Even gifted students need a little help sometimes. When your gifted child or student isn't reaching her potential, try these strategies to help her get back on track.
As most parents and teachers already know, slapping a label of “gifted” on a child does not buy an instant ticket to Harvard.
Gifted students are, of course, individuals with variable personalities, environments, worries, fears, cultural influences. For any number of reasons a gifted student can be, well, less than motivated. Sometimes it’s because he knows he can “get by” without a whole lot of effort. In other cases, it’s case of academic boredom. Other factors, including stress and perfectionism, can influence motivation as well.
According to researchers Sally Reis and D. Betsy McCoach, underachievers can be defined as students whose performance falls far short of what’s expected, over an extended period of time, scoring high on ability measurement but significantly lower in actual performance, with no underlying learning disability to account for the discrepancy.
Beyond that definition is a whole bunch of gray area. Any question of underachievement should be addressed by a team of interested parties, including teacher, parents, the school psychologist, and/or a gifted education specialist.
Once identified as underachieving, however, the question becomes this: what can parents and teachers do to help gifted kids reach the heights they’re capable of reaching?
What research suggests:
- Praise can actually go a long way, as long as it’s the right kind of praise. Telling a child how bright he or she is really doesn’t give them anything to chew on. Instead, be specific in your praise, focusing on a particular project, assignment, or problem successfully completed. And don’t just say, “Great job!” – address something you found to be particularly clever or interesting in their approach. This kind of praise validates the process in addition to the end result, and let’s the child know that you’re really paying attention.
- Encourage intrinsic motivation. Help students to take ownership of learning by assuring that they are given assignments and tasks that build on their strengths, are engaging, and provide a challenge that encourages higher-level thinking. Giving a gifted student choices, too, can help her to feel more “in charge” of, and therefore more invested in, her education.
- Don’t assume that “gifted” means “organized.” Some of the most creative thinkers need a whole bunch of help getting those creative thoughts into some manageable and usable form. Teach organizational skills, and provide students with a variety of strategies to create a framework for those big ideas.
- Use student-to-student or self-evaluation in classroom tasks. It’s one thing to hear a teacher or parent hand down a judgment on an assignment. It’s another thing for a student to self-evaluate or work with a peer to identify problems and solutions. Be sure the student has a specific set of criteria to apply to the particular task or project being evaluated.
- Depending on the factors contributing to low performance, counseling may be of some help. If a student is underachieving as a way of “acting out” or as the result of stress due to the many pressures inherent in being identified as gifted, working with a counseling professional can help give a child the tools they need to feel confident and secure.
For more online help on this and other gifted issues, visit the Davidson’s Institute GT-Cybersource.
