Hollingworth next concentrated her attention on the education of gifted children. She observed that simply classifying a child as gifted is not en- ough. Emphasizing abstract test scores or group characteristics causes the needs of individual stu- dents to often be overlooked. As an example, she described the experience of a gifted 8-year-old girl named Jean who typically finished her assignments more quickly than her classmates. The teacher’s re- action to this problem was to have Jean write digits in a book over and over until her classmates could finish their assignments: Jean had with her the copy books in which she had been writing for the past year, one digit after another by the hour. Jean’s mother said, “She can’t stand the numbers any longer. Her hand gets stiff.” I wish you could see the thousands of rows of digits obediently inscribed by this intelligent child, till finally she burst out crying, “I can’t stand the numbers anymore.” (Hollingworth, 1940, p. 127)
Correcting such mistreatment of gifted children occupied Hollingworth for the rest of her career. In 1926 she published Gifted Children, which became the standard text in schools of education for many years, and Children Above 180 I.Q. was published posthumously in 1942. (For interesting biographical sketches of Hollingworth, see Benjamin, 1975; and Shields, 1975, 1991).