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A study has been following 'gifted' kids for 45 years. Here's what we've learned.

Some of what we used to think about gifted kids turned out to be wrong.

This article originally appeared on 09.22.17


What can we learn from letting seventh graders take the SAT?

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.

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Imagine a classroom with 20 children, four computers, and no teacher. Under those circumstances, do you think the children could teach themselves?

This was educational technology professor Sugata Mitra's theory when he decided to put a computer on the side of a public wall in Delhi, India, 18 years ago.

At the time, he was working in the city for a computer software developer training company. His workplace sat next to a slum. He wondered how the children he saw there everyday would learn to work with tech in the modern age.

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Fu Manchu was on the loose.

Adult male orangutans grow big jowls, like this gentleman from a German zoo. Photo by Oliver Lang/AFP/Getty Images.

Fu was an adult male orangutan who lived in the Omaha Zoo way back in the 1960s.

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My delightful sister, Annie — the Queen of Seeing Through B.S. — posted this image on Facebook the other day:

Image provided by Ben Thomas, used with permission.

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