Specific Writing Disabilities in Intellectually Gifted Children

Abstract

To determine whether some gifted children may have specific writing disabilities, we compared 10 gifted and 10 average children in grades 1 through 6 (N = 120). The primary question addressed was whether gifted writers exhibit more advanced skills than their average-IQ peers in both higher level cognitive writing processes (as manifested in quality of text generation) and lower level writing processes (as manifested in transcription), or solely at one of those levels. Results supported our hypothesis that gifted and average children differ in higher level cognitive processes but not in lower level processes in writing. Poor writing performance in gifted students may reflect low-level transcription deficits and is not necessarily the result of laziness, boredom, or lack of motivation as is often believed. Implications of this research for identifying writing-related learning disabilities in gifted students are discussed.