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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.


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.

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 never ended and is now nearly 45 years in the making. It has followed countless kids from middle school into their careers as some of America's top politicians, scientists, CEOs, engineers, and military leaders.

Stanley passed away in the mid-2000s, but psychologist David Lubinski helped bring the study to Vanderbilt University in the 1990s, where he now co-directs it with Camilla P. Benhow.

It's not a stretch to call this the biggest and most in-depth study on intellectual "precociousness." The results of the study thus far are equal parts 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 to ripe, early to 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.

That might be an outdated example. But Lubinksi 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's going to 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.)

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 kids in the study who were given an opportunity to take more challenging courses that aligned with their skills and interests ultimately went on to accomplish more than the students 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."

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.

If you'd like to learn more about the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, check out this short film on the project created by Vanderbilt University:

Quick Learners; High Achievers: Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth

This article originally appeared on 09.22.17

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Education

Watching kids do lightning fast mental math is both mesmerizing and mind-blowing

Their finger twitching looks random, but WOW is it impressive.

Digamarthi Sri Ramakanth/Wikimedia Commons

2003 UCMAS National Abacus & Mental Arithmetic Competition

In the age of calculators and smartphones, it's become less necessary to do math in your head than it used to be, but that doesn't mean mental math is useless. Knowing how to calculate in your head can be handy, and if you're lucky enough to learn mental abacus skills from a young age, it can be wicked fast as well.

Video of students demonstrating how quickly they can calculate numbers in their head are blowing people's minds, as the method is completely foreign for many of us. The use of a physical abacus isn't generally taught in the United States, other than perhaps a basic introduction to how it works. But precious few of us ever get to see how the ancient counter gets used for mental math.

The concept is simple and can be taught from a young age, but it takes a bit of time and practice to perfect. Watch what it looks like for basic addition and subtraction at lightning speed, though:

If you don't know what they're doing, it looks like students are just randomly flicking their fingers and wrists. But they are actually envisioning the abacus while they move their fingers, as if they were actually using one.

There are various methods of finger calculations that make use of abacus concepts. Watch another method that uses both hands in action:

Even very young children can calculate large sums very quickly using these abacus-based mental math methods. Watch these little superstars add two-digit to four-digit numbers like it's nothing.

How do they do it?

Much of the skill here requires a solid understanding of how an abacus is used to calculate and lots of practice with the physical movements of calculating with it. That's not exactly simple to explain, as it take a couple of years of practice using an abacus—for these mental calculations, specifically the Japanese soroban abacus—to gain the skills needed to be able to calculate quickly. BBC Global shares how such practices are taught in Japan, not only for mental math but for overall cognitive memory:

Abacus mental math programs online recommend learning it between the ages of 5 to 13. It is possible to learn at older ages, but it might take longer to master compared to younger students.

But if there's a finger method you want to try for addition and subtraction up to 99, one that's simple and quick to learn is called chisanbop, in which ones are counted on one hand and 10s are counted on the other. Here's an explainer video that shows how it works:

Chisanbop!

Most of us carry calculators around in our pockets with us at all time, so such practices may feel like a waste of time. But learning new skills that tax our brain is like a workout for our mind, so it's not a bad idea to give things like this a spin. Even if we don't learn to calculate large numbers in the blink of an eye, we can at least exercise our mental muscles to keep our brains healthier. And who knows, maybe we'll get a party trick or two out of it as well.

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Science

Pick a random number between 100. You probably chose 37, and there's a big reason for that.

Why are people seeing the number everywhere?

via Veritasium/YouTube

Why is number 37 everywhere?

When we think of randomness, something chaotic and unpredictable often comes to mind. The funny thing is that when people are asked to choose a random number between 1 and 100, they will most reliably select 37. That doesn’t feel very random.

So why do people seem to have a strange subconscious affinity for such a seemingly random number? Derek Muller and his team at Veritasium investigated this intriguing phenomenon in a video entitled, “Why is this number everywhere?”

To unravel the mystery surrounding 37, Veritasium surveyed 200,000 people, asking them to select a random number. The ones that came up most often were 7, 73, 77 and 37.

Participants were then asked to choose a number they thought would be the least selected. Setting aside the extreme values and the number 50 for being positioned centrally, the numbers that emerged as the most chosen were 73 and 37, almost at a tie.

In reality, the least-selected numbers were 90, followed by 30, 40, 70, 80, and 60.

Why is this number everywhere?

One reason why people choose 37 is because it’s a prime number. Muller says that primes “feel like the most random numbers,” adding that they “don’t appear that much in our lives.” The show’s director Emily Zhang, noted that as a child, she had a book that counted to a hundred and it had a story for every number, but it had little to say about 37.

“So for 26, that's how many letters in the alphabet,” Zhang said. “Or for 30, they give the days of September. Or for 52, that's how many cards are in a deck.” But there isn’t anything notable about 37 besides the fact that it’s a prime number. The fact that little is attached to the number gives it an extra quality of randomness.

On a deeper level, the number 37 seems to coincide with how we’re wired to make decisions when choosing from a large number of options.

Using some rather complex math, Muller demonstrates that when people are given a large number of choices, they will explore and reject 37% of them to get a sense of what's available. They will then elect the first option that's better than all of the ones they’ve seen.

Muller used how we choose partners to give an example of how this works.

“So if you want to get married, say, in 10 years, then spend the first 3.7 years seeing what's out there and then select the next person who's better than anyone you've seen,” Muller says.

The video does a great job of revealing people's blind spots when they try to be random. It’s a lot like when parents choose a unique baby name, but on the first day of kindergarten, they realize other people had the same “unique” idea.

“We can argue special coincidences for many numbers, but we need to finally address the elephant in the room,” Muller concludes the video. “The sheer amount of brain power 37 secretly takes up in our collective minds. It's humanity's go-to random number, one of our most prominent prime numbers, and most of all, our ideal number for making decisions. Maybe that's why we're inclined to it naturally. It feels right to us as where to settle and what to pick.”

Now that you’ve seen this video, you’ll probably see 37 everywhere.

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Science

Fascinating video explains a truth bees intuitively know: 'hexagons are the bestagons'

CGP Grey/YouTube

Hexagons are the best of all polygons.

"What's your favorite shape?" is generally a question we ask 5-year-olds, not grown adults. But maybe if we put it into more advanced terms—"What's the best polygon?"—we'd be compelled to give it some genuine thought.

Since there's an entire field of math dedicated to triangles, that might seem like a logical answer. But, most human-made things around us are made up of rectangles, so maybe they're the best. Then again, there are much more interesting quadrilaterals than squares and rectangles (hey, rhombus!) in addition to pentagons, hexagons, heptagons (which I don't think I've ever even seen), octagons, nonagons—so many "gons" to choose from.

As it turns out, there is an answer to this question—at least according to popular YouTube creator CGP Grey.

The answer? Hexagons. Who knew, right?

If you have doubts that the six-sided shape deserves the title of "best," CGP Grey's video might change your mind.

In it, we see how bees use hexagons to make honeycomb. That's not by accident; it's because hexagons are actually the most efficient shape for tiling. It's the same reason bees' eyes are made up of tons of tiny hexagons—and why the back of our eyes are too.

Snowflakes have six sides, which alone is reason enough for the hexagon to be the bestagon, but the reason they're six-sided is super cool. Saturn has a mysterious, humongous hexagon of gases the size of six Earths, which is weird but also super cool.

But that's just the peripheral stuff. There's a fundamental atomic reason why hexagons are the bestagons—strength and stability which allows hexagons to create the strongest atomic material in the universe.

And, of course, Settlers of Catan.

If you have doubts, let CGP Grey convince you. By the end, you'll have to at least admit that hexagons are pretty darn cool, even if you're partial to some other polygon.

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