This article by Wendy Roedell points out that although good social adjustment, emotional maturity, and healthy self-concepts are realized by many intellectually gifted children, this same group of children is uniquely vulnerable to a variety of adjustment difficulties. Problems of uneven development, perfectionism, adult expectations, intense sensitivity, self-definition, alienation, inappropriate environments and role conflict are explored. Roedell concludes that the degree of success at these adjustments depends to a great extent on environmental support.Gifted students learn in a different manner and at an accelerated rate compared to their peers in the classroom, and therefore require gifted programs to develop and apply their talents. …show more content…
Many of the challenges many gifted students face; put them under lots of pressure to achieve at higher standards. Most children and teenagers will not be able to handle the balance between school and a social life. Gifted students are usually placed in school environments that are filled with pressure. Children may work so hard to keep up (and stay ahead) that they begin to burn out from stress, which can be a dangerous state, both physically and mentally. Stress can create a vicious cycle, as it is more difficult to concentrate and pay attention when stressed, so students may experience low performance, leading them to be even harder on themselves. Gifted and talented students, achieving over the average grade, are thought to have it easy but do they really? The stereotypical idea is that life is easier for clever kids, they do not have to work hard for good grades and generally they breeze through exams, but gifted and talented students are generally put under too much pressure from teachers and parents, who believe that the can achieve more. Although it may …show more content…
In fact, gifted students can experience high levels of stress to excel at everything they do. A lifetime of high expectations can lead gifted students to be extremely hard on themselves as they strive for increasingly higher standards and packed schedules. Although students often need these accelerated tracks to keep them from getting bored in school, the demands of both the coursework and the environment of other gifted students can cause a great deal of stress. But, overall, being gifted is all a balancing act, as is life. Few people would disagree that parents play an important role in their children's achievement. However, some people would argue that parents of high-achieving students play a detrimental role in pressuring their children to achieve at unrealistically high levels or to satisfy the parents' needs. Parents of academically talented children have been accused of pushing their children to achieve at exceptional levels and sooner than usual. While there is empirical evidence that parent factors have a positive association with, or facilitate, children's achievement, there has also been great concern that parents'
Parents’ educations have an influence on children in many different ways, although the parents’ expectation can affect children as well. Kean illustrated if parents expect high achievement, then it predicts better chance for achievement for their children (Kean, 2005). Moreover, sometimes parents’ expectation showed how
Pfeiffer, S. I. (2001, April). Professional psychology and the gifted: Emerging practice opportunities. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 32(2), 175-180.
A common misconception is intelligence is inherited and does not change, so therefore, gifted children do not need special services. However, this mindset is very dangerous when it comes to the development of gifted children. It is widely believed that gifted students will get by on their own without any assistance from their school. After all,
Gifted and talented programs are intrinsically valuable to many children’s education as they provide a system in which all students involved are engaged, challenged, and intellectually stimulated. In "How People Learn", Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino (1999) stress the importance of each student being given reasonable and appropriate goals based on his or her level of understanding and competency (p. 20). Gifted and talented programs help institutionalize the attempt to meet all student’s needs by providing uniquely appropriate challenges which aim to keep every student engaged, thus receiving the best chance at success. Although there are many valuable and important aspects of gifted education, there are also significant issues rooted in the base of America’s gifted and talented programs, one of which I will address throughout this paper. In my opinion, the most notable problem which troubles gifted and talented programs is the system by which students are selected to join their school’s gifted and talented program.
They have been termed as a group of underserved and under stimulated youth by most localities. Brody and Mills [1997] argue that this population of students "could be considered the most misunderstood of all exceptionalities." This occurs because it is difficult for educational professionals to reconcile the twice-exceptional learner’s extreme strengths with their noticeable weaknesses. A GRT should seek to understand the roles and responsibilities that their school districts have documented. This can be extremely challenging because each district may have varying viewpoints as well as each school. “Federal regulations do not exist for gifted education services. Overall guidelines for school divisions to identify and serve gifted students are provided in the Virginia Regulations Governing Educational Services for Gifted Students at 8VAC20-40-10 et. seq. Each school division provides its own identification of and services for gifted students in accordance with its local plan for gifted education. However, the gifted education regulations acknowledge the underrepresentation of students who are culturally different, have disabilities, or come from low socioeconomic backgrounds in gifted education programs. As a result, school divisions are encouraged to make an effort to identify for gifted education services students with disabilities and
Adolescents. VanTassel-Baska, J.L., Cross, T. L. & Olenchak, F. R. (Eds.). Social-Emotional Curriculum With Gifted and Talented Students (pp. 133-151). Prufrock Press Inc. Waco, Texas.
There are many distal influences than can affect a child’s educational success, from the neighbourhood they live in to the children they choose to be friends with. Another influence is the child’s parents, they can be seen to influence how well their child does in an academic setting in many ways, whether it be their own personal academic success or their current job and thus their income and socioeconomic status. A common finding in studies related to parental influence suggests that the more engaged a parent is with the child’s studies and the more knowledge they have, the more success a child experiences in school. Nevertheless, it is important that we do not overlook wider distal influences when studying academic achievement of children
The authors presented different counseling tenets that not just counselors, but also, we, as teachers can use to address the concerns of our gifted learners. We can incorporate these tenets in our lessons so that others students can benefit with it as well. The counseling tenets discussed the book Socio-Emotional Curriculum with Gifted and Talented Students (2009) include the following: nonjudgmental, focusing on strengths, respecting and fostering autonomy, active listening, open-ended questioning, avoiding teacher/facilitator self-disclosure, respecting privacy and processing.
The Gifted program exists to provide more academic opportunities for those who qualify as “gifted.” “’Gifted means performing or demonstrating the potential for performing at significantly higher levels of accomplishment in one or more academic fields due to intellectual ability, when compared to others of similar age, experience, and environment’” (Quoted in “Gifted”). In order to make it into the program the student must show higher intellectual ability than the average student at his or her age, but what determines that factor? The student must take a multidimensional test and score in the 98th percentile. However, the most weighted part of the test remains an average IQ test. Intelligence test scores should not be the primary qualification for admittance into the gifted program. They should not remain the primary qualification because it allows the minorities and the economically disadvantaged to be underrepresented, it proves insufficient when compared to other means of testing, and it fails to accurately reflect a student’s intelligence.
What makes a person gifted has been debated historically and continues on today. The debate has been influenced by politics and culture, which impact how gifted children are educated. The three articles discussed in this paper explore the origins, development, social-emotional impact, and politics of giftedness.
Debelak, M. A. (2008). Academic Competitions as Tools for Differentiation in Middle School. Gifted Child Today, 47-53.
In schools all over the world, gifted classes are being taken away and it is not helping, people such as Ryan Ripepi from Eagles Media Center claims, ”While the honors program does allow motivated students to pursue more advanced classes, the way students are placed in the program is flawed. It relies on placement tests, teacher recommendations, and parent intervention, and it often fails to accommodate
Lovecky, D. V. (1995). Highly Gifted Children and Peer Relationships. Counseling and Guidance Newsletter. Retrieved March 10, 2003, from http://print.ditd.org/floater=74.html.
Teachers with gifted students can help a child with this problem by asking them to volunteer to assist a fellow student in an area they may be struggling in. On the other hand, some gifted students may struggle with perfectionism. This can be an issue for a student because in striving for perfection can be time consuming, tiresome, and in extreme cases, bad for one’s health. Along with perfectionism comes unrealistic expectations. Twice exceptional students have a tendency to be harsh critics of themselves.
Parke, B. (n.d.). Challenging gifted students in the regular classroom. Retrieved March 1, 2004, from http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/Challenging_gifted _kids.html