Diamonds in the Rough - Unearthing the Gifted

Gifted Underachievement is a quiet epidemic and its cause lies in they way we identify students with outstanding abilities and potential. Different researchers use different methods to identify this group and there is no consensus about which is best.

Despite two Senate enquiries (1988, 2001) that concluded gifted children are actually among the most disadvantaged students in Australia, gifted students in Australia are still not getting the support they deserve.

Now, award-winning Australian research has discovered the best method for identifying gifted underachievers in our schools.

Associate Professor Jae Jung and Dr Rahmi Jackson of UNSW Sydney’s research in the area published in The British Journal of Educational Psychology will be named winner of the 2023 Pathbreaker Award by the American Education Research Association (AERA) this month.

It is the first research to pinpoint the best way to identify students whose remarkable gifts hide behind unremarkable results.

Director of UNSW Sydney’s Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre (GERRIC), Associate Professor Jae Yup Jung, says it is difficult to uncover gifted underachievers and educators can’t look to the research for reliable guidance.

“One would expect being gifted to be an unquestionable advantage,” says Assoc Prof Jung.

"Sadly, the research remains clear on the fact that many gifted students in our schools are languishing far from their potential.

"Their right to an education that meets their intellectual and psychological needs is being neglected.”

Assoc Prof Jung says one of the biggest myths about gifted students is that they are going to achieve regardless.

“But what we are seeing is an epidemic of underachievement among gifted students.”

Dr Jackson says some studies report that up to - or even more than - half of all gifted students exhibit significant academic underachievement.

“These young people are achieving significantly below their high potential, and they may experience a lot of distress as a result including frustration, low self-esteem, boredom, anxiety, withdrawal, and anger,” Dr Jackson says.

Research estimates that there may be more than 370,000 gifted students in Australian schools and to be identified as gifted, a student needs to have natural ability that places them in the top 10 per cent for their age group in one or more domains, whether that is intellectual, creative, social/emotional, or physical.

Finding The Optimal Method
“Our first task was to assess the different methods commonly used to identify gifted underachievement in research,” Dr Jackson says.

“We found that each method pointed to a different group of students. The next major step was to determine which of these methods was most likely to identify the real group of underachieving gifted students.

“Our study produced two, separate but related, findings.

“Firstly, the different methods are not equivalent and cannot be used interchangeably - swapping one method for another means identifying different groups of students.

“And most importantly we found one of these methods is better than the others - the one known as the ‘simple difference’ method.”

“The school archive we had access to represented over a decade’s worth of systematic testing and consistent record-keeping. We had cognitive testing results, NAPLAN results, hundreds of thousands of individual school assessment tasks, HSC results, and school certificate results, as well.

“We processed these data according to four methods that are frequently used by researchers, but which estimate both a student’s expected achievement and their actual achievement in different ways,” Assoc Prof Jung says.

Keep it Simple
“The simple difference method stands out,” says Assoc Prof Jung.

“This method involves an assessment of the expected achievement for a student, using ability tests, such as IQ tests. You then assess the actual achievement of the student, for example, using school assessments like end-of-year exams. The gap between expected and actual achievement gives you a measure of underachievement”.

“Not only did the results of the simple difference method align best with what, based on all the available evidence, we would expect an accurate result to look like, but it involves very few unverifiable assumptions about giftedness.

"It is the most reliable method out there for informing decisions about which students need targeted help to fulfil their potential.

“With the simple difference method, we don’t just identify cases of gifted underachievement, we can also see by how much they are underachieving,” says Assoc Prof Jung.

“This is useful because it helps determine the intensity of support needed as well as the students who may need them most.”

Dr Jackson says it is important to recognise that underachieving gifted students need support if they are to fully achieve their potential

“This research means we are now that much closer being able to identify these students and  direct support to where it is most needed,” he says.

“I would advise schools and school systems to begin using the simple difference method to identify underachieving gifted students.” says Assoc Prof Jung.

“It is direct, powerful, easy to apply, and treats students as individuals.”

Published in Jackson, R.L. and Jung, J.Y. (2022), "The Identification of Gifted Underachievement: Validity Evidence for the Commonly Used Methods". British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92: 1133-1159. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12492

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