Does all cream rise? The plight of unsupported gifted children

Neville J. Schofield and Risto Hotulainen followed 37 Finnish students across a full decade to answer a deceptively simple question: if you spot talent early and then do nothing special about it, does that talent surface on its own? The children had all been flagged as potentially gifted during pre-school, using a German instrument called the Breuer-Weuffen Differentiation Test (BWDT). A decade later, the researchers went back and measured how these same students stacked up against their classmates.

What makes the design interesting is the absence of intervention. None of the identified children received any targeted program inside the Finnish comprehensive school system. They were taught alongside everyone else, with no acceleration, no enrichment, nothing tailored to the ability picked up years earlier. If any of them pulled ahead, it would be despite the system rather than because of it.

They did pull ahead. Compared with a Control Group of their peers, the originally identified students finished school with significantly stronger final grades. The gap was not limited to marks on paper. These students also rated themselves higher on Scholastic Competence, meaning they saw themselves as more academically capable, and the self-perception lined up with the results.

Taken together, those two findings point back to the pre-school test itself. An assessment given to children before they had started formal schooling turned out to forecast where many of them would land ten years on. For a predictive tool, that is a strong record.

The BWDT claims to capture something the authors call verbo-sensor motor status. That term bundles together five differentiation abilities tied to language: optical, phonemic, kinesthetic, melodious and rhythmical. In other words, the test is less about raw IQ and more about how finely a young child can discriminate within the perceptual and motor channels that feed into language.

Not every story in the data was a success, though. When Schofield and Hotulainen looked closer, they found recurring patterns among some of the children that signaled a risk of long-term underachievement. Early promise, in those cases, did not translate into later performance. Which is really the point behind the paper's title. Cream is supposed to rise, but some of it, left unsupported, stays at the bottom.