研究“天才”儿童45年后，科学家发现了什么？
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研究“天才”儿童45年后，科学家发现了什么？
1968年夏日的一天，Julian Stanley教授遇到了一位天资聪颖却百无聊赖的12岁少年，名叫Joseph Bates。这个来自巴尔的摩的男孩在数学课程上大大领先于同班同学，因此，他的父母安排他在Stanley任教的约翰·霍普金斯大学修读计算机科学课程。就连大学计算机课程也无法满足Bates。他远远超过了班里的成年学生，靠教研究生FORTRAN编程语言来打发时间。他的计算机课老师不知道该拿他怎么办才好，便把他介绍给了Stanley，一位在心理计量学（对认知表现的研究）领域声名显赫的研究者。为了进一步发掘这位天才少年的能力，Stanley让Bates接受了一系列测试，其中包括SAT考试——这一般是16岁到18岁的美国高中生申请大学时才会参加的。Bates的分数远远高于Johns Hopkins大学的录取线。因此，Stanley开始为Bates寻找一所可以修读高级数学和科学课程的本地高中。他没能找到这样的学校，便说服了约翰·霍普金斯大学的一位招生主任，让当年13岁的Bates作为本科生入学。Stanley后来亲切地称Bates为他的数学能力早熟青少年（Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth , SMPY）项目的“头号学生”。这一项目将会转变美国教育系统鉴别和支持高天赋儿童的方式。SMPY是一项针对智力资优儿童的纵向研究，是目前仍在进行的同类研究中历史最悠久的。这一项目在45年间追踪了5000多位智力资优儿童的职业发展和成就，其中许多人都成为了成就颇高的科学家。从这一研究不断积累的数据中，已经产生了400多篇论文、几部专著，并为如何发现和培养科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）等领域的人才提供了重要见解。“当时Julian想知道的是，我们该如何发现在现在所说的STEM领域中最有成功潜力的儿童，以及怎样让他们更有可能实现自身潜力，”Camilla Benbow说，她是Stanley的学生，现在是范德比尔特大学教育与人力发展系的主任。但Stanley的研究兴趣不仅仅在于天资聪颖的儿童，他还想开发他们的智力，让他们更有可能改变世界。他告诉他的研究生，自己的座右铭是“再也不搞干巴巴的方法论了。”第一批SMPY项目参与者目前正处于事业的巅峰，这些资优青少年的影响力超过了同辈中的其他人，这一点已是显而易见的事实。在推动科学、技术和文化发展的创新者中，许多人都曾参与过类似约翰·霍普金斯大学资优青少年中心（Center for Talented Youth）的培养项目——Stanley在上世纪八十年代开设了这一中心，作为SMPY项目的附属。这项目在早年鉴别并培养了他们的独特认知能力。起初，Stanley的研究和中心向在大学入学考试中取得前1%分数的少年开放。成就斐然的数学家陶哲轩和Lenhard Ng就曾取得过前1%的成绩，还有脸书创始人Mark Zuckerberg，Google的联合创始人Sergey Brin，以及音乐家Stefani Germanotta（也就是Lady Gaga）；他们都参加过约翰·霍普金斯大学的中心。?来源：K. Ferriman Robertson et al. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 346–351 (2010).“这些人的确掌控着我们的社会，无论我们是否喜欢这一点，”杜克大学天才鉴别项目的心理学家Jonathan Wai表示；天才鉴别项目是资优青少年中心的合作项目。Wai整合了包括SMPY在内的11个前瞻性或回溯性纵向研究的数据，以展示早期认知能力和成年成就间的相关性。他说：“测试成绩在前1%的儿童往往会成为卓越的科学家和学者、财富500强CEO、联邦法官、参议员或亿万富豪。”这一结果与人们长期以来形成的观念，即专业表现主要靠练习造就是截然不同的。相反，SMPY的结果表明，相较于有意练习或社会经济地位等环境因素，早期认知能力对成就的影响更大。在美国和其他国家普遍将重心放在提高学习困难学生表现的同时，这一研究强调了培养早熟儿童的重要性，与此同时，鉴别和培养高学术天赋学生的做法带来了许多令人不安的问题：给儿童“贴标签”的风险，天才搜寻项目的不足，以及用标准化考试鉴别高潜力学生的缺陷，尤其是在贫困地区和农村。“我们在预测谁能攀上社会顶层上花费了如此之多的精力，以至于造成了低估被这类测试错过的孩子的风险。”Dona Matthews说，她是一位来自多伦多的发展心理学家，联合创办了纽约亨特学院的天赋学生研究与教育中心。“对接受测试的儿童来说，叫他们‘有天赋’或‘没有天赋’并没有什么好处。无论结果如何，都可能伤害儿童的学习积极性。”1研究缘起Stanley的心理计量学研究始于上世纪五十年代早期，心理学中最著名的纵向研究之一，Lewis Terman的天才遗传研究（Genetic Studies of Genius）激起了他对培养科学天赋的兴趣。从1921年起，Terman以高IQ值为依据挑选青少年被试者，然后追踪并鼓励他们的职业发展。但让Terman失望的是，他的研究队列中只产生了寥寥几位著名科学家。在因为129的IQ值仍不够高而没能入选的青少年中，就包括诺贝尔奖得主William Shockley，晶体管的共同发明人之一；另一位诺奖得主，物理学家Luis Alvarez也被拒绝过。Stanley猜想，如果Terman掌握了专门测试定量推理能力的可靠方法，就不会错过Shockley和Alvarez. 因此，他决定尝试SAT。虽然SAT是为年龄更大的学生设计的，但根据Stanley的猜想，它也一样适合于衡量年龄更小的资优学生的分析推理能力。培育有天资的孩子Camilla Benbow说，“我们不建议任何家长只为培养天才而培养孩子。那样的目标会导致各种社会和情绪问题。”Benbow 和其他培优研究者给出以下建议来激励聪明的孩子既能取得成就，也能过得快乐。让孩子体验各种不同的事物。当孩子表现出强烈的兴趣或天分时为他提供发展兴趣和天分的机会。既保证智力发展，也给予精神支持。通过赞赏努力，而不是能力，来帮助孩子形成成长性的思维模式。鼓励孩子进行智力上的冒险，并放宽心态对待能让他们吸取教训的失败。切忌贴标签：被贴上神童的标签可能造成精神负担。和教师协作满足孩子的需求。聪明学生通常需要更难的学习材料，更多的支持或能按自己的节奏学习的自由。检验孩子的能力。这可以作为要求超前学习的佐证，也有助于及时发现失读症、注意缺陷多动障碍之类的问题，或者社交和精神上的困难。1972年三月，Stanley汇集了巴尔的摩地区450名天资聪颖的12岁-14岁少年，让他们做SAT的数学部分。这是第一次标准化的学术天才搜索（研究者后来还加入了SAT的语言部分和其他测试）。“最令人惊讶的是有多少青少年能解出从未在课堂上学到过的数学问题，”发展心理学家Daniel Keating说，他当时是约翰·霍普金斯大学的博士生。“其次是有多少孩子能考出远高于许多顶尖大学录取标准的分数。”当时，Stanley并没有预想到SMPY会成为一项横跨数十年的纵向研究。但在五年后的第一次跟踪调查后，Benbow建议进一步扩展研究，持续追踪研究对象的生活，加入其他梯队，以及对兴趣、偏好、职业和其他人生成就的评估。研究前四个梯队的SAT分数范围是前3%到前0.01%。SMPY团队还加入了第五个梯队，对象是1992年的顶尖数学和科学专业研究生，以测试天才搜索模型鉴别科研潜力的可推广性。“据我所知，没有任何其他研究对STEM才能的发展原因，以及如何发展这种才能有如此全面的了解。” Christoph Perleth说；他是德国罗斯托克大学的心理学家，研究方向是智力和天赋发展。2空间技能随着数据的积累，研究者很快发现了天才教育和普通教育中“一刀切”做法的不足。1976年，Stanley开始测试第二梯队（563位SAT分数在前0.5%的13岁青少年）的空间能力，也就是理解和记忆物体间空间关系的能力。空间能力测试可能包括匹配从不同视角看到的物体，预测以某种方式切开物体后的横截面，或不同形状的倾斜瓶子中的水位等等。Stanley想知道的是，比起单独衡量定量和语言推理能力，空间能力是否能更好地预测教育和职业成就。被试者18岁、23岁、33岁和48岁时的跟踪调查证实了他的直觉。一项2013年的分析发现，专利数和同行评审论文数量与人们早年取得的SAT分数和空间能力测试成绩有关。两项SAT测试共同解释了大约11%的区别，空间能力则解释了另外的7.6%。这些发现表明，空间能力在创造力和技术创新方面发挥了重大作用，这和最近的一些其他研究吻合。“我认为空间能力可能是已知最大、且尚未开发的人类潜力来源，”Benbow的丈夫，心理学家David Lubinski说。他补充道，只在数学或语言能力上稍有优势，但空间能力高超的学生往往会成为杰出的工程师、建筑师和外科医生。“然而，我认识的招生主管中没人关注这一点，学校测试也往往会忽视这一能力。”虽然诸如SMPY的研究让教育者得以鉴别和培养资优青少年，但世界各国对这一群体的兴趣并不平均。在中东和东亚，过去十年来，在STEM学科表现优秀的学生受到了广泛关注，韩国、香港和新加坡会对儿童的天赋进行筛选，并引导资优儿童参加创新项目。在欧洲，人们的关注点则转移到了教育的包容性方面，对资优儿童研究和教育项目的支持已渐渐消退。2010年，英国决定取消国家资优青少年学院，将资金转拨到让更多的贫困学生进入顶尖大学上。3走上快车道Stanley的研究刚刚开始时，天资聪颖的美国儿童并没有多少选择，所以他选择为资优青少年寻找能实现自身潜能的环境。“对Julian来说，仅仅发掘出有潜力的孩子是不够的，如果想让他们继续发展自己的才能，还需要对他们的天赋进行培养，”Linda Brody说。她曾经是Stanley的学生，现在在约翰·霍普金斯大学运行一个为资优儿童提供辅导的项目。起初，他们的工作是以个案形式开展的。在听说他对Bates所做的工作后，其他资优儿童的父母也开始联系Stanley。Bates在进入大学后继续表现优异，在他17岁时，Bates已经获得了计算机科学学士和硕士学位，在康奈尔大学攻读博士学位。后来，Bates担任了卡内基梅隆大学的教授，并成为了人工智能领域的先锋。“我小时候很羞涩，高中的社会压力并不适合我，”现年60岁的Bates说，“但在大学，我在其他科学和数学爱好者中如鱼得水，虽然我的年龄要小很多。我得以在社会生活和智力发展两方面按照自己的步伐成长，因为更快的节奏能让我保持兴趣。”SMPY数据支持让快速学习者跳级的做法。在对跳级学生和同样聪明但没有跳级的对照组的比较研究中，跳级的学生获得博士学位或申请专利的可能性要比对照组高出60%，获得STEM领域博士学位的可能性则高出两倍。跳级在SMPY研究的前万分之一队列中非常常见，由于他们多元的智力能力和快速的学习节奏，教育这些学生是最具挑战性的。Lubinski表示，让这些学生跳级的成本很小，或者根本不需要额外的花费，在一些情况下甚至能为学校省钱。“这些孩子不需要什么新颖的教育方法，他们只需要提前获得已经向年龄更大的学生提供的资源就行了。”许多教育者和家长仍然相信跳级对儿童有害，会损害他们的社交能力，提前结束他们的童年，造成知识差距。但大多数教育研究者都同意，在社会、情绪、学术和职业发展方面，跳级对绝大多数资优儿童都是有益的。跳级并不是唯一的选项。SMPY研究者表示，即使是最轻微的干预，比如向资优儿童提供有挑战性的学习材料，如大学先修课程等，都能获得明显效果。在资优学生中，相比于没有得到STEM高级内容学习机会的同辈，在大学前获得了更多机会的学生发表了更多的学术论文，取得了更多专利，职业发展水平也更高。虽然SMPY项目带来了许多见解，但研究者对天赋和成就的了解仍不全面。“我们仍然不知道为什么即便在高智力人群中，有些人能成功，而另一些人仍然不能。”Douglas Detterman说，他是凯斯西储大学的心理学家，研究方向是认知能力。“智力不能解释人与人之间的全部区别；动力、个性因素、努力程度和其他因素也很重要。”一项与SMPY方法类似的德国研究也增进了我们的认识。慕尼黑天赋纵向研究（The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness）从上世纪80年代中期开始追踪了26000名资优学生。研究发现，认知因素最具预测性，但一些个人特质，比如动力、好奇心和处理压力的能力对表现也有一定影响。环境因素，比如家庭、学校和同伴同样会发挥一些作用。来自这些智力天才搜寻项目的数据也增进了对人们如何形成某一领域的专业知识的理解。一些研究者和写作者，尤其是佛罗里达州立大学的Anders Ericsson和作家Malcolm Gladwell推广了能力门槛（ability threshold）的概念：对于IQ值超过一定门槛（往往是120）的个人来说，在发展专业能力方面，集中练习时间比额外的智力能力要重要得多。然而，SMPY和杜克大学天才项目的数据却与这一假设矛盾。今年发表的一项研究对比了童年智力在前1%的学生与在前0.01%学生的表现，研究者发现，前者获得高级学位的比例比普通人群的高25倍，但后者获得博士学位的比例是基准水平的50倍。但其中一些研究仍然存在争议。许多天赋开发方面的研究都将精力预测谁能攀上社会顶层上，北美和欧洲的一些儿童发展专家对此感到悲哀。教育者也对将一些学生鉴别并标记为天才的做法感到十分不安。“高分只能告诉你考试者能力很强，以及他/她当时非常适合参加那场考试，”Matthews说。“而低分什么都不能告诉你。”因为许多因素都会压抑学生的表现，包括文化背景，以及是否习惯参加高压力考试等等。Matthews认为，当早期成就处于较高和较低极端的学生感到自己的未来成功前景受到了评估时，他们的学习动力便可能会受到损害，并可能会导致定势思维（Fixed Mindset），这是斯坦福大学的心理学家Carol Dweck提出的一种概念。Dweck认为，比起定势思维，鼓励儿童形成成长思维要好得多——也就是将大脑和天赋视作起点，相信才能可以通过不断的努力和智力挑战发展的思维方式。“学生关注的是提高，而不是焦虑自己有多聪明，或是急于获得肯定，”Dweck说，“他们努力学习，好学得更多、变得更聪明。”Dweck和她的同事的研究表明，掌握了这种思维方式的学生在学校更有学习动力，能获得更高的分数。&Benbow同意不该用标准化考试限制学生的选择，而应开发适合学生能力的学习和教学方法，让不同能力水平的学生实现自己的潜能。Benhow和Lubinski计划在明年对极具天赋的万分之一队列开展中年调查，侧重于职业成就和生活满意度，并对1992年美国顶尖大学研究生样本进行重新调查。未来的调查或许会进一步证伪资优儿童不需要帮助就能成功的长期误解。“教育界仍在抗拒这一观点，”密苏里大学的认知发展心理学家David Geary表示，他的研究方向是数学学习，“一种普遍的观点是，在认知或其他方面拥有优势的孩子不应该被给予额外的鼓励，而应该将更多的注意力放在表现较差的孩子身上。”虽然美国的天赋儿童教育专家一直在呼吁扩大天赋开发项目的选择，但在目前，受益于这些项目的往往仅限于天赋和社会经济条件都处于社会顶端的学生。“我们知道怎样鉴别这些孩子，也知道怎样帮助他们，”Lubinski说，“但我们还是错过了许多这个国家中最聪明的孩子。”但这些天才学生有着塑造未来的潜力。“看看我们的社会目前面临的问题——医疗保健、气候变化、恐怖主义、能源问题等等，他们是最有潜力解决这些问题的孩子，”Lubinsiki说，“在他们身上放手一搏绝没有错。●　●　●On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn't enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes. When that plan failed, Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol as an undergraduate.Stanley would affectionately refer to Bates as “student zero” of his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study's ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.“What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just stud he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”.With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence. Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth — which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams. Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says. Source: K. Ferriman Robertson et al. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 346–351 (2010).Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice — that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status. The research emphasizes the importance of nurturing precocious children, at a time when the prevailing focus in the United States and other countries is on improving the performance of struggling students (see ‘Nurturing a talented child’). At the same time, the work to identify and support academically talented students has raised troubling questions about the risks of labelling children, and the shortfalls of talent searches and standardized tests as a means of identifying high-potential students, especially in poor and rural districts.“With so much emphasis on predicting who will rise to the top, we run the risk of selling short the many kids who are missed by these tests,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist in Toronto, Canada, who co-founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College in New York City. “For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them 'gifted' or 'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine a child's motivation to learn.”Start of a studyOn a muggy August day, Benbow and her husband, psychologist David Lubinski, describe the origins of SMPY as they walk across the quadrangle at Vanderbilt University. Benbow was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when she met Stanley in a class he taught in 1976. Benbow and Lubinski, who have co-directed the study since Stanley's retirement, brought it to Vanderbilt in 1998.“In a sense, that brought Julian's research full circle, since this is where he started his career as a professor,” Benbow says as she nears the university's psychology laboratory, the first US building dedicated to the study of the field. Built in 1915, it houses a small collection of antique calculators — the tools of quantitative psychology in the early 1950s, when Stanley began his academic work in psychometrics and statistics.His interest in developing scientific talent had been piqued by one of the most famous longitudinal studies in psychology, Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius, . Beginning in 1921, Terman selected teenage subjects on the basis of high IQ scores, then tracked and encouraged their careers. But to Terman's chagrin, his cohort produced only a few esteemed scientists. Among those rejected because their IQ of 129 was too low to make the cut was William Shockley, the Nobel-prizewinning co-inventor of the transistor. Physicist Luis Alvarez, another Nobel winner, was also rejected.Stanley suspected that Terman wouldn't have missed Shockley and Alvarez if he'd had a reliable way to test them specifically on quantitative reasoning ability. So Stanley decided to try the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now simply the SAT). Although the test is intended for older students, Stanley hypothesized that it would be well suited to measuring the analytical reasoning abilities of elite younger students. Nurturing a talented child“Setting out to raise a genius is the last thing we'd advise any parent to do,” says Camilla Benbow, dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. That goal, she says, “can lead to all sorts of social and emotional problems”.Benbow and other talent-development researchers offer the following tips to encourage both achievement and happiness for smart children.Expose children to diverse experiences.When a child exhibits strong interests or talents, provide opportunities to develop them.Support both intellectual and emotional needs.Help children to develop a 'growth mindset' by praising effort, not ability.Encourage children to take intellectual risks and to be open to failures that help them learn.Beware of labels: being identified as gifted can be an emotional burden.Work with teachers to meet your child's needs. Smart students often need more-challenging material, extra support or the freedom to learn at their own pace.Have your child's abilities tested. This can support a parent's arguments for more-advanced work, and can reveal issues such as dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or social and emotional challenges.MoreIn March 1972, Stanley rounded up 450 bright 12- to 14-year-olds from the Baltimore area and gave them the mathematics portion of the SAT. It was the first standardized academic 'talent search'. (Later, researchers included the verbal portion and other assessments.)“The first big surprise was how many adolescents could figure out math problems that they hadn't encountered in their course work,” says developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, then a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. “The second surprise was how many of these young kids scored well above the admissions cut-off for many elite universities.”Stanley hadn't envisioned SMPY as a multi-decade longitudinal study. But after the first follow-up survey, five years later, Benbow proposed extending the study to track subjects through their lives, adding cohorts and including assessments of interests, preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. The study's first four cohorts range from the top 3% to the top 0.01% in their SAT scores. The SMPY team added a fifth cohort of the leading mathematics and science graduate students in 1992 to test the generalizability of the talent-search model for identifying scientific potential.“I don't know of any other study in the world that has given us such a comprehensive look at exactly how and why STEM talent develops,” says Christoph Perleth, a psychologist at the University of Rostock in Germany who studies intelligence and talent development.Spatial skillsAs the data flowed in, it quickly became apparent that a one-size-fits-all approach to gifted education, and education in general, was inadequate.“SMPY gave us the first large-sample basis for the field to move away from general intelligence toward assessments of specific cognitive abilities, interests and other factors,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association in Washington DC.Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth in the 1970s.In 1976, Stanley started to test his second cohort (a sample of 563 13-year-olds who scored in the top 0.5% on the SAT) on spatial ability — the capacity to understand and remember spatial relationships between objects. Tests for spatial ability might include matching objects that are seen from different perspectives, determining which cross-section will result when an object is cut in certain ways, or estimating water levels on tilted bottles of various shapes. Stanley was curious about whether spatial ability might better predict educational and occupational outcomes than could measures of quantitative and verbal reasoning on their own.Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally overlooked in school-based assessments.”Although studies such as SMPY have given educators the ability to identify and support gifted youngsters, worldwide interest in this population is uneven. In the Middle East and east Asia, high-performing STEM students have received significant attention over the past decade. South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore screen children for giftedness and steer high performers into innovative programmes. In 2010, China launched a ten-year National Talent Development Plan to support and guide top students into science, technology and other high-demand fields.In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities.
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