In plain language
Does being gifted protect teenagers from the pressures of adolescence, or make them harder to bear? This study drew on the Wollongong Youth Study, a longitudinal project tracking over 950 Australian students through high school. Sixty-five students who scored in the top 10% on both standardised literacy (ELLA) and numeracy (SNAP) tests in Year 7 were identified as gifted, and their personality, social support, emotional well-being, and academic achievement were compared with their non-gifted peers.
Academically, the gifted students were thriving: they had significantly higher grades in every subject area except Geography and Physical Education. Their teachers saw them as superior in adjustment and less likely to have behavioural or emotional problems. But the students themselves told a different story: they reported feeling sadder and less satisfied with the social support available to them than their non-gifted peers. In other words, their teachers were oblivious to how these capable young people actually felt.
Within the gifted group, the students most at risk of poor grades were those high in psychoticism (toughmindedness) and low in conscientiousness, hope, joviality, and positive attitudes to school—while self-esteem was entirely unrelated to gifted students' performance. The findings argue that schools should not assume gifted students are fine because their marks are good: their social and emotional needs deserve attention, and without formal identification procedures, gifted underachievers may "stay under the radar."
Key findings
- Gifted students (top 10% on both literacy and numeracy tests; n = 65) achieved significantly higher academic outcomes than non-gifted peers in all subject areas except Geography and Physical Education.
- Teachers rated gifted students as better adjusted and less likely to have behavioural or emotional problems than non-gifted students.
- Despite this, gifted students themselves reported feeling sadder and less satisfied with their social support than their non-gifted counterparts—a disconnect their teachers did not detect.
- There were no significant differences between gifted and non-gifted students in self-esteem, trait hope, problem orientation, or attitudes towards education.
- Within the gifted sample, poor grades were predicted by high psychoticism and low conscientiousness, trait hope, joviality, and attitudes to school; conscientiousness alone explained about 40% of the variance in gifted students' grades.
- Self-esteem was entirely unrelated to academic performance among gifted students (r = −.003).
How to cite
APA
Vialle, W., Heaven, P. C. L., & Ciarrochi, J. (2007). On Being Gifted, but Sad and Misunderstood: Social, emotional, and academic outcomes of gifted students in the Wollongong Youth Study. Educational Research and Evaluation, 13(6), 569–586. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803610701786046
BibTeX
@article{vialle2007being,
author = {Vialle, Wilma and Heaven, Patrick C. L. and Ciarrochi, Joseph},
title = {On Being Gifted, but Sad and Misunderstood: Social, emotional, and academic outcomes of gifted students in the Wollongong Youth Study},
journal = {Educational Research and Evaluation},
year = {2007},
volume = {13},
number = {6},
pages = {569--586},
doi = {10.1080/13803610701786046}
}
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Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.