What is developmental age?
Together, the thinking age and the evaluative age constitute the developmental age, a criterion we propose to use for the placement of a gifted student in a specific school year. It is currently used by institutions specializing in talent and exceptionality, such as the Alberto Merani Institute in Colombia.
To determine the thinking age, the level a student has reached in their knowledge tools and intellectual operations is taken into account. Thus, it is expected that a young person with good reading, dialogue, study, and learning processes will further increase their cognitive developmental age, since reading, dialogue, study, and learning allow them to exercise intellectual operations and qualify the tools of knowledge. This allows them to organize and differentiate propositions, concepts, and chains of reasoning. Conversely, a student with low levels of reading, dialogue, and study will not convert their intellectual capacity into developed intellectual operations or into greater and more differentiated tools of knowledge. Paradoxically, their very high intellectual capacity remains untranslated into thought (a process much more common than it might seem at first glance).
Likewise, it should be noted that the development of a student's intra- and interpersonal intelligence essentially depends on the type of relationships they establish at home. The overall emotional stability a child displays at school and in life will largely depend on the dialogue, guidance, and support they receive at home. More democratic, communicative, and participatory homes tend to foster happier children with greater independence of judgment and autonomy; on the other hand, permissive homes weaken the child's need for achievement, their interactions, and the quality of their decentralization process. Likewise, "abandoning" families reinforce feelings of sadness and loneliness, while overprotective homes limit the maturation process and fail to prepare children to face the complex dilemmas that life and interactions with others demand.
A student's developmental age does not depend exclusively on personal and family factors, as institutional factors also play a role. However, it should be noted that within a single educational institution, institutional factors tend to be similar for different students and, therefore, are less variable. Teachers, administrators, curricula, and classroom and extracurricular dynamics are similar for students at the same institution. But even if they are similar, they are not the same. Hence, the need for interventions, especially in different educational institutions.
In contrast to traditional schools, which stifle autonomy and limit thinking, institutions that promote the developmental age of their students are those that are clearer about their purposes, foster meaningful learning, and promote thinking skills and the development of their students' autonomy.
Taking the above into account, educational institutions must ensure that their teachers systematically and purposefully exercise their students' intellectual operations, promote the learning of the tools of knowledge specific to each science, and contribute to the development of increasingly autonomous individuals interested in knowledge. Likewise, they must ensure that these processes cover all students and not just some of them.