What We Do

The Gifted Development Center is a testing and assessment and counseling center that has served families of the gifted since 1979. We are child advocates.  The heart of our work is diagnostic evaluation of the complexities wrought by giftedness. Many extremely bright children have difficulty fitting into a curriculum designed for average children and relating to age peers who do not share their interests.  In addition, some have difficulty writing, reading, focusing, mastering a two-wheeler, making friends, dealing with new situations, or coping with teaching strategies that do not support their learning style. 

We offer comprehensive assessment, counseling, tutoring, and telephone consultations for advanced learners. We specialize in visual-spatial learners (individuals who think in images), twice-exceptional learners  (gifted and learning-disabled), the highly gifted (who score above the 99^th percentile), and gifted adults. Our main purpose is to assist individuals in recognizing and developing their strengths, overcoming their weaknesses, becoming joyful learners, and actualizing their potential. Toward this end, we also provide books, articles, audiotapes, videotapes, our Advanced Development Journal, and an international Speakers’ Bureau to educate the public about the needs of gifted children and adults.

For more about our testing experience, please visit More About the GDC.

The Director

The Director of the Gifted Development Center, Dr. Linda Silverman, is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist, who has studied gifted children over 45 years.  She holds a Ph.D. 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.  Her textbook, Counseling the Gifted and Talented (Love: 1993), is the most popular text in this area; it has been adopted at more than 50 colleges and universities. Her newest book is titled, Upside-Down Brilliance:  The Visual-Spatial Learner.  Linda was appointed Co-Chair of the Natioal Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Task Force on Assessment and a member of NAGC's Task Force on Social and Emotional Needs of the Gifted. In addition, Linda was named to the American Psychological Association task force on giftedness and the expert panel guiding the revision of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (SB-V) for Riverside Publishing.  Studying the assessment, psychology and education of the gifted since 1958, she has contributed over 300 articles and chapters, as well as founding the only journal on adult giftedness, Advanced Development Journal.  

In his invitation to Dr. Silverman to join the Advisory Panel for the SB-V, Dr. Wasserman wrote:

We are inviting a few of the leading psychologists in America to join this panel, and we hope that you will honor us by agreeing to participate… Your research is precisely on target in many important respects… Many of the changes we are planning for the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition reflect ideas you have addressed in your research, including a return to the developmental age-scale format of the L-M edition.

Linda Silverman was nominated as a "person of influence in the field of gifted education."  This profile was constructed for a National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) publication entitled, Profiles of Influence in Gifted Education:  Historical Perspectives and Future Directions. 
It was written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of NAGC.  

Click here to view Linda's Column.

The Staff

The staff of the Gifted Development Center is comprised of recognized experts in the assessment, counseling and development of giftedness.  Many have contributed books, chapters, articles, reviews, resource guides, research, and presented at national and international conferences.  Both the Director and Associate Director of the Gifted Development Center serve as leaders in NAGC's Task Force on Assessment. Our examiners are exceptionally well qualified, including school psychologists who also work in local public schools.  The advice of our staff has been sought repeatedly in the development of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (SB-V).  We were asked to create items for the test, suggest types of items needed for advanced students and adults, determine nomenclature for upper ranges of ability, participate in item trials, and conduct several validation studies.  Riverside Publishing hosted a three-day gifted summit meeting in Denver, July, 2000, so that Dr. Richard Woodcock, creator of the Woodcock-Johnson tests, Dr. Gale Roid, author of the fifth edition of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, and Dr. John Wasserman, Director of Psychological Assessments, could learn from the experience of the staff of the Gifted Development Center about particular issues related to assessing gifted children. We have had a major impact on the Binet scales, and our interactions with the test constructors resulted in the establishment of higher ceilings on the Woodcock-Johnson III Battery.   

In addition to all of the regular qualifications needed to conduct assessments, our examiners are selected for their ability to gain rapport with gifted children, as these children are often perfectionistic, intense, and shy in new situations.  Regardless of the amount of experience our examiners have when they join the staff, they are observed testing the gifted by our Director of Staff Development.  Our testers and supervisory staff always work as a team.  We hold weekly supervision meetings and monthly staff meetings.  All testing is reviewed by a supervisor, who checks the scoring, carefully analyzes interpretation, and edits the reports. No information is released to other agencies without written parental consent.  Follow-up counseling sessions are conducted by two professionals—the examiner and a senior staff member—who go over the child’s performance in detail, interpret the results, answer the specific questions parents have, and offer recommendations. For biographical information on any of our staff, please click here.

Assessing the Whole Child

Parents come to us to help them solve the mystery of who their children are and what they need. We assess much more than the child’s level of intelligence.  All parents complete an eight-page Developmental Questionnaire, an Introversion/Extraversion Continuum (filled out separately by each parent), a Behavioral Checklist, a Short Sensory Profile, and the Characteristics of Giftedness Scale.  Before scheduling testing, a senior staff member usually conducts an individualized needs assessment with the parents, in which all of these materials are reviewed, along with any prior test results.  This includes a phone consultation, in which parents share their concerns, and receive preliminary guidance.  The assessment is tailored to the specific needs of the child, and may include tests of emotional functioning, achievement, visual-motor abilities, and visual-spatial abilities.  We always administer a Harter self-concept scale whenever we give an IQ test.  For children under eight, the scale measures scholastic, social, and physical competence.  For children 8-12, the scale additionally measures their attitudes about their appearance, behavior, and global self-worth. For teens, the scale includes all these, plus close friendships, job competence, and romantic appeal. 

We use a combination of instruments to determine the full strengths of the child, as well as weaknesses that may be hidden by the child’s giftedness. Sometimes, children are referred to specialists for further evaluation of vision, sensory integration, auditory processing, reading, attention, or other issues when apparent problems are noted in testing.  We have no vested interest in children’s scores, except to ensure that they be considered in the
child’s educational planning. 

Above-Level Testing

Some of the children we assess achieve the highest possible scores on subtests of IQ tests such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition (WISC-IV), indicating that their abilities surpass the measurement tool.
 
When this occurs, our staff understands that above-level testing is needed to gain an accurate estimate of the abilities of these children. Children above 170 IQ learn more quickly and have considerably more difficulty adjusting to school programs than children in the 150 range, just as an IQ of 30 is dramatically different from an IQ of 50. Dr. Leta Hollingworth, who studied profoundly gifted children, found that the IQ range of 125-155 was optimal, and that children above 170 IQ were at higher risk for social and emotional problems. This was confirmed by Dr. Lewis Terman, who wrote, “the child above 170 IQ has one of the most difficult problems of social adjustment that any human being is ever called upon to meet.”

Tests that have ceilings of 155 or160 cannot fully measure strengths of children beyond this range.  As Dr. Julian Stanley points out, this would be like trying to measure 6-foot tall individuals with 5-foot long rulers.  A large number of university programs for middle school students use above-level testing (the SAT or ACT) to determine which students in the top 3-5% on grade-level achievement tests need more advanced work at a faster pace.  The Stanford-Binet L-M is an above-level measure for younger children, which allows examiners to differentiate students who need more advanced work at a faster pace than children who are moderately gifted.  

While the Stanford-Binet L-M is a dated instrument, it is vitally important at both extremes—with severely delayed and exceptionally advanced students.  There is no other instrument that can accurately measure the abilities of either of these groups of children.  Modern tests are more suitable for children closer to the average range.  As there are no current alternatives for assessing these groups, Riverside Publishing states in its 2002 catalog:

Form L-M, with its lower floor and higher ceiling, is diagnostically appropriate for children at the extremes of mental ability.  It can be used to evaluate levels of mental retardation and intellectual giftedness.

Unfortunately, few psychologists assess children on the Stanford-Binet L-M, and they are not trained in the particular issues involved in testing the gifted. This leads to the misperception that scores on this instrument are “inflated.” This is equivalent to saying that a child who is actually 6-feet tall has an “inflated” height, because he or she exceeds the 5-foot ruler, which is sufficient to measure the height of the majority of children.  The other concern expressed is that the child’s score is compared to old norms.  This is offset by the difficulty of terms and concepts on the L-M that most children do not encounter today. Further, Dr. John Wasserman asserts:

[In regard to] the Flynn effect (the notion that norms become obsolete over time due to improvements in population intelligence)…there are sound statistical reasons for assuming that there may be only very minimal changes at the extremes of ability and that most of the changes in question occur for children and adults near the population mean.  Moreover, Form L-M is one of the few reasonable options given the dearth of intelligence tests with sufficient ceiling to assess extremely gifted children. …We consider your continued use of Form L-M for gifted assessment to be reasonable and sound, based upon an informed knowledge of the literature.

The Stanford-Binet L-M is currently used in several public and private school programs that serve highly gifted students (above 145 IQ) in the United States and Australia. The Binet L-M does not always generate higher scores than other instruments.  In research we conducted, comparing the WISC-III to Stanford-Binet L-M with over 100 children in the nongifted, gifted, and highly gifted ranges, there was no statistical difference in scores for nongifted children.  Significant differences appear in the gifted range, and become extremely significant in the highly gifted range. Some of the children in this study had lower scores on the Binet. A large number of gifted children we have assessed on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) and the Binet L-M achieved lower scores on the Binet L-M.   The Binet L-M is only one instrument we use in a large battery to gain more information about the needs of the child.