Qualitative Assessment is a method of understanding and evaluating gifted children without actual measurements. It gives us experience, clues and information about who a child is, emotionally and spiritually, and opens another door to the understanding of children. Although QA has been practiced for more than 20 years and many children (probably in the hundreds) have been evaluated on this basis, Its definition grew organically through the combined thinking of a group of people coming together periodically (usually at the annual NAGC conferences) to answer a perceived need for a way of evaluating gifted children other than IQ testing. The first time we found a place to discuss a new approach, and thought there would be the three or four of us who had planned to get together, we were surprised to find that the word had spread, and 20 people appeared to explore the possibility of an alternative evaluation method. It showed that there was a clear need for finding a way of evaluating children which included emotional giftedness.
From time to time, there has been pressure, or maybe I should say the hope, to evaluate the QA approach itself by objective measurements. This never felt like a possibility to me, because emotional and spiritual qualities cannot be expressed in cognitive ways. Our whole concept of reality is based on proof and measurement; only then do we feel the security that a concept is real, and therefore trustworthy and acceptable. To base one’s conclusions about understanding other human beings on a proofless assessment requires a great deal of trust and an understanding that the world of emotions cannot be reached by cognitive methods of measurement.
Maybe the only way to clarify this is to ask, “Can you measure love?” or “How many portions of love does it take to be believed?” or by trying to measure it in mathematical terms—in other words, proving love. People, of course, have often tried to do this, as in “Prove to me how much you love me,” and most of us would reject this idea. It would be like asking, “How much life does it take to create a beautiful sunset? How much joy does it take to experience the setting rays of the sun, while they show themselves in all the colors of the rainbow?” They create a warm feeling of happiness; they create fulfillment of a special kind. Can we measure this?
This is the way I look at the characteristics of the gifted child: his or her sensitivities, his or her millions of ways of expressing creativity, his or her excitement for life, the curiosity as well as the anxiety—can you measure this? How many ounces of sensitivity does it take to create the feeling of fulfillment, happiness, desire, anxiety, etc.? The richness of the gifted child’s emotional life can never be reduced to numbers.
Qualitative Assessment is not an alternative IQ test. It is something truly different, and the two cannot be compared. To try is to do a disservice to both approaches. The reality is there are two different parts of the human personality, and the more I work with these children, the more I realize that we have to be careful to make the distinction. Qualitative assessment is about who the child is, and the IQ test is about what he can do. Both give us valid information, but different information, which serves different purposes.
By trying to understand who the child is, I disentangle him from what he can do. QA gives us no information about his interests, achievements, physical abilities or social relationships. In fact, none of that impacts the Qualitative Assessment evaluation. It doesn’t tell us anything about learning disabilities, why learning disabilities exist, or what to do about them. Its purpose is only the understanding, experience, and even enjoyment of the pure individual self. The information about who this Self is opens the door to our understanding of the characteristics of the gifted: their excitements, their enchantments, their imaginations, as well as their concerns, anxieties, and fears. QA tells us what their souls contain, what they may long for. It tells us about their understanding of reality, about their concerns of life and death, about their love for their families and their ability to identify with the animals. QA also tells us about their sense of our reality, as well as their understanding of the limitations of that reality, and the inclusion of the concepts of realities beyond the ones based on our earthly experience. In other words, it talks about the richness that dwells inside the individual. This may impact the individual’s relationships with the outside world, but QA doesn’t make a judgment about it, nor does it concern itself with that part of the child’s life. That is the task of the many other methods of evaluation.
The task of QA is to illuminate the soul—its characteristics, the ways it looks out on the world—without any judgment as to right and wrong, or concern about its future. By learning about gifted children, and how they begin to develop their relationship to the world, we make a point of not making any judgments or predictions, but we do understand about the characteristics of each and about the inner structure of emotions, and how the child sees the world. QA is not a measurement, it’s an awareness, an experience. For the observer, it’s an all-consuming occupation: to emotionally experience the Self of the gifted child. By suspending judgment and concentrating on the experience of the Self, the doors to the innerness of the child can be opened and reveal a world that is usually closed to us. It will not reveal itself if we only look for what a child can do, but it will if we look for who she is. The IQ tests, or something similar, may then become the next step. Once we know who the child is, then we can think about her relationship to the outside world. But this is the task of the tester, QA is the task of the observer without an inner agenda.
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