What characterizes children nominated as gifted by teachers? A closer consideration of working memory and intelligence

Abstract

Teacher nominations are often used in school settings to identify gifted children. However, although high intelligence is part of almost all definitions of giftedness, prior research has consistently shown that not all children nominated as gifted by teachers have high intelligence. In order to further understand the characteristics of these students, we herein explore the role of another cognitive construct, namely working memory (WM). In a sample comprising N = 81 fourth graders, both WM and intelligence showed the same predictive value for characterizing teacher-nominated gifted children, pointing to the importance of the thus-far-unattended WM for characterizing these students.

Keywords:

• giftedness
• gifted nomination
• working memory
• intelligence
• elementary school

Notes

1. Note that we also controlled for gender (n.s.) and age (n.s.) to take more potentially influential variables into account. However, for reasons of clarity and as both variables did not appear to be significant, we did not report their statistics in detail.

2. Note that we also included gender (n.s.) and (z-standardized) age (n.s.) as control variables in the logistic regression analyses (see also Footnote 1).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a Grant from the Hector Foundation II to Ulrich Trautwein.