By Susan Assouline and Nicholas Colangelo
Each summer hundreds of junior high and high school students come to Iowa City for our residential academic programs. Whereas the academic component to the summer programs may be considered to be a primary reason for participation, there are many other components to the residential experience all resulting in the building of a community. For example, students are involved in evening activities including canoeing, tie-dyeing, and community service projects. Also, all of the students in the scholarship programs (Blank Summer Institute, Environmental Health Sciences Institute for Rural Youth, Iowa Talent Project, Project ACHIEVE, and the Iowa Governor’s Institute), and the Summer Institute for Creative Engineering and Inventiveness (SICEI) have an opportunity to participate in the Belin-Blank Center’s Counseling Lab for Talent Development.
The B-BC’s Counseling Lab is a values-based career-counseling program. Because the students in our programs are so highly able, they have tremendous potential in many possible careers. From well-meaning individuals, they often hear statements such as, "You are so bright; you can do anything you want." However, because students can’t do everything that they want, it is our purpose to help students, through the Counseling Lab, clarify their interests by discussing with them their sense of identity and purpose. As a part of Counseling Lab, students complete two or three assessments which help them gain a better understanding of themselves, their talent areas, their developing vocational goals, and their values. The values are determined by having students rank from a list of 20 their top three and their bottom three values. The results of the assessments are used to structure group discussions.
The adjacent table presents, by gender, the values receiving the highest percentage of responses. There was
a tie for two values for the boys, and the top three values for boys differed from the top three values for
girls. The total number of girls responding was 133 and the total number of boys was 130.
In an article that was written nearly two decades ago, Dr. Colangelo reported the results of a similar study of gifted high school students’ values, as measured by the same list of 20 values. The conclusions from Professor Colangelo’s study with high school students were that boys and girls did not differ in their value patterns, and the recommendation was that educators assume that boys and girls are more similar than different.
The research of a new generation, however, may suggest that at the junior high age, the differences between boys and girls are more evident. Friendship is definitely the value tabbed by the highest percentage of respondents, both boys and girls. Family was important to What do you believe is the most important value? (both boys and girls, but for girls, family was in second place, and for boys, it tied, with wisdom, for third place. The second-place value for boys was "comfortable life." The differences in percentages between boys and girls were not significant for friendship, family, and spirituality; however, they were significantly different for wisdom and comfortable life.
Our research mission is to better understand high-ability students so that we can work with educators and school systems to make "schooling" a positive and challenging experience. Knowing what is important (i.e., their values) to gifted students helps us to help educators have a better understanding of their students.