SENGChat: Outliers Are My Bag!

Who cares about the outliers? I do. It matters if a child is 2, 3, 4, or 5 standard deviations (SD) below the norm. And it matters if a child is 2, 3, 4, or 5 SD above the norm. Life experience differs dramatically as one veers further and further from the norm. It helps to understand the chasm between a child’s development and that of age peers, as well as the full strength of the discrepancies between a child’s strengths and weaknesses. The most asynchronous child is the one who is highly gifted and learning disabled. Giftedness mask disabilities and disabilities depress IQ scores; therefore, qualitative recognition of giftedness and expertise in learning disabilities are both essential to truly seeing and helping the child.

Join Dr. Linda Silverman for a SENGChat on this topic!

Have questions you would like Linda to answer? Send them in advance to inquries@sengifted.org 

About the Presenter:

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist. She founded the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiary, Gifted Development Center [www.gifteddevelopment.com] in Westminster, Colorado. In the last 43 years, she has studied over 6,500 children assessed at GDC, the largest data bank on this population. Her research enabled the creation of extended norms on the WISC-IV and WISC-V.

She specializes in twice exceptional and profoundly gifted children. In 1985, she founded POGO, and later PG Retreat, for families of children about 160 IQ. Her Ph.D. is in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California. For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education. She has been studying the psychology and education of the gifted since 1961 and has written over 300 articles, chapters and books, including Counseling the Gifted and Talented, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, Advanced Development: A Collection of Works on Gifted Adults and Giftedness 101. She founded the only juried psychological journal on adult giftedness: Advanced Development.