Myers-Briggs Personality Testing and Gifted Children

If you have gifted children, you’ve likely had them take an IQ test to gain insight into their impressive intellect. To provide your kids with skill-level-appropriate schooling you may have enrolled them in gifted and talented classes where they can learn with others who have high IQs. Have you noticed anything the group of students your children study with have in common? Gifted children have many similar traits yet still remain individual in their areas of talent. Myers-Briggs personality tests assess a person’s most gifted mbti type as well as extroversion or introversion and can be insightful when it comes to helping talented children learn. 

What is a Myers-Briggs test?
According to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, there are 16 possible personality types based off the 8 personality preferences involved in the Myers-Briggs test. The preferences – extroversion, introversion, sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking, judging and perceiving – all measure what is intuitively important to a person. Some individuals think more than they feel, while others are more flexible than practical. Knowing your children’s Myers-Briggs test personality types can show you how they learn and how they naturally think. While a cognitive abilities test shows how smart your children are, it doesn’t cover why they study best in certain environments or whether hands-on learning versus reading are most beneficial for them.

Study found personality similarities between gifted children
A study published in the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education focused on 5,723 gifted kids. Of those children, intuitive and perceiving traits were the most common, and the students were likely to be introverted and intuitive. They were also more often seen as thinking and perceiving at a higher level than their average peers. What does knowing your children’s personality type mean? If your son is introverted, he may be great with people but require alone time to recharge. Instead of encouraging him to have friends over all weekend, allow him time to read, play games or just be by himself for several hours. Friend time is great, but introverts also need a break. For a daughter who is dominantly sensing, reading non-fiction and writing essays may be excruciating. She learns better through more hands-on techniques like creating a model or writing a historically accurate script. You can better understand how your gifted children think and help them learn if you know not only their IQs but also their personality types.

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