Cultural program offers free gifted-child evaluations

 

Two girls join the gifted child. Photo provided by Lloyd Southworth.

 

By Liang Meilan

A free, two-week program to determine whether a child is gifted began at Rainbow Theater, Haidian District, last Sunday. The project is being conducted by a group of European teachers who are in Beijing as part of a cultural exchange program.

The four teachers can evaluate if a child, between the ages of 3 and 8, is gifted in problem solving, the performing arts or general creativity. Consultations are held daily, except for Monday and Tuesday, through January 31.

All those evaluating are experts in early childhood education. Among them is Kathleen Bryant, former director of evaluations at WhizKids International, who is preparing to open a gifted children’s academy in Toronto this September.

“Over 120 families have taken advantage of the evaluations. Most of them were expat families while some 25 percent were Chinese families,” said Lloyd Southworth, community affairs director of the China Trade Commission (CTC) Beijing Office, a Hong Kong-based non-government agency that sponsored the teachers’ exchange program.

The CTC spearheaded the gifted child evaluation program primarily as a service to Beijing expats who might feel that the local school system is too preoccupied with academics to identify special skills and creative talents, the organization said in a statement.

“Traditional Chinese schools tend to suppress a child’s creativity and imagination. And while the international schools of Beijing are much more liberal, children growing up in a strange new country might become temporarily more withdrawn, reclusive or anti-social because of the language barrier,” CTC’s Executive Director, Anthony DeMarco, said.

Cai Jingkun, one of Beijing’s foremost experts on child development and early education, commended the project. “The earlier we can identify that special creative spark or skill in a child, the better, faster and more fully it can be developed,” he said.

The evaluations are conducted by observing the children in a pre-arranged play setting where the teachers watch for markers of creativity, leadership, problem solving and social skills. Each teacher prepares a report, which is consolidated with the others’ in a two-page summary for the parents.

Although the evaluations are not 100 percent conclusive, the profiles are considered to be more than 90 percent accurate by child psychologists familiar with Mensa and WhizKids International testing and evaluation methods, the CTC said. Mensa is the world’s largest organization of people with high IQs – those in the top 2 percent of the overall population.

Gifted child evaluations normally cost 1,500 yuan, but are free for the CTC’s first 50 participants. For more information, contact CTC’s community affairs coordinator Leslie An at 8261 5180 or promoreservations@gmail.com.

The CTC was established in 1996 to assist small and mid-sized businesses expand globally through joint ventures with companies in Canada, the US and the UK. The organization’s Beijing office, opened in 2009, helps to promote social integration between Eastern and Western children. Their projects include free magic shows, Santa Claus visits to malls and cross-cultural children’s birthday parties.