Michael S. Matthews

Parental Influences on the Academic Motivation of Gifted Students: A Self- Determination Theory Perspective

The home environment that parents provide their gifted children can have a significant impact on academic motivation, yet limited research has focused on this topic. Self-determination theory, a comprehensive framework of motivation, was used in the current study to explore two research questions: (a) What attitudes do parents of gifted students have toward the academic motivation of their children? (b) What approaches do parents of gifted students use at home to develop academic motivation? Interviews with 30 parents of gifted children from across the United States revealed three higher order themes including Parents as Experts, Scaffolding, and Behavior Modification. From a self-determination theory perspective, results suggest that despite good intentions, the parents of this study were inconsistent in providing home environments that support their children’s development of internalized forms of academic motivation.

Gifted students dropping out: Recent findings from a southeastern state

Dropping out of school has been presented as a serious problem affecting gifted students, with some authors suggesting that 20% or more of dropouts could be gifted (e.g., Rimm, 1995; Robertson, 1991). Longitudinal data from North Carolina were used to investigate high‐school dropout rates among gifted students (N = 7916) who had participated in a regional talent search program as seventh graders. In contrast to some prior estimates, results indicate that dropout rates among this particular gifted population are extremely low. Dropout rates among all gifted subgroups, as well as across this entire population, were below 1%. Gifted students differed from the general dropout population in being less likely to report dropping out due to attendance problems and more likely to drop out to attend a community college. Limitations of the findings are discussed, and implications for gifted education policy and practice are offered.

Leadership Education for Gifted and Talented Youth: A Review of the Literature.

Leadership has been retained in the federal definition of giftedness, across major revisions, since its inclusion in the Marland Report (1972) definition more than 30 years ago. Despite this history, there appears to be little consensus regarding the relationship between leadership education and education for talented and gifted youth. This review analyzes publications about leadership education among talented and gifted students since 1980. Four major emphases are identified within this literature, and empirical articles within each area of emphasis are summarized and critiqued. Analysis confirms that a consolidated theoretical framework for leadership giftedness has not yet materialized, although limited consensus may be emerging regarding the aspects of leadership that are more or less responsive to instruction. Findings suggest that more research may be needed to justify retaining leadership ability within the federal definition of giftedness. Three suggested directions for future research on youth leadership giftedness are extrapolated from this foundation.

A Critique of the Literature on Parenting Gifted Learners.

Despite numerous calls for research on parents of gifted learners, researchers have given only cursory treatment to the topic. In this article, the authors review and synthesize 53 sources, published since 1983, on parents of gifted learners. Existing research on parents of gifted learners may be categorized into three thematic areas that include (a) parent influence, (b) parent perceptions of giftedness and ability, and (c) parent satisfaction with gifted programming. Theory-driven research is conspicuously absent from this body of work, and study designs emphasize self-report measures and lack control groups. The analysis of this literature reveals gaps in the research record and offers recommendations about where future research should be focused. These areas include attitudes, values, and expectations of families of underserved gifted children; relationships between parents and schools; parents’ understanding of giftedness; parents of gifted underachievers; and how parents support and influence their children at home.

Homeschooling the Gifted A Parent’s Perspective

Homeschooling has witnessed a dramatic growth over the past decade. Included in this population are gifted and talented students, yet despite this growth there has been no appreciable increase in the research literature. To better understand the gifted homeschooling family, researchers interviewed 13 parents of homeschooled children their parents identified as being gifted. Four major themes emerged from the data: (a) parents know best, (b) isolation, (c) challenges, and (d) family roles. Findings reveal that these parents decided to homeschool only after numerous attempts to work in collaboration with the public school and that the mothers bore the primary burden of responsibility for homeschooling in these families. Though the move to homeschooling alleviated many of the issues experienced in public school, it brought a different set of challenges to these families. This exploratory study establishes a better understanding of why parents of gifted children ultimately decide to homeschool.

The Validity of the Achievement-Orientation Model for Gifted Middle School Students An Exploratory Study

Gifted underachievement represents a frustrating loss of potential for society. Although attempts have been made to develop interventions to reverse gifted underachievement, the theoretical underpinnings of these interventions have yet to be empirically validated. The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the Achievement-Orientation Model for gifted middle school students. Based on a sample of 156 gifted sixth- and seventh-grade mathematics students, results of the current study suggest two unique clusters of gifted students, those whose attitudes toward each of the model’s constructs are positive and those who attitudes are not as positive. Furthermore, results of a path analysis demonstrate that most of the relationships posited by the model do appear to exist. The findings of this study suggest that the Achievement-Orientation Model may hold promise for the development of interventions to address gifted underachievement.

Effects of Schoolwide Cluster Grouping and within-Class Ability Grouping on Elementary School Students' Academic Achievement Growth.

We evaluated the effects of one year of schoolwide cluster grouping on the academic achievement growth of gifted and non-identified elementary students using a piecewise multilevel growth model. Scores from 186 non-identified and 68 gifted students’ Measures of Academic Progress Reading and Math scores were examined over three school years. In 2008–2009 within-class ability grouping was used. In 2009–2010 schoolwide cluster grouping was implemented. In 2010–2011 students once again were grouped only within classrooms by ability and students identified as gifted were spread across all classrooms at each grade level. Results suggest that schoolwide cluster grouping influenced student performance in the year following its implementation, but only for mathematics and not the area of reading.

Policy Matters An Analysis of District-Level Efforts to Increase the Identification of Underrepresented Learners

Policies delegating control of educational policy to the local level are widespread, yet there has been little examination of the effects of such distributed decision making in the area of advanced education programming. We used propensity score matching to examine the effectiveness of locally developed policies for identifying intellectually gifted children identifying themselves as Black or from low-socioeconomic backgrounds across one large U.S. state (Florida) that has a state-level gifted education mandate. Ongoing underrepresentation of traditionally marginalized groups in gifted education was evident, even among districts with policies specifically designed to ameliorate disproportional representation. However, the presence of such a policy reduced the degree of underrepresentation.

Evaluating Gifted Identification Practice: Aptitude Testing and Linguistically Diverse Learners

The authors examined individually administered IQ scores from an entire K–5 population (N = 432) of Limited English Proficient students referred for gifted program eligibility determination in a single large urban district in the southeastern United States. Of 8 IQ tests compared, only 1, the Stanford-Binet V, had scores appreciably lower than expected on the basis of the districts screening score criteria. Two nonverbal measures showed no statistically significant differences in comparison to aptitude scores obtained on the other measures. These results suggest that school psychologists’ use of professional judgment in choosing which aptitude measure to administer to these learners appears to be equitable, and that blanket recommendations favoring the use of nonverbal measures with linguistically diverse gifted learners may not be appropriate.

Putting Standards Into Practice: Evaluating the Utility of the NAGC Pre-K–Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards

Despite their importance, there has been surprisingly little scholarly examination of the NAGC Pre-K --Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards (NAGC, 2008/2000; Landrum, Callahan, & Shaklee, 2001) since their publication a decade ago. As part of a larger study investigating the effectiveness of local policies developed within the framework of state law, we used a qualitative approach to examine the ‘minimum’ and ‘exemplary’ criteria from the Student Identification portion of these NAGC Standards. Through this process we developed a 27-item checklist, which we then used to evaluate 43 locally developed plans for identifying diverse gifted learners from one large state in the southeastern United States. Based on this experience, we identify the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using the Standards for this purpose. We provide the checklist items we developed, and we offer specific suggestions for how the Gifted Program Standards in their currently ongoing revision process might be made more user-friendly for practitioners to apply toward effective evaluation of gifted program documents. Putting the Research to Use Our experience in using the Student Identification portion of the NAGC Pre-K --Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards highlights some difficulties in using a national standards document directly to evaluate district-level program descriptions and policies. Specifically, we found three aspects that hindered the application of the Student Identification framework to the evaluation of local policies: 1) A standard identified as Exemplary could be met in some cases without first satisfying the Minimum requirement of the same numbered standard; 2) Some standards included more than one criterion within a single numbered standard, and district documents satisfied one but not all of these criteria; and 3) The lack of consensus on terminology led to the use of some words such as “screening” to mean different things in the NAGC Standards than in the district documents, while other terms were too broad (such as “culturally fair”) or too narrow to prove useful in evaluating plan quality. The responsibility for developing and implementing policies and procedures often rests at the local level. Consequently, we believe that practitioners will find a checklist such as the one we have developed and presented here to be a useful bridge between the language and aims of standards documents and the tangible goals of those who develop and implement policies within the framework of state rules. We suggest that the currently ongoing revisions to these NAGC Standards should consider our findings in the three areas described above, and we recommend continued support for the development of ancillary materials as has been provided for these and other national standards documents.