David Lubinski

Media Appearances

• What Happens to Gifted Children

  Some people want to get rid of magnet high schools and accelerated programs for these kinds of precocious kids. But these programs are necessary if we’re going to keep high-scoring students engaged and growing. I spoke with David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow, who direct the S.M.P.Y. study at Vanderbilt University. They observed that we have inherited an industrial model school system that sometimes treats children as interchangeable widgets — every child is supposed to learn reading at age 6.

  June 13th, 2024

• The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory

  “We had a lot more data,” said David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. “This was data that was not available and really unimaginable in Freud’s time.” The source of that data was an extraordinary project called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a 50-year longitudinal survey of gifted students overseen by Dr. Lubinski and Camilla P. Benbow at Vanderbilt. Tracking the same population of talented individuals over extended periods starting in 1972, from when they were children with potential to when they had children of their own, has proven to be valuable in all sorts of unpredictable ways. These psychologists have the answers to many riveting questions about human behavior. Their job is figuring out what to ask.

  June 30th, 2022

• Opinion | We Are Leaving ‘Lost Einsteins’ Behind

  “Current talent search procedures focus on the assessment of mathematical and verbal ability,” wrote David Lubinski of Vanderbilt and Harrison J. Kell, a senior researcher at the Educational Testing Service, in “Spatial Ability: A Neglected Talent in Educational and Occupational Settings.” Lubinski and Kell stress the failure of many of such searches to test for the cognitive skill known as spatial ability.

  July 21st, 2021

• The great ‘gifted’ gap

  Because there’s no federal standard for identifying giftedness, states and districts come up with their own definitions – which is one reason researchers don’t have a clear answer on the benefits of gifted education. Some say highly talented children can reach their full potential only if they’re educated alongside other highachieving students. “It’s good for kids to be with their intellectual peers,” said David Lubinski, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University and a longtime expert on gifted education.

  January 14th, 2020

• Will Bright Kids Succeed Even if Not Challenged Enough?

  Gifted individuals, overall, end up as psychologically well-adjusted. A century of research on gifted kids shows that these kids end up academically and occupationally successful, as indicated by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth led by Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski.

  July 18th, 2019

• Of Furries and Fascism at Google

  Mr. Damore’s firing last year by CEO Sundar Pichai certainly rang of panic at the time. Google explicitly invites freewheeling discussion and provides internal forums for it. Mr. Damore did not, in his famous memo, object to Google’s diversity goals. His ruminations on biology may be jejune, but unwelcome facts are still facts. Witness the work of David Lubinski at Vanderbilt, which goes a long way toward explaining the recruiting frustrations of many a tech and engineering-based company. Prof. Lubinski and colleagues find that women who are gifted in math and science tend to be broadly gifted, and consequently have lots of opportunities in a wide range of fields, whereas men with math talents tend to be narrowly gifted, and all end up in math-science-engineering fields.

  January 16th, 2018

• Psychologists studied 5,000 genius kids for 45 years — a short film reveals its key findings

  A new short film from Vanderbilt University, where SMPY is run by researchers Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski, reveals some of the biggest takeaways since the study began issuing exams to teens across five cohorts over the years.

  September 18th, 2017