically on kids within a certain range of intellectual ability, but Lubinski is careful to note that many of its findings can and should be applied to all students. For example, the children in the study who were allowed to take more challenging courses aligned with their skills and interests ultimately achieved more than those who were not afforded the same opportunity.
“You have to find out where your child’s development is, how fast they learn, what are their strengths and relative weaknesses and tailor the curriculum accordingly,” Lubinski says. “It’s what you would want for all kids.”
What this means for all kids
It may sound a bit like a pipe dream, but it’s a great starting point for how we should be thinking about the future of education in America. After all, the SMPY data doesn’t just tell us something about the kids who tested in the top 1%. It tells us something universal: potential rarely announces itself fully formed. It has to be noticed, challenged, and given room to grow, whether that’s a math prodigy who needs to skip ahead a few grades or a kid with a quieter talent that doesn’t show up on any standardized test at all. Fifty years of tracking some of the most capable people in the country boils down to a pretty simple idea. Pay attention to what a kid is actually good at and actually loves, then get out of the way and let them run with it.
This article originally appeared nine years ago. It has been updated.
