Customer Reviews

Developing Mathematical Talent: A Guide for Challenging and Educating Gifted Students

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Developing Mathematical Talent: A Guide for Challenging and Educating Gifted Students by Susan Assoluline and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik is a good guide to what students, teachers, and parents need to know about teaching the mathematically gifted student. It was written by two leaders of the field whose years of experience make an interesting perspective. It is designed to be read by both teachers and parents. The useful format goes through the basics of what anyone who is dealing with a mathematically gifted student should know.
The book makes some basic points. There are many students who are mathematically gifted who are underserved. Even those identified and placed in gifted programs, often experience problems in getting the proper support in math. Often gifted programming focuses on other academic areas or cultural enrichment rather than providing a replacement for the regular math curriculum that the mathematically gifted students have outgrown. There don't seem to be a lot of standards that describe what should happen for the mathematically gifted student. That can be positive because the needs of gifted children are different. Some mathematically gifted students only need to be accelerated a year or two ahead, others find the standard curriculum totally inadequate to their current knowledge and aptitude. However, the negative part of not having an organized standard means that parents, gifted teachers, and gifted students themselves, need to be strong advocates getting a proper fit for each student. There needs to be a lot of hard information. Just saying that a student is advanced is not enough. You need to determine how advanced a student is (there are many tests available to help do that). Schools have more buy-in if they can help administer the tests and see the scores for themselves. Hard numbers are more convincing to administrators than anyone's opinion. Unfortunately, education is a profession that is constantly beset by fads. Several of the current ones, such as mixed ability grouping, no tracking, etc., are not supportive to gifted education. However, our gifted students cannot afford for gifted education to be a fad.
This book would be a useful for anyone dealing with a mathematically gifted student. However, I think it would be more useful as a reference book rather than as a book to be read cover to cover. The way the book is organized it would be very easy to dip in to find information out about types of tests available or suggestions on how to advocate for a gifted child. There's a good, if not extensive index, the chapter titles are very descriptive, and the title page of each chapter lists its main points. This tightly organized structure makes it easy to reference as needed. It would be a good addition to the professional development section of every library.

This book is an easy to read and very practical guide to working with mathematically talented students, who may or may not be identified as gifted. It is logically organized and can be used as a resource, but I found it interesting enough to read cover to cover, as well.

For me, an especially useful detail in the book was the description of how to use the results of talent search tests to differentially provide mathematical instruction to students with various score levels. As a parent of a child who took one of these tests, I was never sure how to interpret the results. As a teacher, I will now know.

The book is a very useful guide.