Underachievement rates among those gifted children

[ssk7882]

What a civilized response!  Thank you, Shaun.  That was really far 
more than I deserved.  I did come across as spoiling for a fight 
there, didn't I.

I'm afraid that I do tend to react to "underachiever" as a fighting 
word, particularly when it appears in combination with any mention of 
IQ test results.  

In fact, you were so very nice about it that I'm almost feeling
sorry to be so intent on pursuing this subject further.  But I am.

Laura wrote:

> *sighs* who am I to argue against "years of experience here, 
> personal knowledge of over 50 cases, detailed knowledge of another 
> 200 cases, and an intimate knowledge of 60 years of research"...

<grins>  Laura, my dear, I am really feeling your pain.  I'm 
suffering from more than a bit of that myself.

But I'm going to have to do this anyway.  

Shaun wrote:

> Well, you're free to use any definition you wish - but this is 
> nothing like the definition we use.

> "A person who is not achieving at a particular level, who is known 
> to have both the ability and the desire to achieve at that level."

> We don't consider those who choose a different path to be 
> underachievers. The term is reserved only for those who would like 
> to be achieving at a higher level.

Certainly that definition seems sensible to me.

Sadly, though, it's not the definition that the studies to which I
think you've been referring throughout this discussion have actually 
used.
  
Now, admittedly I have no particular expertise in this field -- and 
certainly none to match your own -- but I have done a bit of reading 
on the subject as it is, for purely autobiographical reasons, one of 
considerable personal interest to me, and I'd been rather assuming 
that the source of your claim that 50% of the students in the top IQ 
range "underachieve" was the 1991 VanTassel-Baska study.  Correct me 
if I'm wrong, but I'd been assuming that that was your main source.

That study, however, did *not* use as its criteria for evaluating 
achievement the subjects' own stated goals, ambitions or desires.  
Rather, it applied external criteria to evaluate "achievement," as 
did Rimm's "Underachievement Syndrome" nonsense from the mid-80s (the 
particular title of which is escaping me right now), as in fact has 
every single study that I have ever seen on this topic.  It is this 
fact that has caused me to find it utterly unsurprising that 
these studies all come to the same conclusion: namely, that very many 
gifted young people are failing to "achieve."  Well, of course they 
are!  After all, if the standard criteria for evaluating things 
like "achievement" were relevant to them, then they wouldn't suffer 
so much in school in the first place, now, would they?

So *are* there, in fact, any studies that have used the definition 
that you gave above as their standard, and then gone on to find 
similarly high rates of underachieving among the top twentieth 
percentile?  

If there are in fact such studies, then I would love to be directed 
to them, as this has long been a particular bugbear of mine.


Back to your own definition, though:

> "A person who is not achieving at a particular level, who is known 
> to have both the ability and the desire to achieve at that level."

So someone is an "underachiever" if he has failed to reach the goals
that he has set for himself?  That seems a quite reasonable definition
to me.  It does make me wonder, though, how you go about determining 
whether the problem lies in the ability to achieve, or in the 
original selection of goal?  In other words, how can one rule out the 
possibility that the child may not have simply set his sights a bit 
too high in the first place?  And how do you determine whether a 
change in goal later in life is to be considered "legitimate" or to 
be framed in terms of a symptom of the dread Underachievement 
Syndrome?


You wrote:

> > . . . .and a significant number of these kids are underachievers 
> > because their school environment is inappropriate to them.

I then asked:

> Why do you make this assumption?

And you replied:

> Because I am aware of the tens of thousands of pages of research 
> into these issues over the last 50 years that show this is the 
> case, because I am personally aware of over 100 cases, and because 
> I was one of them myself.

Well.  As I said, I can't argue with your experience in the field, nor
can I compete with the sheer volume of your reading.  I can state, 
though, that every study on this topic that I have read has left me 
feeling very dubious indeed about the relevance of the standards 
of "success," "excellence," and "achievement" that the researchers 
have chosen to privilege, which in turn tends to make me feel less 
than confident about the assumption that those students labelled 
as "underachievers" are really losing an interest in learning at all, 
or that they are necessarily truly failing to achieve the goals that 
they *themselves* have set.  

I'm not questioning your experience, I hope you understand, nor even 
your basic premise.  I absolutely agree with you that the education 
of the gifted and talented leaves a lot to be desired, and I admire 
your efforts to improve that situation.  (And from your unfailingly 
polite and patient tone in this discussion, I also feel convinced 
that you must be a great teacher.)

I do, however, believe that this problem often gets misframed, and 
that this in turn often leads to precisely those self-esteem and self-
confidence problems that are usually attributed to "underachieving."

There's personal experience here, as I'm sure you've deduced.  You 
see, I am one of those terrible disappointments, those living proofs 
of the failure of the educational system to deal appropriately with 
children with special needs, those underachieving top twentieth 
percentilers over whom researchers (and parents, and friends, and 
teachers, and random strangers on the Internet) always seem to
be wringing their hands -- and quite frankly, I'm getting a little 
bit sick of it.  It *is* damaging to ones self-esteem to be one of 
those underachieving over-170ers, but not -- at least, in my case -- 
precisely for the reasons that are usually assumed.  

What is really damaging to self-esteem is when, as a by-product of 
having applied highly inappropriate criteria to your activities in an 
attempt to measure your degree of "achievement," people then go on to 
dismiss even your most deeply-cherished desires, ambitions, 
achievements and works as in some way superficial or meaningless: 
trivial, unimportant, "wasted efforts," indicative of a profound 
inability to "follow through," or of a failure to live up to ones 
potential, or of prodigy burn-out, or "having lost interest in 
learning."

Such statements are just plain insulting, honestly, and they aren't 
made any less insulting by the addendum that of course, it isn't 
really *your* fault, sweetheart, it was just that rotten educational 
system that was to blame for it.  It ruined your ability to follow 
through on your projects, don't you see, and rendered you incapable 
of producing the sorts of things that *we* value (unlike those weird 
things that you happen to value, which are of course silly and 
frivolous, and not really the kinds of things that count; they're not 
actually "real" achievements at all, you know, and the value that you 
yourself perceive in them is just a figment of your poor deluded 
mind).

Part of the problem here, I think, is an inability (or a refusal) to 
understand that those of us who get those upwards-of-170 scores on 
our IQ tests often honestly *do* think differently than most other 
people.  I don't personally believe that we think any "better," in 
any meaningful sense of that term, but it has indeed been my 
experience that our thinking is often extremely *unusual.*  It's the 
reason that we scored so bizarrely highly on those tests in the first 
place. 

Yes, of *course* people with very high IQ scores are going to show a 
high tendency to "underachieve" when the criteria being applied to 
evaluate achievement are those which were designed for the societal 
norm!  Isn't that only to be expected?  You are dealing here with 
people who think in a highly abnormal manner.  They're not going to 
be approaching things in precisely the same way, nor even necessarily 
with the same goals in mind.  That around half of them fail to meet 
those external criteria of achievement is only to be expected, isn't 
it?

And yeah, of course they're going to have self-esteem issues.  It is 
very difficult not to develop self-esteem issues when ones own 
approach to activities like learning and creating is so deeply at 
odds with the approach that the majority favors, and when this fact 
then so often leads to outright dismissal of the value of ones 
endeavors.  Very few people have the confidence to put up with that 
nonsense for any length of time without developing a few self-esteem 
problems as a result of it.

So when my reaction to the statement that fifty percent (or perhaps 
even more) of students in the very top percentile of the IQ range go 
on to become "underachievers" was "Well, of *course* they do!" -- 
well, I really wasn't speaking with my tongue in my cheek.  What I 
meant to imply there was that it is really only to be expected that 
so many of us will hold very different ideas about what constitutes 
an "appropriate" outlet for our efforts, and that this is likely to 
be much of what then leads to our classification as "underachievers."


Take your future engineer, for example.

<This is a gifted eight year old, trapped in the regular school 
system>

> His mathematical abilities are those of a typical 16 year old. What 
> is he required to do in his class at school? They are learning 
> their multiplication tables, and doing two digit addition. He knew 
> those things before he was 3.

Yes.  This sort of thing is very frustrating, I agree.  It is mind-
numbingly boring, for one thing (particularly if the teacher doesn't 
take well to your sitting at your desk and reading a book, rather 
than pretending to pay attention), and for another, it fosters 
resentment between the kids themselves.  I distinctly remember 
developing feelings of murderous *rage* towards the other children in
my class in first grade as a result of being forced to listen to all 
of the reading groups stammering their way out loud through the same 
chapter of a primer in class -- over and over and over again, every 
day, day in and day out...

I mean, it really didn't do much to foster love of humanity in me, 
particularly as I suffer from some problems with sensory fields -- I 
find it very difficult to filter out irrelevant sensory data.  I've 
learned to cope with it now, thanks to some skilled LD people, but at 
the age of four I was completely incapable of blocking out such 
background noise.  To this day, I can recite from memory the 
entirety of that primer.  (I reserve particular horror and loathing 
for the chapter about Sally's losing her teddy bear.  Many of the 
children in the class found the word "bear" a particularly difficult 
one to spell out. <shudder>)

All that said, though, I suppose that this is the sort of statement 
that I find so worrisome:

> In three and a half years at school, he has learned basically 
> nothing. He's very close to shutting down and giving up on school. 
> If he was happy, we wouldn't be involved at this point - but he 
> isn't. He wants to learn - and school is doing nothing to address 
> his desire to learn. If something isn't done, he will lose that 
> desire.

I guess what worries me here -- and I do realize that we may just be 
talking past each other -- is the equation of "school" with
 "learning."  This boy wants to learn, and school is doing nothing to 
address his desire to learn. He is therefore very close to giving up 
on school.

Well, really!  Who can blame him?  What he wants isn't *school* but 
*learning,* and even for those of perfectly average intelligence, the 
two are really not at all the same thing.  It would be nice if they 
were, but they aren't.  School is all about gaining certification of 
ones ability to achieve a minimum degree of competence in a specific 
set of skills.  Learning is something very different.

Of course, I realize that your concern for this boy is that he might 
lose his desire to learn.  You say as much.  But the terms "learning" 
and "school" get sort of conflated in your statement, with "giving up 
on school" and "losing the desire to learn" becoming viewed as almost 
synonymous, and this strikes me as significant because I think that 
it is very much the same conflation that leads to that definition 
of "achievement" that I find so very troubling when it is applied to 
the profoundly gifted.  

Learning is a process.  It is a verb, not an object.  You don't "do 
things" with learning; learning is itself what you do.  To love 
learning is to love the *doing* of it, not the having done of it.  It 
isn't really intrinsically goal-oriented behavior at all, although it 
certainly can be applied to goals or have goals applied to it.  But 
the act of learning itself is for many people not a means at all, but 
an end.

The standard definitions of "achievement," on the other hand, all 
seem to focus on end-product.  They look to object, not verb, to 
completion, not process.  And I think that this becomes particularly 
problematic when one is talking about children whose IQs fall at the 
extreme edges of the range, because such people are even more likely 
than most to value the process over the end-product, the doing over 
the having done.


> If he decides later on that he doesn't want to be an engineer, or 
> he has no interest in mathematics, or whatever, that's fine. But it 
> should be his choice - not something that he is pushed towards 
> because of inappropriate schooling.

Obviously we are not in any disagreement there, and I certainly also 
agree with you that this poor kid would likely be much happier if he 
were permitted to be somewhere where he could pursue his interest in 
his own manner and at his own level, rather than being stuck chanting 
out his times tables when he's actually ready for calculus.  I mean, 
that's obviously a big problem.

What concerns me here, I suppose, are two fears, ones which are 
admittedly based on personal and anecdotal experience, but which I 
think are no less valid for all that.

First, it worries me that if this kid does eventually decide, for 
whatever reason, that his interests lie in some other arena -- 
perhaps even in one much further outside of his particular domain of 
specialty -- that this will be viewed as a symptom of failure.  There 
is often, in my experience, a sense that extraordinary precocity in 
some particular field imbues one with a kind of *obligation* to adopt 
that field as ones major focus of interest for the rest of ones 
life.  Indeed, it's usually the case when you are very young that 
your particular area of talent strikes you as by far the most 
intriguing or exciting -- sometimes for the simple reason that it's 
really very gratifying to be so good at it, and to get all of the 
praise and attention that goes along with that.  As people get older, 
though, the fields outside of their particular domains can start to 
seem far more interesting -- sometimes because they are more 
challenging, sometimes because they are new and exciting, sometimes 
simply because people's interests do change as they get older.  

Abandoning the field of interest that most interested you as a child, 
however, is one of the primary behaviors that researchers have 
identified as symptomatic of "prodigy burn-out," or of the 
Underachiever Syndrome.  I personally find this rather disturbing.

My second concern lies more in the arena of precisely what 
manifestations of "interest in mathematics" will be considered 
sufficiently goal-oriented to "count" when it comes to the evaluation 
of this boy's achievement later in his life.  Becoming an engineer 
obviously would qualify as "achieving," as would gaining a doctorate, 
publishing a monogram, pursuing a career in any professional field 
that requires a strong background in mathematics, and so forth.

Should he decide to live in his parents basement, on the other hand, 
and to spend all of his time exploring unusual mathematical concepts, 
then he will most likely be classified as an "underachiever" and 
viewed as having lost both his desire to learn and his interest in 
mathematics.  (Unless, of course, he ends up solving one of the huge 
outstanding mathematical questions, in which case everyone will 
revise their assumptions and laud him as an iconoclastic genius 
instead.)  He will also likely develop some serious self-esteem 
problems as a result of people constantly insinuating that he has 
failed to live up to his much-touted potential -- even though in 
fact, he is doing *precisely* what he has always done: namely, 
pursuing his interest in thinking about mathematics.

This is troubling to me because to my mind, it reveals an utter lack 
of comprehension of precisely what constitutes "interest,"
"ambition," "desire," "achievement," and even "learning" itself.  


> There's a big difference between choosing a particular path than 
> finding it's the only one left to you.

There is.  I do find myself questioning, though, the assumption that 
all of the purported cases of people's paths being cut off are really 
that at all. Certainly it sometimes happens.  The desire to learn can 
be quelled, and it all too often is.  But I cannot escape the 
suspicion that many of the studies showing this problem as so 
widespread -- afflicting fifty percent of the population, and so 
forth -- are reaching those conclusions in part because they are 
looking at all of the wrong things.

My own experience with people whose IQs range in the 170 to 200 range 
has shown, well...

> ...our kids have a very wide range of value and interests and are 
> encouraged to discover their own paths. And most would be *very* 
> resistant to any attempt to direct them in any event.

<laughs>  Well, yes.  *Precisely.*  And I rather get the impression 
that many of the studies that have been done on these people may have 
really overlooked that tendency (as well as some of its more common 
manifestations) when they set out to determine the rates of "burn-
out" or of "underachieving" among the populace.


-- Elkins