Twice-Exceptional, Half-Noticed: The Recognition Issues of Gifted Students with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Gifted children with learning disabilities are known as twice-exceptional. Both the identification and the classification of twice-exceptional children are a matter for practical ingenuity, as these children tend to fall upon extremes of a scale, resulting in either the child with both obvious giftedness and a learning disability or in the child where the giftedness effectively masks the disability. The latter results in a child that tests as average upon surface-level assessments. In this article, a new direction of the identification of twice-exceptional students is proposed in terms of specific learning disabilities, specifically in terms of the latter form of students who go through education undiagnosed. In addition to this direction, we provide a condensed understanding of both giftedness and specific learning disabilities in students, as well as how they interact in twice-exceptionality, and how teachers might best navigate the issue of masking within the classroom.