Talented Readers

Identifying the characteristics of and defining talented readers is challenging because no consensus exists. Research indicates that not all academically gifted students are talented readers, and not all talented readers are identified as academically gifted perhaps because of the wide variation of abilities in this population. This widely known research has had the result of precocious reading not being taken seriously by educators, who often believe that early reading is just decoding without comprehension. Many of these early readers are likely gifted but are overlooked for gifted education programs. Most current research suggests that gifted students' general learning characteristics differ from average learners in several ways: They usually learn faster than others; have the capacity to find, solve, and act on problems more readily; have ...