The Child the System Left Behind — Now Leads the Research That Changes It
There is a particular kind of irony in the story of All Gifted School.
We were founded for the child the system left behind. The child labelled difficult, slow, or simply different. The child who did not fit the mould that a century of industrial education had carefully constructed.
And now, one of our own researchers — in her early twenties — has just been recognised by one of the world’s most prestigious organisations in gifted education.
The Mensa Foundation has awarded Dr. Sue-Ann Lim its Award for Excellence in Research for the 2023–2024 cycle.
She is, to our knowledge, one of the youngest recipients this award has ever had.
What the research says
Dr. Lim’s paper — “Effectiveness of Invention Tasks and Explicit Instruction in Preparing Intellectually Gifted Adolescents for Learning” — was published in Instructional Science, one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the field of educational research. It was co-authored with Professor Jae Yup Jung and Professor Slava Kalyuga of UNSW Sydney.
The study investigated something that sits at the heart of everything we do at All Gifted:
How do gifted children actually learn best?
Not how the system assumes they learn. Not how we wish they learned. How they actually do.
The findings were striking. Gifted adolescents performed significantly better in far-transfer tasks — the ability to apply knowledge in new and unfamiliar situations — when they were first given open-ended problem-solving tasks before receiving direct instruction.
In other words: let them struggle with the problem first. Then teach.
This is the opposite of how most schools operate. Most schools instruct first, then test. The gifted child — who already processes faster, connects dots earlier, and sees patterns the curriculum hasn’t introduced yet — is bored before the lesson begins.
Dr. Lim’s research gives us a scientific foundation for what many great educators have always known intuitively: gifted children do not need protection from difficulty. They need meaningful difficulty. The right kind. At the right moment.
Why this matters for All Gifted
At All Gifted School, we have always believed that giftedness is not a single thing. It is not a test score. It is not an IQ number. It is a way of engaging with the world — curious, persistent, hungry for challenge, and often deeply frustrated by environments that were not built for them.
Dr. Lim’s research validates the pedagogical foundation of how we teach. Our individually paced model — where students move through material at their own speed, guided by a dedicated mentor — creates exactly the conditions her research identifies as optimal for gifted learners.
There is no waiting for the class to catch up. There is no moving forward before understanding is deep. There is no one-size-fits-all lesson plan designed for the average child who, as Dr. Lim’s research implicitly reminds us, is not the child sitting in front of you.
A personal note
When I founded All Gifted in 2014, I did so because of my own children — and because of the thousands of families I had worked with as a career counsellor at Singapore Management University who arrived at university having chosen the wrong path, having been pushed through a system that never asked who they really were.
Seeing Dr. Lim receive this recognition fills me with a specific kind of pride — not just institutional pride, but the pride of proof.
Proof that when you build an environment around the child rather than around the system, extraordinary things happen.
She was in her early twenties when she conducted this research. She was doing what gifted children do when given the right environment: she flew.
That is All Gifted.
The award
The Mensa Foundation’s Award for Excellence in Research recognises groundbreaking published investigations in the disciplines of intelligence or intellectual giftedness. Recipients are drawn from the fields of education, psychology, sociology, neurology, and related disciplines worldwide.
Dr. Lim’s paper was published in Instructional Science (Springer Nature, 2023).
Mensa Foundation Awards for Excellence in Research →
All Gifted School is a Singapore-founded international online school for Grade 6–12, accredited by ACS WASC and MSA-CESS. We were built for the child the system left behind.
If you have a gifted child — or a child who has been labelled, overlooked, or simply not yet seen — talk to us.
Harvard-trained educator, former SMU full-time lecturer, and mother of five — all of whom entered university between the ages of 11 and 15. Pamela founded All Gifted School on the conviction that all children are differently gifted, and that education's job is to bring every child's potential to its fullest.
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