Twice exceptional

The term twice exceptional, often abbreviated as 2e, entered educators' lexicons in mid 1990s and refers to gifted children who have some form of disability. These children are considered exceptional both because of their giftedness (e.g., intellectual, creative, perceptual, motor etc.) and because of their special needs (e.g., specific learning disability, neurodevelopmental disability etc.) Ronksley-Pavia (2015) presents a useful conceptual model of the co-occurrence of disability and giftedness. The term twice exceptional, often abbreviated as 2e, entered educators' lexicons in mid 1990s and refers to gifted children who have some form of disability. These children are considered exceptional both because of their giftedness (e.g., intellectual, creative, perceptual, motor etc.) and because of their special needs (e.g., specific learning disability, neurodevelopmental disability etc.) Ronksley-Pavia (2015) presents a useful conceptual model of the co-occurrence of disability and giftedness. A 2e child usually refers to a child who, alongside being considered gifted in comparison to same age-peers, is formally diagnosed with one or more disabilities. Although 2e can refer to any general disability, it is often used to refer to students with learning disabilities, although research is not limited to these areas, and a more holistic view of 2e can help move the field forward. The disabilities are varied: dyslexia, visual or auditory processing disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, autism spectrum disorder, Tourette syndrome, or any other disability interfering with the student's ability to learn effectively in a traditional environment. For example, 19% of dyslexic students were found to be superiorly gifted in verbal reasoning. The child might have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or diagnoses of anxiety or depression. Often children with 2e have multiple co-morbid disabilities that present as a paradox to many parents and educators. There is no clear-cut profile of twice-exceptional children because the nature and disabilities of twice exceptionality are so varied. This variation among twice-exceptional children makes it difficult to determine just how many of them there might be. Best estimates of prevalence range from 300,000 to 360,000 in the U.S. (on the order of 0.5% of the total number of children under 18). Linda Silverman, Ph.D., the director of the Gifted Development Center has found that fully 1/6 of the gifted children tested at the GDC have a learning difference of some type. In Australia, in 2010 a conservative estimate of the prevalence of 2e children was around 40,000, or approximately 10% of gifted Australian children, although other estimates have placed this much higher at 30% of gifted Australian children as being 2e. Brody and Mills argue that this population of students 'could be considered the most misunderstood of all exceptionalities'. In each situation, the 2e student’s strengths help to compensate for deficits; the deficits, on the other hand, make the child’s strengths less apparent although as yet there is no empirical research to confirm this theory. The interplay of exceptional strengths and weaknesses in a single individual results in inconsistency in performance. They might present any of the three profiles identified by educator and researcher Susan Baum: