The Effects of Educational Context on Individual Difference Variables,Self-Perceptions of Giftedness,and School Attitudes in Gifted Adolescents

This study examined the effects of educational context on affective outcomes in a sample of 743 gifted Israeli adolescent students. Educational context (special gifted classes versus regular classes—with one day pull-out program) was hypothesized to predict context-sensitive personal variables and labeling of giftedness in the direction of better student personal-social adjustment and more favorable self-perceptions of giftedness in regular compared to special gifted classes. By contrast, students in special classes were predicted to show more positive school attitudes and better overall satisfaction with school than their mainstreamed counterparts. Analyses of the data showed that gifted adolescents in regular classes revealed a more positive personal-social profile than gifted mainstreamed students, showing lower test anxiety, a higher academic self-concept, and more positive perceptions of their giftedness. By contrast, students in special gifted classes held more favorable school attitudes and were more satisfied with their school environment in comparison to their mainstreamed counterparts. Overall, these data support the research hypotheses and point to a differential pattern of relationships between school program and personal-social adjustment, on one hand, and school attitudes and satisfaction, on the other.     

Independence and the creative potential of gifted and exceptionally gifted boys

A 16-item questionnaire concerning independence and three divergent thinking tests were administered to three groups of preadolescent boys and their mothers as part of an ongoing longitudinal investigation of exceptional giftedness. The subjects included one group of exceptionally gifted boys with IQs in excess of 150 (n=28), a second group of exceptionally gifted boys selected for their math-science abilities (also well within the 99th percentile;n=26), and a control group of gifted boys (n=37), with a mean IQ of 133). The three groups were compared with one another in terms of (a) their own independence ratings, (b) their mothers' independence ratings, (c) correlations of boys' and mothers' independence ratings, and (d) correlations of independence ratings with IQ and scores from the divergent thinking tests. Results indicated significant differences among the three groups of mothers, and significant differences between the two exceptionally gifted groups and the control group. In addition, mothers' and subjects' independence scores were moderately correlated with IQ and divergent thinking test scores. These results are discussed and placed in the context of the longitudinal project of which they are a part.This research was supported by a grant to Dr. Albert by the Arthur D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation.Preliminary results from this investigation were presented at the meeting of the Hawaii Psychological Association in Honolulu, Hawaii, November 1985.Received Ph.D. from Boston University His research interests include long-term family involvement in giftedness and achievement of eminence.Received Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School His current interests include the psychometrics and family background of creativity and exceptionality.     

Exceptional giftedness in early adolescence and intrafamilial divergent thinking

Two groups of boys and their parents (N=54) were given five divergent thinking tests as one part of a longitudinal investigation on exceptional giftedness in early adolescence. One groups of adolescents was selected because their IQs were above 150, and the other group, was selected because of their outstanding math-science abilities. Canonical and bivariate analyses indicated that there was a strong correlation between the adolescents' divergent thinking test scores and their parents' divergent thinking test scores (Rc=.55). Additionally, there was some indication that these correlations differed in the two exceptionally gifted groups, with the high-IQ group having divergent thinking test scores related to those of both parents, and the math-science group having divergent thinking test scores related only to those of their mothers. These findings are very consistent with earlier investigations on exceptionally gifted adolescents.This research was supported by a grant to M.A.R. from the University Research Council of the University of Hawaii, and by grants to R.S.A. from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.Received Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School. Research interests include creative, gifted, and autistic children, and psychometrics.Received Ph.D. from Boston University. Research interests include child development, long-term family involvement, giftedness, and the achievement of eminence.     

General,social, and academic self-concepts of gifted adolescents

Seven hundred seventy-two male and female adolescents (between the ages of 12 and 15) participated in a study concerning the identification and socioemotional situation of various subgroups of gifted students (N=94). In this article only the results concerning general, social, and academic selfconcepts of gifted adolescents are reported. A distinction is made between four groups: two groups of gifted achievers (one with high (N=22) and another with below average creativity questionnaire scores (N=45), a group of gifted underachievers (N =27), and a control group (N=74). The multiple and hierarchical model of self-concept by Shavelson et al.serves as a framework for our approach. The most striking differences are found between gifted achievers and gifted underachievers. The latter demonstrate very low academic self-concept and high test anxiety scores, an external locus of control, and low scores on school well-being and motivation. A positive self-concept in all areas seems to be the driving force for achievements, which are in accordance with high potential intellectual aptitudes. Similar results were reported by Feldhusen.Received M.A. from University of Nijmegen. Research Interests: cognitive development of adolescents, giftedness, and sociometric status.Received Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany. Research interests: early indicators of giftedness, gifted education, and developmental processes of gifted children and adolescents.     

Nonintellectual correlates of satisfaction with acceleration: A longitudinal study

Two studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between several nonintellectual personal attributes and satisfaction with acceleration among intellectually gifted students. First, two cohorts of gifted students (top 1% in ability and separated in age by five years) who had utilized acceleration during the course of their education were surveyed at age 18 and again at age 23. Overall, no strong relationships were found between satisfaction with acceleration and the nonintellectual factors at either age. Second, similar analyses were conducted for a subgroup of subjects, using the Adjective Check List and the Study of Values. Again, few significant correlations were found; the correlations that were statistically significant were small. These findings indicate that some non-intellectual personal attributes, which are often assumed important to the selection of students for acceleration or to the evaluation of participants in accelerative programs, actually may not be appropriate for these purposes.This research was supported by grants to Camilla Benbow from the National Science Foundation (MDR-8651737 and MDR-8855625) and an anonymous service agency. Further support was provided by scholarships to Mary Ann Swiatek from Oberlin College and from the Kappa Kappa Gamma Fraternity.Received M.S. in counseling psychology from Iowa State University. Research interests include social and emotional aspects of giftedness, and social coping among gifted adolescents.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from the Johns Hopkins University. Research focuses upon intellectual talent.     

Social Coping Among Gifted High School Students and its Relationship to Self-Concept

Several authors suggest that gifted adolescents employ a variety of strategies to cope with perceived negative social effects of recognized high ability. The Social Coping Questionnaire (SCQ) is designed to measure the use of several such strategies. Previous SCQ studies were based on participants who earned high scores on above-level standardized tests. The current study uses a revised SCQ and a differently identified group of gifted students. Factor analysis produced 7 social coping scales similar to those found in previous studies. The scales had adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability at an 8-week interval. Gender differences at Time 1 suggest that females are more likely than males to deny giftedness and maintain high activity levels, whereas males are more likely than females to use humor. Grade level (9–12) main effects and gender by grade level interactions were absent. Relationships with self-concept scores suggest that problem-focused social coping strategies are more adaptive than are emotion-focused, denial-based strategies.     

Crisis and vulnerability in adolescent development

It was argued that adolescent development should be studied from a more relational and structural approach (cf. Damon and Hart, 1982). In the first study of 5986 Chinese students, two distinct self-concept dimensions were included and their relations to one another and to locus of control, extraversion, and test anxiety were compared across six primary and secondary grade levels. This was in contrast to past studies' focus on the overall change of single or global aspects of self-concept. It was found that self-concept of academic ability increased with age, whereas self-concept of appearance decreased with age. Both self-concepts were closely related. Locus of control was more related to self-concept appearance, and test anxiety to self-concept of academic ability. Extraversion was related only to self-concept of appearance. These relations existed mainly in adolescents (especially girls) and not in younger children. Midadolescence was found to be a critical period as both self-concepts showed quite drastic changes. Tentative evidence showed that the transition from sixth to seventh grade tended to have a dampening effect on the two self-concepts. Results from a second study of 701 secondary school students that included more self-concept dimensions lent further support to the findings of the first study. Crisis and vulnerability in adolescent development are discussed in the qualitative analysis of the relational changes.Ph.D. in social psychology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Research interests: Value and self-concept development, parental infuences, and deviant behaviors.     

Gifted adolescents and intimacy in close same-sex friendships

As most research with gifted children has demonstrated that giftedness has a positive effect on popularity and social self-esteem, it was expected that gifted adolescents would demonstrate higher intimacy with their same-sex closest friends and would tend to evince a more secure attachment style than nongifted cohorts. A total of 56 gifted and nongifted 9th graders completed questionnaires regarding their intimacy with closest same-sex friend and attachment style. However, the hypotheses were not confirmed. Gifted adolescents of both sexes reported lower intimacy with their closest same-sex friends than nongifted adolescents, and they did not differ from the latter in the frequency of the attachment styles they exhibited. These results are discussed in light of the distinction between instrumentality and expressiveness in social relations; it is suggested that gifted adolescents have a stronger instrumental orientation than others. While this may prove conducive to close relationships at the preadolescent stage, it does not give them an advantage during adolescence.Received Ph.D. in psychology from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Current research interests are close relationships, attachment, intimacy, and identity formation.     

Verbal giftedness and sociopolitical intelligence: Terman revisited

This paper reports on a three-year study of sociopolitical intelligence-defined as the ability to formulate viable solutions to moral, social, and political problems—in adolescence. From an initial sample of 659 intellectually gifted 12- and 13-year-olds, 58 students with the highest SAT-V scores were selected for study. From a later sample of 506 equally gifted 13- and 14-year-olds, 120 students were selected using measures of verbal intelligence (DAT), social insight, and creative potential, as well as academic and nonacademic achievement. On the basis of a variety of personality and cognitive measures the students in both samples were found to be unusually mature and well adjusted but to vary considerably in sociopolitical intelligence. These results suggest in partial agreement with Terman's earlier findings concerning the gifted, that above a certain level of tested intelligence the critical determinants of effective, practical performance may be personality and biographical variables.This research was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to the first author.Received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkely. Major interests are personality theory and moral developmentReceived her Ph.D. in psychology from The Johns Hopkins University. Major interests are personality theory and medical psychology.Received his Ph.D. in psychology from The Johns Hopkins University. Major interests are education and developmental psychology.Graduate student in psychology, The Johns Hopkins University. B. A. University of Oregon, 1973. Major research interest is personality correlates of high-level achievement.Main research interest is the development of sociopolitical achievement.     

The Pivotal Role of Adolescent Autonomy in Secondary School Classrooms

Student engagement is an important contributor to school success, yet high school students routinely describe themselves as disengaged. Identifying factors that alter (increase) engagement is a key aspect of improving support for student achievement. This study investigated students’ perceptions of autonomy, teacher connection, and academic competence as predictors of changes in student engagement within the classroom from the start to the end of a course. Participants were 578 (58% female) diverse (67.8% White, 25.2% African American, 5.1% Hispanic, 1.2% Asian American) high school students from 34 classrooms who provided questionnaire data both at the start and the end of a single course. Novel results from a cross-lagged model demonstrated that students who perceived their classrooms as allowing and encouraging their own autonomy in the first few weeks increased their engagement throughout the course, rather than the typical decline in engagement that was demonstrated by students in other classrooms. This finding is unique in that it extended to both students’ perceptions of engagement and observations of student engagement, suggesting a fairly robust pattern. The pertinence of this finding to adolescent developmental needs and its relationship to educational practice is discussed.     

The impact of divorce and subsequent father absence on children's and adolescents' self-concepts

The self-concepts of 406 grade school and junior high school students were assessed in this study. It was found that children and adolescents who had experienced father loss through divorce and whose mothers hadnot remarried demonstrated significantly lower self-concepts than those who were from intact families. Interestingly, children and adolescents who had experienced father loss through divorce and whose mothers had remarried were found to possess lower self-concepts than those from intact families, but this difference was not statistically significant. These findings were found across grade levels (i.e., grades 3–8) and for both sexes. The importance of these findings are discussed in light of current trends toward an increasing divorce rate and an increasing presence of stepfathers in American families.Recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1972. Research has been varied, ranging from assessment and amelioration of emotional and social problems in children to the impact of father loss on children and adolescents.Currently serving in the U.S. Navy. He has pursued graduate studies at Kansas State University. Primary research interests have been in the assessment of inter- and intrapersonal attitudes of children.     

Social and emotional adjustment of adolescents extremely talented in verbal or mathematical reasoning

Perceptions of self-esteem, locus of control, popularity, depression (or unhappiness), and discipline problems as indices of social and emotional adjustment were investigated in highly verbally or mathematically talented adolescents. Compared to a group of students who are much less gifted, the highly gifted students perceive themselves as less popular, but no differences were found in self-esteem, depression, or the incidence of discipline problems. The gifted students reported greater internal locus of control. Comparisons between the highly mathematically talented students and the highly verbally talented students suggested that the students in the latter group perceive themselves as less popular. Within both the gifted and comparison groups, there were also slight indications that higher verbal ability may be related to some social and emotional problems.     

Individual and Contextual Predictors of Cyberbullying: The Influence of Children’s Provictim Attitudes and Teachers’ Ability to Intervene

Electronic social communication has provided a new context for children to bully and harass their peers and it is clear that cyberbullying is a growing public health concern in the US and abroad. The present study examined individual and contextual predictors of cyberbullying in a sample of 16, 634 students in grades 3–5 and 7–8. Data were obtained from a large cluster-randomized trial of the KiVa antibullying program that occurred in Finland between 2007 and 2009. Students completed measures at pre-intervention assessing provictim attitudes (defined as children’s beliefs that bullying is unacceptable, victims are acceptable, and defending victims is valued), perceptions of teachers’ ability to intervene in bullying, and cyberbullying behavior. Students with higher scores on provictim attitudes reported lower frequencies of cyberbullying. This relationship was true for individual provictim attitudes as well as the collective attitudes of students within classrooms. Teachers’ ability to intervene assessed at the classroom level was a unique, positive predictor of cyberbullying. Classrooms in which students collectively considered their teacher as capable of intervening to stop bullying had higher mean levels of cyberbullying frequency. Our findings suggest that cyberbullying and other indirect or covert forms of bullying may be more prevalent in classrooms where students collectively perceive their teacher’s ability to intervene in bullying as high. We found no evidence that individual or contextual effects were conditional on age or gender. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence and Their Relationships with Social Coping Among Gifted Adolescents in Hong Kong

Two hundred and fifty-nine gifted adolescents were assessed on their emotional intelligence and social coping strategies using the Emotional Intelligence Scale (N. S. Schutte et al., Personality and Individual Differences, 25, 167–177, 1998) and the Social Coping Questionnaire (M. A. Swiatek, Gifted Child Quaterly, 39, 154–161, 1995). An item factor analysis yielded four dimensions of emotional intelligence, leading to the construction of 4 empirical scales of emotional intelligence. Students scored most highly on Social Skills and Self-Management of Emotions, followed by Empathy, and Utilization of Emotions. In coping with their being gifted, students endorsed to different degrees their use of 6 coping strategies, which were Valuing Peer Acceptance, Involvement in Activities, Attempting Avoidance, Denying Giftedness, Prizing Conformity, and Discounting Popularity. Social Skills emerged as the most important component of emotional intelligence predicting the use of strategies of Valuing Peer Acceptance and Involvement in Activities. Implications of the findings for enhancing emotional intelligence of adolescents in coping with problems arising from their being gifted and the need for further studies using longitudinal data are discussed.     

Stereotypes of social isolation and early burnout in the gifted: Do they still exist?

At the turn of the century, two common stereotypes of genius were that precocity was associated with social failure and that precocity bred early burnout. Later research on the gifted has refuted these stereotypes. The two studies in this paper investigate whether the stereotypes have changed in light of this new knowledge. In the first study, 66 male and 61 female colege students rated gifted, able, and average males and females. In the second study, 60 male and 59 female college students rated males and females with various extreme levels of precocity. In both studies, the stimulus persons were rated as high schoolers and as adults. Results indicate that the perception of the gifted, especially females, as encountering serious social problems is still prevalent. The illusion of burnout, however, has been replaced with an illusion of unqualified success.Major reseach interests include person perception and close relationships.     

Adolescents' Perceptions of the Relevance of Domains of Identity Formation: A South African Cross-Cultural Study

This study investigated South African Afrikaans-, English-, and Xhosa-speaking secondary school adolescents' (N = 1217) perceptions of the relative importance of identity-related domains. For this purpose a structured questionnaire consisting of 14 domain-specific items was used. Most of the domains were regarded as very important or fairly important by a significant majority of participants. Four domains were regarded as very important by more than 70% of the total research group, namely, future career, moral values, family relationships, and religious matters. Political and sexual matters were regarded as of least importance. Intercultural differences were evident in most domains. Significant gender differences were also found. Relatively more females than males reported a high priority to domains such as future career, moral values, friendships with same sex peers, gender role, and community matters. The male participants regarded relationships with the opposite sex and sexual matters as more important than the females did. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of carefully considering the domains included in future research on identity formation, depending on variables such as socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics of the specific research groups to be included in the investigation.     

Psychological adjustment in a college-level program of marked academic acceleration

The questionnaire responses of 24 markedly accelerated young students were compared with those of 24 regular-aged university students, 23 National Merit Scholars, and 27 students who had qualified for acceleration but instead elected to participate in high school. Measures included the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, California Psychological Inventory, the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment. Accelerated students differed minimally from the college-aged groups, and not at all from high-ability age mates, on all of the measures, a finding contrary to the expectation that skipping high school is likely to be deleterious to one's adjustment. Both groups of normal-aged college students were more socially assertive. The accelerated students were less conforming and conventional than the others, but mean differences were small and not indicative of admustment difficulties. The study provides no basis for concern about the typical psychological and social adjustment of accelerated students.The research reported here and, in part, the program it describes, were funded by a grant from the William H. Donner Foundation, the support of which is gratefully acknowledged.Received Ph.D. from Standford University. Research interests include the development of gifted and mentally retarded individuals.Received Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Research interests include psychosocial aspects of talent development.     

Social Status Attainment During the Transition to Adulthood

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a critical time for status attainment, with income, education, work experience, and independence from parents accruing at varying speeds and intensities. This study takes an intergenerational life-course perspective that incorporates parents’ and one’s own social status to examine the status attainment process from adolescence into adulthood in the domains of economic capital (e.g., income) and human capital (e.g., education, occupation). Survey data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (analytic n = 8,977) are analyzed using latent class analysis to capture the ebb and flow of social status advantages and disadvantages from adolescence (Wave 1) through young adulthood (Wave 3) into adulthood (Wave 4). The analytic sample is composed of 50.3 % females and 70.2 % Whites, 15.3 % Blacks, 11.0 % Hispanics, and 3.5 % Asians ages 12–18 at Wave 1 and 25–31 at Wave 4. Four latent classes are found for economic capital and five for human capital. The importance of parents’ social status is demonstrated by the presence of large groups with persistently low and persistently high social status over time in both domains. The capacity of individuals to determine their own status, however, is shown by equally large groups with upward and downward mobility in both domains. These findings demonstrate the dynamic nature of social status during this critical developmental period.     

Perceived similarity of mothers and their early adolescent daughters and relationship to behavior

The relationship between mothers' and their early adolescent daughters' self-concepts and the possible relationship to behavior is discussed in the literature review. In an exploratory study of 36 mother-daughter pairs, the mothers' self-concepts were moderately correlated (.37) and predicted their daughters' self-concepts on three of four factors (R=.43) but did not predict their behavior. There was a tendency for the daughter groups' maladaptive behaviors to increase as their self-concept scores decreased.