You probably see them every day. People who stand out from what others perceive as “normal”, but who are also capable of coming up with or doing incredible things. Gifted individuals. Psychologist Šárka Portešová, associate professor at Masaryk University, has devoted her entire professional life to supporting these people. Together with her colleagues, she has developed a software program for diagnosis. Additionally, she openly argues that we as a society should finally stop trying to fit individuals into any norm.

“My work currently has thee main focus areas. I teach at the faculty, I develop the Invenio software, which we created for diagnosing children with special abilities, and we also lend it to schools. I also run the center where parents come with their children for advice and where we organize various educational events for teachers, as well as seminars to share tips on how to work with gifted children,” says Portešová, noting that all three areas complement each other.

There is endless work to be done across all areas – one issue is that in Czechia, it is still not usual to provide support to people with specific talents or any related needs. Another is that the number of those suffering from socio-emotional problems, anxiety, depression and accessive stress is growing.

“That is why we are opening a research station where we will measure these characteristics and then advise on how to work with them. Among other things, we received a contribution from a former class of a woman whose child committed suicide, apparently due to problems related to his giftedness,” Portešová explains, pointing to the areas where child psychiatrists, of whom there is now an acute shortage in Czechia, should consult on children's problems.

As a researcher, you study exceptionally gifted children. Tell us, how do you define such child?

That’s a difficult question, because the overall concept has evolved over time. In the past, being gifted was defined as having an IQ of 130 and higher. A child was given this label, and if they scored 129, they were no longer considered gifted. Today, we know that we cannot define a person with a single number. There is no accurate boundary. We are much more interested in identifying the specific areas in which a child is gifted. That is why we measure a number of different specific abilities, such as logical reasoning, verbal abilities, spatial abilities, memory, and attention. We are interested in the whole profile.

Why is that?

These are abilities that are not influenced by formal education. For example, we do not assess “mathematics” in the sense of how well a child solves equations, but rather their ability to think logically or make deductions. This range is important because if, for instance, working memory is not well developed, it can limit performance in tasks requiring logical reasoning, as the child may struggle to process multiple pieces of information at once. Nevertheless, they may still excel in other areas. This is the case with children with so-called dual exceptionality, i.e. giftedness and a concurrent disability, such as a learning disorder. These children may exhibit a number of deficits, read poorly, or have weak memory, and are therefore seen by teachers as below average. However, we observe that the same children have very good spatial and logical skills that are not recognized at school. In short, we also focus on what lies beneath the surface.

So it’s not only about the support of excelling children?

No, we look for both extremely gifted children and those who are above average. When we see that a child exceeds the average in certain areas, this also creates specific educational needs. Even though we know that abilities may level out over time, it is important to respond to them and support the child early on. Moreover, extremely gifted individuals are relatively rare, estimated at only two to three percent of the population.

You have been working on this topic since your master‘s thesis. How has your view evolved over the years?

“Researchers have been exploring why some people are more gifted than others for a long time. For example, the research of the American psychologist L. M. Terman was particularly important. His goal was to find out relevant relationship between giftedness and psychopathology, as it was believed that gifted people were a bit “strange”, and he wanted to know whether this assumption was accurate.”

Therefore, he began searching for gifted children and included in his research those with an IQ above 130. This later proved to be the main limitation. He identified about 1,400 children, whom researchers followed until the end of their lives.

The link between giftedness and pathology was disproved, but at the same time he found that, as a group, these individuals were not particularly successful compared with the general population. It was precisely this finding that revealed that a single IQ value does not say very much on its own.

It also became clear that two future Nobel Prize winners were not included in the research sample. They did not meet the numerical threshold. One evidently belonged to the group of dually exceptional children, so his results were lowered by dyslexia, while the other one was a child of immigrants, did not speak English well, and failed the verbal section of the test.

And how did you personally become involved in this topic?

I chose perfectionism in gifted children as the topic of my master’s thesis, and through that I began collaborating with a colleague from the United States. We examined whether a tendency toward perfectionism is an inherent part of giftedness, since there were several competing theories about this. It turned out that there are significant cultural differences. In the United States, perfectionism is often defined as strong achievement motivation and an intense drive for high performance, whereas in our context it is understood more as fear of mistakes and excessive meticulousness. The connection between giftedness and perfectionism was therefore not confirmed.

After that, I became interested in the previously mentioned dual exceptionality, so we began searching for children with this profile in schools in order to test them. We selected about 60 children, and the sample split into two groups of 50 and 10. In the first group, teachers agreed that the children were truly gifted and capable, although they were said to overthink or philosophize at times. However, with the remaining 10 children, teachers almost jumped out of their chairs when we suggested they might be gifted. They insisted the opposite, describing them as hyperactive, reluctant to read, and uncooperative. At that point, we decided it would be interesting to examine this group in more detail, and we discovered that all of them showed dual exceptionality, meaning they were gifted but also had conditions such as ADHD.

How did the development of your software Invenio come about?

I teach many current and future school counselors, and when I ask them how many gifted children they have, almost no one raises their hand in a group of fifty people. Statistically, that is impossible. They say they have many capable students, but gifted ones? Apparently not. I realized that this is largely due to distorted ideas. We simply do not know what a gifted child is supposed to look like.

So we decided to help address this. Together with my colleagues Michal Jabůrek and Ondřej Straka, we began developing sets of questions, bringing them into schools, and testing them in practice. This process gradually led to the creation of the first test, and we connected the entire system to the modern theory of intelligence known as CHC theory. However, this took years of work. To this date, we have tested around 14 thousand children.

Essentially, our goal is for entire classes to take the test, not just a selection chosen by teachers, because many children are overlooked precisely due to that initial selection.

So a child completes the test with excellent results. What happens next?

Parents receive the results immediately after testing, along with recommendations describing the child’s performance in individual areas and suggestions for further development. At the same time, a professional report is generated for the counseling center.

The biggest challenge is the follow-up support. Having a label without real opportunities for development is extremely risky for any gifted child. Parents cannot stop at the results alone, either. However, teachers are already overloaded. That is why just last week we organized a webinar on curiosity, where we discussed additional options, including resources available on YouTube, as well as various applications and software tools.

There are many opportunities, although unfortunately many of them are primarily in English. For example, at Masaryk University a wide range of activities is organized for gifted high school students, and I believe that even more programs will emerge in the future.

But what about places outside Prague and Brno?

As soon as you move into more remote regions, especially border areas, it becomes a problem. Parents call us very often because they feel isolated and unsupported in their local environment. We are therefore thinking about expanding online resources and want to bring together a group of teachers who would create learning materials in Czech. However, we also see another difficulty: sometimes we struggle with teachers who, despite receiving full support from us, say they simply will not engage with the topic.

We have been talking about giftedness, but whether a child actually uses their abilities also depends on motivation, right?

Absolutely. We often emphasize that a child with “only” above-average abilities but strong interest and motivation will go much further than a child with exceptional abilities but no motivation or interest. In many areas, motivation and interest significantly strengthen and even compensate for intellectual ability.

Where do motivation and interest come from?

We know that it is very important to expose children, not only gifted ones, to a wide range of fields so they can discover their interests. They need varied opportunities. Where ability connects with genuine interest, success is much more likely. Opportunities should therefore not be offered only to preselected children, but to everyone, which unfortunately is still not common in Czech Republic.

There is also another issue. Problems with motivation often arise because teachers confuse motivation with effort. A child may appear to be trying hard simply because they are afraid of a parent’s reaction. On the other hand, a teacher may say a child is not motivated, when in fact the conclusion comes from repeatedly assigning the same task, which the child understandably does not want to complete for the fiftieth time. In such cases, motivation is being confused with compliance with the teacher’s expectations about what the child should be doing.

In recent years, the number of diagnoses of various differences has been increasing. Is that a good thing? Should we instead accept that everyone is an individual?

In my opinion, yes. Diagnoses often arise because we still expect people to adapt to the system. There are many children who, for this reason, are genuinely unable to attend regular school and are instead educated at home. These are often the most gifted children, which I find very unfortunate. The system tries to categorize everyone, and those who do not fit are given multiple labels. My hypothesis is that we still do not fully understand manifestations of difference, so we label children using categories we at least partially recognize. This may also explain why the number of children diagnosed with ADHD is rising today.

When someone receives such a label, it suggests they fall outside the norm. But do we actually have a clear definition of what the norm is?

Exactly. I do not think we do. For example, I once worked with a child who was already being monitored by OSPOD because the child refused to attend school and was suspected of having autism. The child came to us with an extensive file describing various differences, but in the end it turned out to be a completely typical child who was simply very curious, liked to explore topics in depth, and constantly asked questions. The child was extremely gifted, but no one had addressed that before. Everyone had only tried to assign a disorder-related label.

This concerns me more broadly, including all those reports from psychiatrists, child protection authorities, and clinical psychologists. We tend to focus too much on highlighting what is wrong instead of developing what is strong.

We live in a time when diagnoses such as ADHD are increasingly common even among adults. What is your view on that?

It surprises me as well, but it actually reflects what I mentioned earlier. At least today we have labels, whereas in the past we did not even have those, and any form of difference was simply framed as something “broken.” When an adult finally receives a diagnosis and practical guidance on how to work with their traits, it often provides an explanation they have felt the need for over many years. Suddenly, they understand themselves better.

Sometimes, when we test a child, the parent decides to be tested as well. I remember a woman who came with her son and said she had only completed primary school. Yet the assessment revealed that she had exceptional abilities that she had never been able to develop within the system as it was structured at the time. It is a great loss. Her life path could have been very different. Now that we understand these things better, it is all the more important to address them.

So should an adult who feels they are somehow different seek a diagnosis?

It depends on what they expect from it. Understanding one’s strengths in the context of personality can be very beneficial and useful for the future. If I understand that I am an introvert, what I am good at, and how I react in different situations, I can navigate life more effectively.

This also has strong relevance in HR and workplace environments. With talent, it is crucial to identify a person’s strengths and build on them, structuring teams so they function through the complementary strengths of individuals, rather than forcing everyone to be “normal” or to stop being “different”. A person will not fundamentally change, but the difficulty of accepting that reality is still very strong in our environment.