Source: Vision, Spring 2000

Smart in School: Perceptions of Self and Others
By Susan Assouline and Nicholas Colangelo

Our summer residential program participants and their parents have been responding to questionnaires for a number of years. We combined the responses from the years 1997-1999 (total number = 1251) and created a general picture of the academically talented students in our programs. In general, our findings indicated that:

  1. The perceptions of the Belin-Blank Center summer participants are positive with regard to being smart;
  2. Parents and teachers are also seen (by students) as being positive about the student being smart; and,
  3. Friends are perceived (by students) as being negative in their attitudes about the student being smart.
A consequence of finding #3 is that gifted students will often attempt to "hide" their abilities from their peers. In other cases, students will deliberately underachieve so as not to be perceived as too "intellectual." Similar findings have been documented in a number of other studies and articles.

These three general findings originated from more specific data. For example, in Graph 1 you will see the exact percentages to the students' responses to the question, "Who encourages you to do your best in school?"

Another insteresting observation (see Graph2) concerned the percentage of students who responded, "A lot like me," or "Sort of like me," to the question: "I would rather do my schoolwork alone than in a group." This is particularly interesting in comparison to the responses to the question (see Graph 3): "I would rather work with other kids who are smart than with kids of all kinds of abilities."

Graph 4 illustrates the finding that the percentage of students who indicated that they thought a subject would be very useful to their future work reveals little variability among the three grade levels as well as among a variety of subject areas.

We first began collecting responses to questions on our Student and Parent Questionnaires (SPQ) in 1994. Since that time we have learned a great deal about academically able students and their parents through our analyses of their responses to the questionnaires. We have recently revised the SPQ. The BESTS 2000 participants and their parents all received the newly revised questionnaires, and we are looking forward to analyzing their responses. In addition to BESTS, all summer program participants as well as the Invent Iowa participants will be asked to complete the new questionnaires. Both parents and students have reported that they enjoy completing the questionnaires, and often the questions precipitate interesting discussions within the family. Results of the analyses will be reported periodically in Vision.


Back to Belin-Blank Center Research