The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Read Free Book Online

scientific sense).
    Hollingworth’s journey with these children began during a psychology course on the mentally impaired that she taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1916. For the sake of contrast, Hollingworth decided to put an exceptionally bright child through a round of intelligence tests in front of her class. Two of her students nominated an eight-year-old boy, Edward Rochie Hardy Jr., who had an excellent academic record.
    Hollingworth tested Edward using the Stanford revision of theBinet-Simon intelligence scales. The original Binet-Simon version had been created to identify children of “subnormal intelligence.”But over time, the test, which eventually became known as the Stanford-Binet, was revised to measure high as well as low levels of intelligence.In the modern version, scores fall along a smoothed-out bell curve.But the version that Hollingworth used compared the subject’s “mental age” (a calculation based on the quality of the answers given) with the subject’s actual age to calculate an intelligence quotient, or IQ.
    Hollingworth began testing Edward in front of the approximately thirty students in her class. As soon as Edward answered the first question for his age-group, Hollingworth realized that she had gotten more than she bargained for. She immediately jumped forward to the questions for older children, which Edward also answered easily. It took two full class periods to test Edward, and even then he exhausted the scale without being fully measured, reflecting an IQ of at least 187.
    As Hollingworth grew more familiar withEdward’s background, she learned that he didn’t speak until he turned two, but when he did begin to talk, he could say all the words he knew in German, French, Italian, and English. He was reading books like
Peter Rabbit
before he was three. By the time Edward was eight, he had picked up several more languages, worked out the Greek alphabet from an astronomical chart, and thought the ultimate in fun would be to have statistics for a country he had imagined on Venus.
    Hollingworth began searching for other children with IQs above 180. Over the course of twenty-three years, she found only eleven others who hit her skyscraping IQ benchmark; she eventually deemed it “nearly useless to
look
for these children, because so few of them exist.” According to Hollingworth’s estimation, such children were fewer than one in a million.
    Hollingworth described Edward as “prodigious.” But when asked to clarify what she meant by that, she said thatshe merely meant thathis abilities were “wonderful” or “extraordinary.” For future prodigy scholars, it wasn’t much to go on.

    For Feldman’s anti-Piaget purposes, selecting participants was critical. He needed something more specific than “wonderful” or “extraordinary.”
    Piaget thought that children didn’t typically demonstrate the highest level of cognitive development—formal operational thought—until they were eleven. Feldman had his heart set on finding children doing just that in their field of expertise before Piaget thought it possible. So, in his initial prodigy study,he decided to include only children who performed at the level of a professional (which, he thought, clearly evidenced formal operational thought) before reaching double digits. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for what would become the leading definition of a child prodigy.
    Feldman found three children who met his prodigy threshold—two eight-year-old chess aficionados and a nine-year-old composer.He gave them each four psychological tests that measured traits ranging from spatial reasoning to moral judgment. Then he declared victory: The prodigies’ abilities with respect to these “general developmental regions” were in no way as exceptional as their skills in their areas of specialty. They were performing at the