Brilliant Behaviours

The following checklist is often used as a beginning point in defining giftedness in children and adults:

•  Humor – Exceptionally keen sense of the comical, the bizarre and/or the absurd.
• Motivation – Intense desire to know, do, feel, create or understand.
• Interests – Ardent, sometimes unusual, passionate, sometimes fleeting.
• Communication/Expressiveness – Extraordinary ability to convey meaning or emotion through words, actions, symbols, sounds or media.
• Inquiry – Probing exploration, observation or experimentation with events, objects, ideas, feelings, sounds, symbols or media.
• Problem solving – Outstanding ability to bring order to chaos through the invention and monitoring of paths to a goal; enjoyment of challenge
• Sensitivity – Unusually open, perceptive or responsive to experiences, feelings and to others. Intuition – Sudden recognition of connections or deeper meanings without conscious awareness of reasoning or thought. 
• Reasoning – Outstanding ability to think things through and consider implications or alternatives; rich, highly conscious, goal-oriented thought.
• Imagination/Creativity – Extraordinary capacity for ingenious, flexible use of ideas, processes or materials.
• Memory/Knowledge/Understanding – Unusual capacity to acquire, integrate, retain and retrieve information or skills.
• Learning – Ability to acquire sophisticated understanding with amazing speed and apparent ease.

Kanefsky, Maker, Nielson and Rogers. 1994.