Child Genius.. anyone watching

[Totallyfloaty35]

Its quite interesting, can't believe 5yrs have passed since previous show.

Neil captured everyones hearts i can picture his 7 year old face now!

I agree FM. To me it is more about percentiles and comparing a child or adult for that matter to peers of the same age to get an idea of their abilities.

Some of the websites about gifted children have some very good explanations of IQ testing and the whole area of testing.

I hope Neil is doing well, living in a community and has friends. I caught up with it when they were 14 and I was younger then watched the 7 one. So looking forward to the 56 programme. Funny thing was that it was an experiment in class then they dropped that and realised it was a great social experiment instead.

Where can I watch 7up from the beginning?

I realise these programmes only show tiny bits of the IQ tests and I've never done a full-scale one myself, but I do wonder about their robustness and relevance.

I understand the idea that some things - like mazes and puzzles - can't be taught but is that really completely true? Surely a child who's done lots of mazes and puzzle-type things as part of their 'enrichment' programme is going to be better at them, just as a child who's brought up in a household where people drill them on vocabulary is going to be more likely to know what a lotus is.

Thought Kieron was very talented, though, and thought it was very sad that Peter (or his dad) had focused so much on chess rather than on everything else in life.

I ended on 275,000 as I know nothing about football!

I thought that school chess master was spot on. Friends are important and Peter seemed to lead a solitary life. I'm not always sure that parents know best where their children are concerned.

Mine didn't restart back to 1,000,000, so only have 75,000 now!

I think the theory - though someone who knows more please correct me if not - is that you can improve your IQ test performance by practice up to a point, but not beyond a certain fairly small increase. How true this is I don't know. I suppose also a psychologist administering these tests in person would get a sense of whether a child was very familiar with the format of a question or whether it was completely new to them.

Redsuedeshoes - I don't know if you can watch it online but the DVD is available from Amazon here

Bummer!

we didnt view kieran's paintings very much..
i wonder how they will sell when he is 20 for example, and will they hold their value?

the business in the gallery when they were selling was shocking.
grab grab grab.
all sold!

I don't know there must be something about 7Up on U tube. Imagine it now, they were the pioneers of reality TV, pity they didn't get a fraction of the money that the 'stars' of Big Brother can command nowadays.

singer, loads of bits of the IQ tests can be taught. And you do get better at them the more you take. But with the exception of boasting or establishing competency in people whose IQ is known to be very low (eg., an adult with an IQ of below 70 is not considered able to judge their own actions in an adult way), mostly what people want to know from IQ tests is the relationships between bits of one person's IQ. Eg., are they better verbally or spatially? I suspect with that, teaching doesn't substantially alter the internal relationships between different bits of your intelligence.

That's as I understand it, I could be talking rubbish. I know that mine and my brother's (we've had a few each, it's very routine for dyslexics) vary quite a lot from one to another in terms of the final scores, but the pattern of strengths and weaknesses always looks the same.

I've heard that theory too. But I've noticed, just from doing some practice verbal/non-verbal reasoning tests with my sons (for 11+) how much better they get at solving those kinds of puzzles. And on the 11+ website there are loads of people drilling their children with vocabulary lists.

Joan Freeman always seems amazingly surprised at meeting clever children, which you think she'd be quite used to, given her line of work.

(sorry that took me ages to type)

Cross-posted, LittleRP.

Thanks hocus

I think the difference might be that with verbal/non-verbal reasoning tests the purpose of the question is usually transparent, isn't it? Whereas lots of IQ test questions aren't. It's quite hard to know how to get better at, say, matching symbols because there's no obvious 'trick' to it.

[hhmm] if you can explain an IQ test before hand and show someone what they are looking for, i.e all the shapes have the same no. of sides etc then I suppose you can gain a few points, but they are very hard to work out quickly to someone below gifted intelligence (me)!

Yeah, and it's often timed so precisely, it'd be easy to tell whether someone genuinely just 'sees' the spatial questions, or whether they work them out.

I always run out of time before I get to an answer but apparently people who are really gifted sometimes get confused because they think the answer is so obvious it's not worth stating!

Bum. Have missed it on both 4 and 4+1. Anyone know if it's going to turn up again later? Really loved this before - Dante sticks in the mind as a good'un, felt sorry for Aimee's mum even the first time round, those ones in East Anglia seemed like they wanted genius children more than actually having genius children. We actually still have an earlier one (where Dante and his mate went to Paris) saved on our Sky+ as we enjoyed it so much.

Although I did not like the IQ test I do think that children under the age of 7 who sit it are not likely to have pre-learnt more than most children of a similar age.

When one of my kids was asked to give the difference between a baseball and an orange he said, "If you hit the orange with a bat it will splat everywhere". The answer was wrong as he was supposed to say one was a fruit and one was an inanimate object.

But the tests look at such an array of stuff, how on earth do you compress it into one linear scale. What is it actually a measure of, that number that comes out at the end? That difference between the two brothers - one very exceptional and one extremely exceptional or whatever it was. Different terms of what?

Want to add that we have been looking at the Pearson UKCAT tests for medical entrance recently, not all Unis use them, but most do and I can tell you they are horrendous to a layman. I would say that anyone who gets a respectable score on these tests is an intelligent person.

We will buy a book prior to the test if needs be, but as well as getting through this, A level grades need to be AAA, plus the personal statement which makes a student out to be 'Mother Theresa' plus a personal recommodation from Barrack' (nicked this from another mumsnetter) so it's good to know that our future doctors are the creme de la creme. [hgrin]