Issue awareness in young highly gifted children: do the claims hold up?

It has been claimed that the highly gifted child becomes aware of philosophical, societal, moral, and metaphysical issues at an unusually young age (Carroll, 1940; Derevensky & Coleman, 1989; Freeman, 1994; Hollingworth, 1942; Roeper, 1982; Silverman, 1994; Winner, 1996). Hollingworth (1942) considered an early interest in issues, which she termed "questions of origin and destiny," a marker for giftedness (p. 279). In spite of the frequency of the observation that gifted children have an unusually early and intense interest in issues, there is little empirical evidence of this phenomenon. The insight of those who live and work directly with these children-often the only source of information readily available to researchers interested in rare populations--is invaluable; hut it is not sufficient to evaluate whether highly gifted children's interest in issues differs significantly from that of typical children. Empirical examinations of early issue awareness in highly gifted children are rare.

If these claims are supported by empirical evidence, they force us to broaden our view of giftedness: A high IQ could reflect not only heightened cognitive powers, but also a concern with certain kinds of content (i.e., environmental issues or issues involving justice). If this is the case, a great deal more attention should be paid to the impact that exposure to issues may have on young highly gifted children.

Giftedness

For educational and occupational purposes, there are advantages to thinking of giftedness as high ability in any domain (yon Karolyi, 2005; yon Karolyi & Winner, 2005). In the present discussion and unless otherwise specified, the term gifted will refer exclusively to high intellectual ability, specifically high verbal abstract reasoning skills. An IQ score at or above 140 will serve to define highly gifted.

What is Issue Awareness?

An issue can begin as a problem. At the playground, the sandbox is littered with cigarette butts and broken beer bottles. A very young child does not realize that this is a problem--that he shouldn't play there, and begins to climb in. An older child recognizes a problem exists: the trash makes the sandbox ill suited for play. She tells the toddler he shouldn't climb in. The baby-sitter, thinking about the issue, shakes her head as she redirects the little boy: How many playgrounds are littered with butts and glass? How many beaches? Why do people pollute their world? What can be done? Someone comes by with a shovel and bucket, removes the debris from the sandbox, and dumps it into a nearby trash can. The problem is solved. The issue remains.

A problem occurs at a local level. An issue, in contrast, is a generalization: an abstraction applied to larger context. Issue awareness involves the ability to generalize an idea from the level of 'my playground' to the level of children's playgrounds in general. In sum, issue awareness refers to the identification or recognition of a substantive social, cultural, environmental: or physical circumstance, or a philosophical, psychological, existential; or metaphysical construct that has a recognized unresolved component and that is "extensive" or extends beyond the individual's immediate experience. The term extensive, meaning far-reaching, broad, large, and extended [MS Word, 2000 thesaurus], is used in lieu of the term global, to avoid confusion with the common usage of global meaning related to the world.

Issue Awareness in Gifted Children: A Limited Review of the Literature

Research on issue awareness in gifted children is sparse. Sources of information relevant to issue awareness include studies of gifted children's questions, wishes, worries, tears, and visions of the future. Rather than attempt a comprehensive examination of all of the research on each specific issue that might come to the awareness of a gifted child, I review studies directly relevant to general issue awareness and giftedness. Occasionally, research on typical populations is drawn upon to provide context.

Are Gifted Individuals Especially Aware of Issues?

According to Piaget (1929/1951) an interest in metaphysics, specifically an interest in questions about "the primal cause," arises around ages 6 to 7 and develops in a particular order (p. 366). According to Hollingworth (1942), the need for systematic explanations of such things does not arise until much later, around age 12 (or when the child has reached the mental age of 12 or 13). These stances are not incompatible: The sorts of systematic explanations required by Hollingworth's child call for abstract reasoning not available to Piaget's child until around age 12.

We expect extensive issues to become salient during adolescence and some concern with the larger issues of humanity is considered a normal part of adolescence. But what about when young children become issue aware? Early issue awareness could create an atypical developmental experience for the gifted child (Roeper, 1995).

Very young children may participate in causes such as food drives for the local homeless shelter, adopting a panda bear, collecting and removing litter from the beach, and so on. Accordingly, we expect that young children know something of issues; but we expect them to do so in a concrete and constrained manner. We would not expect a preschooler participating in a canned food drive to become overwhelmed at the notion that there are hungry children. Few will ask, "How many children are hungry?" "What happens to them after Thanksgiving?" "What do they usually eat?" "Why don't we give them canned food throughout the year?" Nevertheless, a few young children do ask just these sorts of questions. Are these, then, intellectually gifted children?

Professionals working with and studying gifted elementary school children describe an unusual "interest in problems besetting society" (Martinson, 1961, p.79-80), such as world peace (Strang, 1956), endangered animals, or depletion of the ozone layer (Silverman, 1994). They observe that these young gifted children hold powerful ideals (Ward, 1980), show early concern with moral, philosophic (Ramaseshan, 1957; Winner, 1996), and spiritual issues (Clark, 1992; Lovecky, 1998; Tolan, 2000; see also Morelock, 1992), and that they may "get caught up in issues and causes that other students do not see" (Ford, 1989, p. 134; see also Manaster & Powell, 1983).

These observations tell us only that some gifted children are aware of issues. But many young children, not just gifted children, sometimes ask deep sounding questions (Matthews, 1994; Siemens, 1994). All that can be generalized from these reports is that individual young children, both gifted and typical, sometimes ask very interesting questions. They do not tell us whether gifted children, as a group, are disproportionately interested in issues.

Are Gifted Groups Especially Aware of Issues?

In the early 1900s, a group of 30 children (ages 4 years, 3 months to 11 years, 11 months) who were gifted (130 to above 160 IQ), African American, and who attended segregated elementary schools were found to have early awareness of the issues of racism and discrimination (Proctor, 1929). This observation, and others like it, supports the notion that gifted groups have early issue awareness; however, the studies described in this section included neither control groups of typical individuals nor measures that allow for normative comparisons.

Gifted children (ages 7-18) were found to be afraid of major world problems such as war and hunger, and felt they were more concerned about these problems than were their typical peers (Derevensky & Coleman, 1989; Galbraith, 1985). Such self-other comparisons, however, only tell us participants' perceptions of their relative standing. The fears of typical adolescents include global issues, such as world politics and economics according to Gullone (2000). The concerns the gifted children described are more similar to those of typical adolescents than they are to the concerns of typical elementary-school-aged children, who are most likely to be afraid of animals (Derevensky, 1979).

Very few of the studies that provide information relevant to issue awareness include children who are highly gilled, and even fewer compare the highly gifted to other groups. One exception is Barbe's (1964) study. Barbe compared moderately (120 to 134 IQ) and highly gifted (148 and higher IQ) students on a Three Wishes Task. Only 1 out of 20 highly gifted children compared to 8 out of 20 moderately gifted children's wishes were found to be directed towards world welfare. It might be premature to conclude on the basis of this result, however, that highly gifted children are less likely than moderately gifted children to be concerned about world welfare. Seven highly gifted children compared to 1 child in the less gifted group wished for additional wishes. Because the wish for additional wishes was not granted one cannot know whether any or all of the highly gifted children's additional wishes would have included ones for world welfare. Although no control group of typical students was included in this study, Barbe compared moderately (120 to 134 IQ) and highly gifted (148 and higher IQ) students on a Three Wishes Task.

Are Gifted Groups, Compared to Typical Groups, More Aware of Issues?

None of the studies described above included control groups of typical students. Without such a control group, one cannot assess whether gifted students' concerns about issues are greater than average. The fact that groups of gifted children can display issue awareness does not tell us whether groups of typical children are equally aware of issues. Comparisons between gifted and typical groups are needed if we are to better assess whether the gifted are disproportionately aware of issues.

Consistent with most of the above findings, studies that include control groups of typical children reveal that gifted children's wishes, worries, tears, and expectations of the future reflect higher than average levels of issue awareness. For example, in Winstead's (1999) qualitative study of 1st and 2nd grade girls, no member of the control group (n = 6) indicated a wish or a worry related to an extensive issue, nor did their mothers report the girls had such wishes or worries. In contrast, the gifted group's (n = 6) responses included extensive issues such as "world peace, 'no poor people', 'no endangered species,' and happiness for the world;" and their mothers reported the gifted children worried about "social problems, future events, environment, food shortages, child abuse, wasted resources, and war" (p. 55).

Clark and Hankins (1985) asked gifted and typical 6-10 year olds questions intended to reveal awareness of philosophic issues. They found that the gifted children disproportionately expressed concern about war. In contrast, gifted children studied by George and Gallagher (1979) were no more concerned about war than were typical children; but were more concerned than average about pollution.

Gallagher (1990) asserted that gifted children are particularly able and inclined to picture the future. Furthermore, this picture may not always be rosy. Gifted students may be more negative than average about the future (George & Gallagher, 1979) and a more pessimistic view of the future is linked to higher intelligence (Freeman, 1994). In fact, Freeman's study revealed that those who had the most pessimistic expectation of the future (expecting a nuclear holocaust during the next 100 years) were, on average, highly gifted (M = 142 IQ). Her result, however, does not tell us whether children were more aware of the issue or merely more pessimistic.

Level of IQ has also been linked to degree of concern about issues. Ramaseshan (1957), compared typical (90-110 IQ) to moderately (120-129 IQ) and very (130 IQ or higher) gifted adolescents and found that the most gifted group had "the greatest interest for international understanding, humanity, ethics and philosophy" (p. 90). These findings however do not tell us whether the most gifted children had such concerns at an early age.

Training programs such as Future Problem Solvers can increase issue awareness (see Torrance, 1977 for early work in this area) and gifted children increase their issue awareness when they participate in such programs (Tallent-Runnels & Yarbrough, 1992). This suggests that access to information about issues can enhance issue awareness. Tallent-Runnels and Yarbrough, however, also found that even gifted children who did not participate in the Future Problem Solvers program were more aware of global issues than were typical students.

Research Questions

Whereas some studies have investigated issue awareness in gifted children, few have employed comparison groups and few have looked at whether such awareness arises at an early age. The study reported below formed part of a larger study investigating issue awareness in young children (yon Karolyi, 2001). Presented below is the portion of the study designed to clarify the relation between high levels of giftedness and issue awareness, and to determine whether highly gifted children show earlier and greater issue awareness than their agemates. Two research questions were investigated:

1. Do highly gifted children have early issue awareness compared to their chronological agemates?

2. Is early issue awareness in highly gifted children found even when such children do not have greater than average access to information about issues in the home?

Methodology

Participants

Two groups of children were studied. Twenty-eight 7-to 9-year-olds comprised the highly gifted (HG) group (15 girls, 13 boys); Twenty-six children comprised the control group consisting of typical children of the same chronological age (the CA group) (12 girls, 14 boys). Only participants who obtained ratio 1Q scores between 94 and 130, inclusive, on the SIT (measure to be described below) were included in the control group (see Table 1). With two exceptions, each participant assigned to the HG group obtained a ratio IQ score of 140 IQ or above on the SIT. The two exceptions were children who had previously obtained scores of over 150 IQ on professionally administered Stanford Binet LM IQ tests.

Groups were matched on SES to the extent possible. Nearly half of the HG group members lived in New England; nine came from the Midwest, four from the west coast, and two from the central Atlantic states. All control group members lived in New England. One parent of each child also was included in the study. In each group, more mothers (HG: n = 24, CA: n = 18) responded than fathers (HG: n = 4, CA: n = 8). The participating parent provided information about his or her education and ethnicity; however, one member of the control group did not respond to these questions. Participating parents of highly gifted participants reported having completed an average of 17 years of school, whereas those of controls reported completing an average of 15 years of school. About 80% of the parents in both groups reported being White of European descent. Minority group members, including Americans of multiracial, African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern or Arabian descent and Native Americans, made up the remainder.

To reduce the effects of parent activism on children's issue awareness, children whose parents volunteered or were employed by activist organizations and who described themselves as activists were dropped from the study (n = 13). This decision was made because I sought to determine the relationship between issue awareness and high IQ independent of a family environment that encouraged issue awareness.

Materials and Procedures

Parent Report. The purpose of the Parent Report was to obtain parents' perceptions of their children's issue awareness and to gather demographic information. Parents were asked to fill out a checklist of issues by marking any item that they felt had interested or concerned their children (without consulting their children). For each item marked, parents noted the age at which their child first expressed interest or concern about the issue (Onset) and rated children's responses on 5-point scales in terms of (a) the importance of the issue to the child (Importance), (b) the frequency of the child's expressions of interest or concern about the issue (Frequency) and the extent to which children had access to information about the issue (Access) through (c) discussions that took place in the home--with or in front of the child (Talk) and through the media (Media), via (d) print sources (Print) (e) television, videos, film, or pictures (Film), and (f) the internet (www). The rating options for Importance ratings ranged from "not important" to "extremely important." The remaining rating options ranged from "never" to "extremely often." Twenty four issues were listed on the checklist and there was space for parents to write in up to four additional issues of concern to their children. From the list of issues, parents then selected up to three issues they considered as being of most importance to their children. Parents filled out the Parent Report measure prior to their child's interview.

Slosson Intelligence Test. The Slosson Intelligence Test (SIT) is a brief individual intelligence test that measures mostly verbal-abstract-reasoning abilities. It was used primarily as a screening instrument. It was designed to correlate with the Stanford-Binet LM and does so strongly (Armstrong & Jensen, 1982). For children of the ages included in the present study, the SIT can measure IQ scores up to 163 or 164. The 1982 version of this measure was selected because ratio IQ scores can be extrapolated for scores that exceed this ceiling. To ensure consistency across intelligence ranges, ratio IQ scores were calculated for all participants. (This use of an older measure with older norm tables was approved by the test publisher.) The ratio IQ scores obtained by the participants are therefore unlikely to reflect the scores they would obtain from current measures professionally administered. However, they do allow comparison to the large body of research employing the Stanford-Binet LM.

Self Report. In the first section of the Self Report measure, children were asked a set of questions for each of up to three issues. These issues were the ones that parents listed as most important to their children. Children rated the issue's importance to them (Importance) on a five-point scale, ranging from not important (1) to extremely important (5). When issues were rated as not important or only somewhat important, no further questions were asked about the issue. When an issue was rated as important, very important, or extremely important, children were asked, "Tell me something about--(the issue)--and why it's important to you." Neutral probes, such as: "Tell me more about that" or "Can you explain that to me?" were used, as needed, to clarify ambiguous or insufficient responses.

Next, students who rated an issue as very or extremely important, were asked a variant of the question, "What could fix that (the issue) or make it better'?" The purpose of this question was not only to determine whether children understood the issue sufficiently to offer a solution, but also to redirect children's thoughts towards solutions in case talking about concerns had caused anxiety.

In the next section of the Self Report, students were asked, "What are some other things that are important to the world and that are important to you'?" The purpose of this question was to generate a list of issues important to each child. There was no limit to the number of responses allowed. The responses the child gave to this question were classified as either an issue or not an issue. Responses classified as issues were counted and contributed to the Count score. Students were then asked to select from this list the top three issues that were most important to them. The questions for the second set of three issues (child-identified issues) were identical to those used for the first set of issues (parent-identified issues).

Pictures. Children then responded to a set of eight issue-laden drawings (Pictures) (see Figure 1 for an example). These were deemed appropriate for viewing by young children, and were either chosen from the magazine Environment (Renaud, 1996; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c) or from the Canadian National Committee for UNICEF web site (McVicar, 1999; Schwartz, n.d.). The former depict various environmental concerns and the latter depict issues of concern to the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child (Schwartz, 1998a, 1998b). The images can be read literally (e.g., a palm tree growing in Alaska) or as illustrating a social or environmental problem (e.g., global warming).

For each picture, children were asked to respond to a set of questions: (a) "What do you think this picture is about? What is it trying to tell us?" (b) "What makes you think that?" Then, students were asked about the importance of the issue to them. Next, they were asked for possible solutions, using the same questions and ratings as used in the Self Report measure.

Any extensive issue that the child identified in response to the picture stimuli was accepted, regardless of whether or not it was the issue the artist likely had in mind. For example, most of the participants who described an issue in response to the drawing in Figure 1 of an Inuit boy and a polar bear in a snowy landscape looking with confusion upon a palm tree said the picture was about global warming. One highly gifted child, however, identified the issue of invading non-indigenous plants. Although this was not what the artist had in mind, it was an extensive issue that the child clearly understood.

Students were tested in a private room with one researcher. Students' responses to the Sell" Report and Pictures measures were taped and transcribed, then rated by two judges trained to code participants' responses. Judges rated only those responses related to issues the child rated as important. The calculations used to determine the extent to which judges agreed on how to rate responses (inter-rater reliability) were based on the percentage of agreement prior to discussion. When the judges did not agree on how to rate an item, they discussed it until they came to consensus. Analyses were performed on these consensus-based ratings.

Results

Inter-Rater Reliability

Even prior to coming to consensus on how to rate responses, the judges' independent ratings, for the most part, agreed. Con-elations were used to quantify the level of judge agreement. For the Self Report and Pictures measures, respectively, the correlations for Understanding were r = 0.776 and r = 0.862 and for Count, they were r = 0.822 and r = 0.858. Consensus ratings were used for coding all the data used in the relevant analyses.

Group Comparisons

Each comparison was theoretically motivated (based on expectations derived from reviewing existing literature). The direction of difference (the expectation that the highly gifted group would obtain scores that were greater than, or less than, or equal to those of each control group) was predicted a priori. Therefore, to test whether groups' scores differ significantly from each other, a series of one-tailed independent t-tests were employed for the group comparisons. Effect sizes (d), (in this case, a measure of the extent to which group differences were responsible for the results) were calculated using the SD of the control group (see Tables 2 to 4).

To reduce the risk of making Type I errors (incorrectly identifying effects that, in fact, do not exist in the world) resulting from undertaking multiple comparisons, Benjamini and Hochberg's (1995) False Discovery Rate (FDR) method of controlling family-wise error was employed. The alpha level of p < .05 formed the basis of the calculations used to set adjusted critical alpha levels (see Tables 2 to 4). The decision to use the FDR approach rather than a more stringent one was made because the nature of the investigation called for an approach that did not overly inflate the risk of making a Type II error (incorrectly missing an effect that, in fact, exists in the world).

All but three variables met the criterion for equality of variance. These were the parent reports of Frequency, Count, and the access variable, Film. The adjusted values from t-tests based on there being no assumption of equal variances is, therefore, reported for these three variables. (Equality of variance is stipulated when employing certain statistical analyses. It is the assumption that data for both groups, in this case, are similar in nature.)

Self Report. Consistent with prediction, results based on the Self Report measure revealed that ratings of the HG group's Understanding of the issues they deemed to be important were higher than were those of the CA group, t(52) = 2.043, p(1-tail) = 0.023, [p.sub.crit] = 0.025; d = 0.599. No group differences were found for the number of issues (Count) that were identified by the groups of children, (d = 0.279), nor for their report of the issues' Importance (d = 0.043). Note that one outlier from the control group, whose score was more than four SD from the mean, was excluded from the Importance analysis.

Pictures. The HG group received a higher mean Understanding score, and the difference between groups was significant, t(52) = 2.852, p(1-tail) = 0.003, [p.sub.crit] = 0.018; d = 0.786. In addition, the HG group identified more issues as being depicted by the pictures (Count) than did the CA group, t(50) = 2.945, p(1-tail) = 0.002, [p.sub.crit] = 0.014; d = 0.827. Consistent with the Self Report findings, there were no group differences in the children's ratings of the Importance of the issues represented by the pictures (d = 0.223).

Parent Report. Results obtained from the parent questionnaires present a very different picture of the young highly gifted child. Below, the t-test results for four Parent Report variables (Onset, Importance, Count, Frequency) are reported. (To provide consistency across variables so that higher scores reflected higher issue awareness, the ratings for Onset were reversed prior to analysis.)

Parents of the HG group reported that their children became aware of issues at a much younger age than did parents of the CA group (Onset), t(47) = -4.110, p(1-tail) = 0.000, [p.sub.crit] = 0.007; d = -1.048. Parents of the HG group also listed a higher number of issues that their children were aware of (Count), t(47) = 4.629, p(1 -tail) = 0.000, [p.sub.crit] = 0.004; d = 1.612, considered them more important (Importance), t(49) = 2.530, p(1-tail) = 0.007, [p.sub.crit] = 0.021; d = 0.665, and were more often concerned about them (Frequency): t(48) = 3.940, p(1-tail) = 0.000, [p.sub.crit] = 0.011; d = 1.349.

Access. Consistent with prediction, planned contrasts revealed no differences between the HG and CA groups. A nonsignificant trend, however, was found for the Print variable (see Table 4) suggesting that the HG group might possibly gain more access to information about issues from print sources than do their agemates. Nevertheless, collectively the Access results provide support for the assertion that above average access to information about issues in the home is not responsible for highly gifted children's early issue awareness.

Discussion

The decision to seek triangulated observation points was made with the hope that doing so would lead to a clearer picture of issue awareness in the highly gifted child. Instead, this decision resulted in inconsistent findings. Although the parent results consistently favor the highly gifted group, the results from the children's own responses are mixed.

One reason why the results of this study were mixed could be that the two groups were not differentiated enough. The control group included not only typical but also moderately gifted children. The IQs in the control group should have each been no higher than one SD above the mean, rather than averaging one SD above the norm. Additional limitations that could relate to the measures are discussed below.

Evidence from the child interviews has provided only mixed support for the hypothesis that highly gifted children have earlier issue awareness than their chronological peers. Children in the HG group understood issues better and were better able to recognize issues represented in pictures, compared to the CA group. They were no better than their agemates at specifying, recalling, and listing issues; and they attributed no greater level of importance to issues they had picked out as important. In contrast to the evidence from child interviews, evidence from the parents demonstrated that highly gifted children had higher issue awareness than their chronological agemates on all measures.

Because no differences were found between groups in terms of children's access to issues in the home, one can conclude that the highly gifted group had average access to the four sources of information about issues. Greater issue awareness in the highly gifted thus cannot be explained by environmental (family) variables.

Understanding Issues

In spite of limitations, some tentative conclusions can be drawn about issue awareness in highly gifted children on the basis of this study. As a group, highly gifted children were unambiguously shown as having superior understanding of issues; both the issues that they and their parents identified as being of importance to them, and the environmental and human rights issues depicted in drawings.

Access to Information About Issues

A predicted, but counter-intuitive result was that the highly gifted children's superior understanding of issues did not seem to spring from having greater than average levels of access in the home to information about issues. However, a replication of this study employing larger samples might possibly reveal that highly gifted children have greater access to information about issues through their reading. Nevertheless, the present study's result that the gifted and control groups have the same level of access to issues in the home strengthens the finding that highly gifted children have early issue awareness.

Importance

Despite the fact that children in the highly gifted group displayed greater issue understanding, they did not give issues higher importance ratings than did the control group. This finding is puzzling. It is possible that there is a response demand characteristic in terms of how important all the children felt they should consider specific issues. It is also possible that the measure itself had too restricted a range to distinguish between these groups. In addition, it is possible that awareness of an issue's existence is necessary, but not sufficient for considering it important. In other words, highly gifted children might be more aware of issues, but simply did not consider them all important, or at least not personally important. For example, one might be a vegetarian who recognizes Mad Cow Disease has become a global issue; but does not consider it important because it is not personally relevant. The prompt, How important is [the issue] to you? [emphasis added], indeed, asks about personal relevance. Thus it is possible that in this study a child's understanding of an issue is a better indicator of issue awareness than is his or her evaluation of the issue's importance. It seems reasonable to deem understanding an issue as central to issue awareness and, thus, deserving of more weight than one would assign to an evaluation of that issue's importance.

Count

Perhaps the most intriguing outcome was that even though highly gifted children did not identity more issues than did their agemates in their self reports, they did identity more issues in response to pictures. This may have occurred because of the greater difficulty of the Pictures task. One would expect a child to be familiar with most of the issues in the Self Report measure (a list of issues generated by the child plus three issues identified by the parent as of importance to the child). One could not predict, however, how many of the issues represented in the pictures would be familiar to the child. The more transparent nature of the Self Report task may have rendered it less able to distinguish between groups, whereas the difficulty of the Pictures task may have allowed it to reveal clear distinctions.

Parent Reports

In contrast to the mixed evidence provided by the direct measures, parents consistently reported early issue awareness in highly gifted children. According to their parents, highly gifted children became aware of issues at a much younger age than their agemates, near the end of their fourth year versus the middle of their sixth year. From their parents' perspective, highly gifted children also were aware of more issues, and expressed their awareness of them more frequently than did their agemates. In strong contrast to the results of the direct measures, parents of highly gifted children reported these issues to be of greater importance to their children than did parents of those in the control group. Indeed, if only the parent questionnaires had been used to assess children's issue awareness, the conclusions would be unequivocal: highly gifted children have early issue awareness. The disparity between the direct measures of children's issue awareness and those of parents' perceptions of these same phenomena is striking.

One possible explanation for this disparity could be that parents of the highly gifted children report inflated scores. This could happen if their responses are subject to a halo effect. In other words, they might generalize their children's talents and gifts across a wide range of characteristics, seeing them as not only brighter, but generally superior. An overestimation of the highly gifted group's scores would explain much of the disparity between the parent and the child responses.

There is a problem with this explanation, however. Inflated issue awareness scores by parents of highly gifted children should be accompanied by similar inflation of their reports on the children's access to issues, especially in terms of discussion and reading. No corresponding differences were found in those ratings.

The protective parent explanation. There remains another speculative explanation, one that could provide a starting point for future investigations of this phenomena. Informally, a number of the parents of highly gifted children (only), confided that they protect their children from media sources and from potentially disturbing information about issues. This leads to an interesting but entirely speculative interpretation of the discrepancies in the results. If highly gifted children are particularly issue aware and this comes to their parent's attention early in their lives (perhaps before age 5), parents may take steps to protect their children from encountering information about issues, acting as both moderators and mediators of issue awareness. If this is the case, then the results of this study suggest that parents would be accurately reporting the child's high issue awareness, based on their history and knowledge of the child's sensitivities. However, if a parent took steps to limit the nature of their child's exposure to issues, such steps could result in an average level of knowledge about issues. In other words, issue regulation of the child's environment could 'normalize' the child's issue awareness, but not his or her potential for issue awareness.

This proposed issue regulation explanation is also consistent with other discrepancies in the results. Whereas there was no difference obtained through the Self Report measure between the highly gifted and control group in the number of extensive issues identified, the highly gifted children were better than controls at identifying issues presented in pictures. If parents of highly gifted children are protective about issues, issue regulation might also explain this disparity.

If issue awareness relies on inference, one would expect highly gifted children who are issue regulated to show greater sensitivity to issue-laden stimuli than do their agemates. And indeed this result was obtained. In contrast to the Pictures task, the Self Report task did not call on inference, but on experience. Here, the issue-regulated highly gifted child's performance should look much like that of their agemates, and it does. Thus, it is possible that parents of highly gifted children regulate their exposure to issues. Such an explanation is consistent with the pattern of results reported here.

In summary, there were inconsistencies in results that arose from using three different kinds of measures. A plausible explanation that could account for the discrepancies is that parents of highly gifted children regulate their exposure to issues in response to their children's early issue awareness. If future research supports this explanation, then the strategy of using three observation points will not have muddied the waters, but will have led to an explanation that accounts for the complexity in the data.

Conclusions

If, conceptually, we consider issue understanding of greater relevance to issue awareness than evaluation of issue importance, we can conclude that the admittedly mixed evidence from the child interviews, along with the evidence from the parent interviews, provides support for the hypothesis that highly gifted children show earlier issue awareness than do typical children. This awareness appears to have emerged without highly gifted children having greater access to information about issues in the home.

Future investigations of issue awareness might include a measure of inference ability and test whether skills in inductive reasoning predicts issue awareness. Future studies should also include younger children (ages 4-5) to determine whether the parents of highly gifted children are accurate in their perceptions that onset of issue awareness occurs at such a young age.

Strong evidence emerged that parents of highly gifted children view their children as having higher levels of issue awareness than do parents of typical children. Whatever the source of this view, be it an accurate reflection of their children or a halo effect, parents who hold such a view are likely to have different expectations of their children than do parents without such a view. Until we know more about the children's own issue awareness, we cannot assess the effect of their parents' expectations on the children, but we can take the parents' experience into account. It is likely that some sense of extra responsibility accompanies seeing one's child as particularly sensitive to extensive issues when they are very young, and this would add to the qualitative differences between parenting highly gifted children and parenting more typical children. Some parents of highly gifted and typical children might benefit from support, information, or guidance in how to engage in developmentally appropriate discussions about issues with children. However, until we know what is developmentally appropriate, such a need, if it exists, must go unmet.

In conclusion, only some of the claims about highly gifted children held up to the scrutiny this investigation afforded. There is a great deal more to learn about issue awareness in gifted, as well as typical children. It seems likely that children, both gifted and typical, know a great deal more about issues than adults realize. One comment I heard repeatedly from the children themselves was that they liked having an adult ask their opinion and take the time to listen to it. Children may need to have adults listen more to their concerns about issues. Certainly, adults in children's lives could do something about this state of affairs. All children, not only gifted children, are confronted with powerful issue-laden images every day. We must continue to ask how this affects both our children and our society.

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks must go to the children and families that gave of their time and made this project possible. I would also like to thank Ellen Winner, Karen Rosen, Jeanne Sholl, Karen Arnold, Hiram Brownell, Peter Gray, Jacqueline Lerner, and Alan Keniston for their generosity, excellent advice, guidance, and humor.

Manuscript submitted August 9, 2004.

Revision accepted July 1, 2005.

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Catya von Karolyi is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where she teaches courses in Human Development and Educational Psychology and conducts research. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Global Awareness Division of the National Association for Gifted Children, as well as on the advisory board to Metrolina Regional Scholars' Academy (a charter school for gifted students), and is a past president and board member of the Hollingworth Center for Highly Gifted Children. E-mail: [e-mail]

Table 1

Participant Gender, Age,
Ratio IQ, and Mental Age

Group   n    Female   Male    CA       MA     RIQ   min.-max.

HG      28     15      13    8.890   14.193   163    142-205
CA      26     12      14    8.817   10.128   115     95-130

Note: CA = chronological age, MA = mental age, RIQ = mean ratio
IQ. Ages in years.

Table 2

Means, Standard Deviations, T-Tests,
and Effect Sizes for the Self Report
and Pictures Measures

Source           group n        M (SD)         t (1-tail)

Self report

Understanding
  HG               28        2.517 (0.641)       2.043
  CA               26        2.181 (0.561)

Count
  HG               26        4.231 (1.394)       1.087
  CA               25        3.760 (1.690)

Importance
  HG               28        4.078 (0.643)       0.517
  CA               26        3.972 (0.854)

Pictures

Understanding
  HG               28        2.084 (0.478)       2.852
  CA               26        1.717 (0.467)

Count
  HG               26        4.370 (1.497)       2.945
  CA               25        3.160 (1.463)

Importance
  HG               28        3.367 (0.762)       0.832
  CA               26        3.192 (0.786)

Source           group n    df      p      p-crit      d

Self report

Understanding
  HG               28       52    .023      .025     0.599
  CA               26

Count
  HG               26       49    .141      .032     0.279
  CA               25

Importance
  HG               28       52    .304      .043     0.043
  CA               26

Pictures

Understanding
  HG               28       52    .003      .018     0.786
  CA               26

Count
  HG               26       50    .002      .014     0.827
  CA               25

Importance
  HG               28       52    .205      .036     0.223
  CA               26

Note. HG = highly gifted; CA = chronological agemates.

Table 3

Means, Standard Deviations, T-Tests, and
Effect Sizes for the Parent Report Measures

Source           group n        M (SD)         t (1-tail)

Parent report

Onset
  HG               28       58.968 (13.932)      -4.110
  CA               21       77.551 (17.731)

Count
  HG               28       16.500 (7.280)        4.629
  CA               25        8.720 (4.826)

Importance
  HG               28        3.509 (0.547)        2.530
  CA               23        3.095 (0.623)

Frequency
  HG               28        2.988 (0.759)        3.940
  CA               23        2.275 (0.529)

Source           group n    df      p      p-crit      d

Parent report

Onset
  HG               28       47    <.001     .007     -1.048
  CA               21

Count
  HG               28       47    <.001     .004      1.612
  CA               25

Importance
  HG               28       49     .007     .021      0.665
  CA               23

Frequency
  HG               28       48    <.001     .011      1.349
  CA               23

Note. HG = highly gifted; CA = chronological agemates; Onset = age
of onset of awareness of issues in months.

Table 4

Means, Standard Deviations, T-Tests and
Effect Sizes for the Access Measures

Source           group n        M (SD)         t (1-tail)

Access

Talk
  HG               27        2.950 (0.918)        0.471
  CA               23        2.837 (0.766)

Print
  HG               27        2.231 (0.522)        1.705
  CA               19        1.958 (0.552)

Film
  HG               27        2.174 (0.821)       -0.500
  CA               23        2.276 (0.630)

www
  HG               26        1.230 (0.364)        0.755
  CA               16        1.139 (0.398)

Source           group n    df      p      p-crit      d

Access

Talk
  HG               27       48    .320      .050      0.149
  CA               23

Print
  HG               27       44    .048      .029      0.494
  CA               19

Film
  HG               27       48    .310      .046     -0.163
  CA               23

www
  HG               26       40    .227      .039      0.228
  CA               16

Note. HG = highly gifted; CA = chronological agemates.