62 Gifted and Talented International - Volume 22 Number 2: December 2007 Abstract Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) is often reported in gifted children. Several authors, however, suggest that gifted children, in fact display AD/HD-like behaviors, especially at school due to boredom resulting from academically understimulating environments. In order to clarify this issue, a study was conducted on 37 gifted children based on four different observational assessments of hyperactivity disorder (father, mother, teacher, child), using the Conners Rating Scale - Revised. The main results show that teachers at school observe less hyperactivity disorder than parents at home, and their perception is similar to that of the children. These findings underline the importance of understanding hyperactive behavior situationally, i.e., in the context of the relational dynamics arising between a child expressing him or herself through a particular behavior and an environment that perceives this particular behavior and responds to it with different tolerance thresholds according to the observers. Keywords: Hyperactivity, AD/HD, gifted children, environment, observational sources, assessments. 1993). However, according to several authors, observation of AD/HD in gifted children may depend on the environment. Indeed, the common notion is that gifted children frequently display AD/HD at school, but not at home (Lind and Silverman, 1994). It suggests that, as underlined by the DSM-IV-TR and several authors (Lovecky, 1994; Gallagher, Harradine & Coleman, 1997; Hartnett, Nelson, & Rinn, 2004), AD/HD may be related to boredom resulting from unchallenging and academically understimulating classroom environments. Webb and Latimer (1993) stated that gifted children may spend between 25 - 50% of their regular classroom time waiting for their classmates to catch up, even if they are in a heterogeneously grouped class. Lovecky (1991) considers that being so far ahead of the academic curriculum makes the child bored in class and might be one of the reasons for their AD/HD-like behaviors. According to some authors, gifted students’ high activity is generally focused and goal-directed (Clark, 1992; Webb, Meckstroth & Tolan, 1982; Webb & Latimer, 1993), in contrast to the behavior of AD/HD is often reported in gifted children (Hartnett et al., 2004), but the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM- IV-TR, American Psychiatric Association, 2000) provides no data with respect to the prevalence rate of AD/HD in this population. AD/HD is defined in the DSM-IV-TR by “a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity- impulsivity that is more frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development”. Without identification and proper treatment, AD/HD can have serious consequences, including school failure, depression, conduct disorder and social interaction impairments. The DSM-IV-TR classification identifies two predominant sets of symptoms observed during the past 6 months: the inattentive type and hyperactive - impulsive type. A combined type is also reported. (See notes: Table 1). In addition, the DSM-IV-TR criteria require that symptoms be present in two or more settings and AD/HD in non-gifted children is typically pervasive across settings (Webb and Latimer, Diagnosis of Hyperactivity Disorder in Gifted Children Depends on Observational Sources Sylvie Tordjman, Jacques-Henri Guignard, Carolina Seligmann, Emilie Vanroye, Gregory Nevoux, Jacqueline Fagard, Andrei Gorea, Pascal Mamassian, Patrick Cavanagh and Sandra Lebreton Introduction