The Under-Educated: How We Have Neglected the Bright Child

by ROBERT C. WILSON

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THE most neglected child in the average classroom of the public school is the gifted child. It is easy for the hard-pressed teacher to overlook him since he does the required work easily. Presented with a course of study pitched at the level of the average, the student with a potentially brilliant mind is unstimulated, bored, and must find ways to kill time since he works much faster than the rest of the class. Capable of extraordinary insight, hungry for knowledge to feed his insatiable interest, he finds that many of his questions must go unanswered; teacher is busy elsewhere. The net effect is to lower his interest in school and his motivation to learn.

By the time such a student reaches high school, the years of wasted energy and the lack of opportunity to learn effective work habits have seriously hampered his potentialities for doing any sort of intellectual work commensurate with his ability.

A number of recent studies indicate that less than half of those youngsters in the upper 10 per cent of intellectual ability ever enter college. Yet these are the very students with the ability to achieve aboveaverage success in college training.

As a nation we are pledged to provide for all of our citizens the equivalent of a high school education. This movement toward universal secondary education has produced a tremendous increase in the number of young people attending school in the higher grades. Since 1870, the general population has increased about four times, but secondary school enrollment has multiplied approximately eighty times, from 80,000 students to about 6,500,000 in 1953. The proportion of youngsters of high school age attending school has increased from 20 per cent in 1900 to 80 per cent in 1950.

The vast increase in enrollments has been accompanied by a shortage of classrooms and teachers, a large increase in the range of abilities of the students, and a consequent lowering of the average ability in the classroom.

The modern classroom teacher may have in her room 30 or 40 students who range in I.Q. from 75 to 150. In an average class, a sixth-grade teacher may find herself with students varying in mental age from 8 years to 16 years, in reading ability from third grade to twelfth grade, in arithmetic reasoning and computation from third grade to tenth grade.

In her efforts to help all students master the material of the grade, the teacher will have to devote a larger proportion of her time to the dull students. Because the gifted child masters the material easily, he does not appear to need as much of the teacher’s help as the slow learner. Yet if he is to fulfill his potentialities he must have encouragement.

One of the first steps in helping the gifted is to establish an identification program for discovering which pupils have special abilities and talents. No single procedure is perfect, but a combination of procedures can produce useful results.

After identifying the gifted, a variety of methods can be used in making school experiences more appropriate to the ability of the gifted child. Of these, the most common are grouping, acceleration, and homeroom enrichment.

Grouping students according to ability is a procedure which has been widely used. If rapid learners of similar age are grouped together, they are not held back by the slow learners. Discussion of abstract concepts is facilitated and there are more opportunities for students to explore further the broader implications of subjects being studied. The bright student is less likely to be embarrassed when he shows interest and liking for academic subjects.

In large school systems, grouping has sometimes taken the form of special schools for the gifted — such as the Bronx High School of Science and the Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan, to both of which are assigned large numbers of gifted students. For moderate-size school systems, a more feasible method is to group students within a school. The rapid learners may be grouped together for the whole day or they may be grouped together only for academic subjects in which they show special ability and interest.

It is argued that grouping is undemocratic; that it does not provide equal opportunities; that the slow students suffer from the absence of the stimulation of the rapid learners; and that the rapid learners should learn to get along with individuals of all levels of ability in preparation for adult life.

But those who approve of grouping say that “democratic,” interpreted as equal opportunity, means equal opportunity to fulfill one’s potentialities; that the rapid learner, instead of stimulating the slow learner, really inhibits him by his swiftness and comprehension; and that in adult life people tend to associate with those of like interests and abilities.

Acceleration is the procedure which is most familiar to people. It may take the form either of “skipping” a grade or of doing the prescribed work for several grades in a shorter period of time than usual. Almost anyone can cite instances of some personal acquaintance who was accelerated and doesn’t seem too well adjusted as an adult. Such unsystematic observations, of course, overlook the numerous instances of accelerated individuals who are well adjusted or the instances of individuals who are poorly adjusted and might have made better adjustments had they been accelerated.

A long-term study of gifted California school children was carried out by Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University over a period of twenty-five years. In his book, The Gifted Child Grows Up, the data indicate that in every way in which their personalities, achievements, and social, emotional, and physical adjustment could be evaluated, the majority of those accelerated in school were superior to their nonaccelerated contemporaries.

Obviously, all aspects of a child’s development need to be considered in deciding to accelerate a particular child. Most schools accelerate children occasionally, but such occurrences are largely haphazard and accidental. Use of this procedure in a systematic, considered way is one means of improving the educational experience for the gifted.

Homeroom enrichment is the procedure which seems to be most generally acceptable to teachers and school administrators. The philosophy behind this procedure is that teachers will provide instruction for each child suitable to his individual interests and rate of development. Under these conditions, the gifted child is kept with his classmates in the regular classroom. The teacher devotes time to planning activities and projects with the child which will challenge his abilities and interests and provide the educational stimulation he needs. Let us suppose, for example, that a class is being introduced to the new arithmetic process of multiplying a fraction by a whole number. Those children who master the process easily will become bored if required to continue drilling with the rest of the class. In enriching the arithmetic experiences of these children, the teacher might have them apply the process to a variety of practical problems or she might work out with them some extra projects in arithmetic such as reading about the history of numbers, constructing an abacus, or creating number games.

It is felt that possible damage to the child’s emotional and social adjustment will be avoided by keeping him with children of his own chronological age since they are presumably at about the same level of emotional and physical development as he is. However, in a large class with a wide range of ability the teacher simply does not have time to carry out enrichment effectively. The teacher with 30 to 35 pupils who vary in ability from the gifted to the barely educable does not have time to do a great deal of planning for individual pupils, particularly if it involves obtaining instructional materials that are not immediately accessible or subject matter with which she is not directly familiar.

Homeroom enrichment as a procedure for improving the education of the gifted is most likely to be effective in small classes where the teacher is able to devote considerable time to the individual child.

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THE Portland, Oregon, public school system, in collaboration with Reed College, has undertaken a five-year study to develop a better educational program for its children of superior intellectual ability and special talent. The study is supported in part by grants from the Fund for the Advancement of Education of the Ford Foundation and was initiated in July, 1952. It is being tried out in fourteen of the school system’s seventy elementary schools and five of the nine high schools.

Teachers have been made more aware of the children in their classes who possess special talent and ability as a result of a comprehensive identification program. The identification program, carried out in all grades, makes use of teacher observations, standardized tests of intelligence and achievement, and specially devised tests of talent in art, music, creative writing, creative dramatics, creative dance, social leadership, and mechanical talent.

Training of teachers has been augmented through summer workshops and afterschool classes in the education of the gifted and through courses designed to increase their competency in the subjects they teach. The program has also provided the equivalent of an extra one-half teacher in each elementary school and an extra one and one-half teachers in each high school to give regular teachers additional time for preparation and planning for their gifted pupils and to release teachers to conduct special classes in various subjects.

In the elementary schools these special classes meet two to five times a week for one period in such subjects as science, French, Spanish, arithmetic, literature, dramatics, art, and creative writing. No single school offers all these classes. The classes offered by any particular school are dependent upon the interests and abilities of the students and the availability of a well-qualified teacher.

These special interest classes, as they are called, overcome several limitations in the homeroom enrichment procedure. They are usually small, 10 to 15 students, so that the teacher is able to do more individual planning. The teacher has more than average competency and interest in the subject matter and is therefore able to conduct more meaningful classes. The students are all above average in ability, so that the classes can be conducted at a qualitatively higher level with increased stimulation for the individual.

In the high schools, the special classes have been arranged in some cases as special sections of regular classes and in some cases as supplementary to the regular curriculum. Examples of the latter are the junior-senior seminar classes in science, mathematics, literature, and social studies. These seminars are composed of groups of 5 to 15 juniors and seniors and are conducted in much the same manner as a college seminar. There is no prescribed course of study, and the specific problems dealt with grow out of the interests of the group. Student initiative and active participation are encouraged; and, in general, lecturing, recitation by question and response, and emphasis upon learning cut-and-dried answers have been avoided.

To evaluate the results of special classes, a questionnaire was sent to parents, teachers, and pupils. Responses from ihe questionnaires indicated that over 99 per cent of the parents were favorable to the program and wished to see it continued. Sixtythree per cent felt that their children’s interest in school had increased, and 67 per cent reported that their children’s activities in the special classes carried over to out-of-school activities. Eighty-eight per cent of the high school students and 95 per cent of the elementary school students found that the program had been helpful to them academically.

The project staff was interested in determining whether or not participation in special classes had made any difference in the student’s relationships with children of his own age. There was concern about the possibility of “swelled heads” among those in special classes and the chance that they might be labeled as “brains” or “grinds” by those not participating. In response to a question about how well they get along with other pupils, 52 per cent of the elementary school pupils felt that they got along better. Among high school students, 20 per cent felt that participation in a special class had given them prestige in their relations with their fellow students; 80 per cent felt that there had been no change; none felt that it had made them unpopular. Some were learning that there are other students just as bright as they or brighter. Some who didn’t realize they had any unusual ability and who had felt inadequate reported a greater sense of personal worth.

Typical teacher comments were: —

“I can move faster, farther, and deeper into subject matter, demand more student contribution to the course.”

“I have observed these benefits in my class: the training of the promising and potential leaders; giving importance to education as a force in life; an awareness of the nature of education and a trained mind; judgment in balancing study and social activity programs.”

A follow-up study has been undertaken of the 1953 high school graduates who participated in the first junior-senior seminars and who have now had a year of college. Questionnaires were sent to them during the summer of 1954. The great majority of them approved of the program: 98 per cent felt that the junior-senior seminars should be continued; 91 per cent felt the seminars had been of more value to them than their regular classes. They found that the regular curriculum was most deficient in providing training in good study habits and notetaking skills and in providing sufficient opportunity for research and outside reading. They indicated that the greatest values they received from the seminars were learning to study better, to evaluate ideas, and to work on their own initiative. With regard to the effects on their evaluations of themselves, many students indicated feelings of greater self-confidence and a realization of their ability to handle difficult concepts and problems.

Looking to the future, one sees only the likelihood of an intensification of the problems which in the past have militated against adequate educational experiences for the gifted. Enrollments will continue to increase, teachers will continue to be in short supply, and the pressures toward increasing class size will continue.

As a nation, we face even more critical shortages of highly trained personnel if we persist in undereducating the most able segment of our population.