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Gifted Child Clinic

89 French Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: (732) 235-7700

Director: Michael Lewis, PhD
Program Director: Barbara Louis, PhD
Program Coordinator: Stacey Napoli
email: napolisl@umdnj.edu

Program Description

The Gifted Child Clinic serves as a referral agency for children who are thought to be gifted or talented. Children between three and twelve years of age are referred by parents, pediatricians and educators. A battery of tests is used to evaluate the children for signs of giftedness. Among these are standardized measures of cognitive ability, informal assessments of special skills and behavioral observations. Performance in the following areas is evaluated: language production and comprehension, reasoning, memory, spatial aptitude, social and emotional maturity, creativity, gross and fine motor maturation, level of symbolic play, reading or prereading, mathematics or premathematics, and overall intelligence.

In addition to assessment, parental counseling and parent educational courses are offered. Parents are counseled on a short-term basis on how to handle such problems as perfectionism and peer rejection experienced by some gifted children. Some parent education group topics include: how to choose appropriate schools, how to facilitate peer relations and understanding sibling-gifted child relationships.

Special Service

Comprehensive testing, evaluation and recommendations

Director

Michael Lewis PhD