Fifteen Student Characteristics of Potential Giftedness

• Student’s use of language.
• Quality of student’s questions.
• Quality of examples, illustrations, or elaborations that a student uses in explaining some thing or in describing events or in telling stories.
• Student’s use of quantitative expressions and quantitative reasoning.
• Student’s ability to devise or adopt a systematic strategy for solving problems and to change the strategy if it is not working.
• Special skills students exhibit that are unusual for their age or grade.
• Student’s innovative use of common materials in the classroom or outside of it.
• Student’s breadth of information.
• Student’s depth of information in a particular area.
• Student ’s collections of materials or hobbies.
• Student’s persistence on uncompleted tasks.
• Student’s absorption in intellectual tasks.
• Extensiveness of student’s exploratory behavior.
• Student’s criticalness of his or her own performance.
• Student’s preferences for complexity, difficulty, and novelty in tasks.