PROFESSOR IN FOCUS
GIFTED STUDENTS DESERVE MORE ATTENTION We fancy ourselves to be a knowledge economy, but gifted children and students rarely end up where they can fully develop their intellectual capacities. Kim Kiekens, a lecturer at Group T Campus, wants to change that. In 2019, she founded ‘Spring-Stof’, an organisation that provides a complementary learning path for cognitively gifted children aged 4 to 18. When will university follow?
Kim Kiekens © Julie Feyaerts
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n average, people have an IQ of 100. In 2% of the population, the figure is significantly higher, up to 130 and above. That doesn’t seem like much, but it does mean that Belgium alone has 200,000 gifted people. At KU Leuven, this would involve at least 280 students. “You rarely hear anything about this group and when they are in the news, it is often negative,” Kim notes. “Superintelligent people are still portrayed as if there is something wrong with them. They quickly get the name of being anti-social, maladjusted, or even arrogant.”
