Intellectual Differences Among the Gifted

… and how personality, culture, access and expectations muddy the waters.

Intellectual Differences Among the Gifted

As complexity increases within a specialty field, so does the average IQ (Gottfredson, 1994). See more in Notes about this. For example, the average surgeon’s IQ is higher than the average general practitioner’s, and the average high school teacher’s IQ is higher than the average primary-grade teacher’s. People of higher intellect are attracted to the challenge or complexity of certain fields. We cannot assume to know someone’s abilities just by the job they perform (in other words, although the average IQ of teachers may be 120, there can easily be a teacher with an IQ of 145), but we can assume that teachers — and other professionals — possess at least a certain minimum level of intelligence for the job.

It is likely that the Level One gifted kindergartner or the Level Three first grader has a very different reasoning approach than his or her teacher, and perhaps a higher IQ. It is important to remember that, even though the child’s IQ may be higher, the teacher’s mental age is still ahead of even a Level Five six-year-old. By age 10 or so, that’s not as certain! Gifted students and their teachers are often not on the same wavelength.