We are looking for participants in an exciting opportunity to assist in field research. Pearson Education Inc. will be releasing the 5th edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V) in 2014.  In an effort to ensure that the assessment tool works well for children of all ability levels, Dr. Ruf has been selected to be an examiner to help norm the test, and the group she has been asked to assess is gifted children and teens, ages 6 years through 16 years, 11 months.   

Here are some of the basic requirements:

• Your child must have been previously tested and have an IQ of 130 at the 98th percentile or above. Pearson has requested that the primary qualifying test be no older than 2 years for children under 10, 3 years for children under 15, and 5 years for the older age range of 15-16.
• Your child cannot have been tested on ANY intelligence measure in the previous 6 months, or on any Wechsler Intelligence test in the prior year from when we schedule the test with Dr. Ruf.
• Your child's primary language MUST BE ENGLISH.
• Your child must have no diagnosis of any learning disability.
• Testing will be conducted in Dr. Ruf's home office in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We are scheduling morning and afternoon appointments for Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays starting in May, 2013. We will consider appointment dates, at this time, between now and August 29. 

So if you believe your child would qualify to participate in this testing, please write to me at [email protected] for more information.

By the way, are you aware of how Mensa works to meet the needs of kids under 18? "Young Mensans" is one of the fastest-growing segments of this organization's membership. Mensa has a full-time Gifted Youth Specialist who supports Young Mensan services and resources, and local groups have Gifted Youth Coordinators who serve as resource guides and also often plan activities specifically for Young Mensans. Check out the many benefits available on the Mensa website.

We often find that many gifted children (and adults) are perfectionists and are afraid to make mistakes. Or if something they take up isn't immediately easy, they will put it down again. Our friend Karl Bunday, who is active in the Minnesota Council of the Gifted and Talented, addresses the need to make mistakes in his article The Explorer is the Person who is Lost, or Courage in the Face of Stupidity.

While the article mainly addresses the study of mathematics - and in fact appears on the website of Camp Epsilon, a summer camp for highly gifted math students - the wisdom can be applied to any field of study.

In a somewhat related article in the National Post of Canada, Sarah Boesveld writes In praise of failure: The key ingredient to children's success, experts say, is not success. 

What if music and painting were taught the same way as mathematics is taught? Here's an interesting essay by a top mathematician, Paul Lockhart, on how math is as much art as science and how our educational system, in the way that we go about teaching math, strips all the beauty from it. Take a look at A Mathematician's Lament.