What Teachers Really Think When They Hear "Gifted"
That label meant to help your kid is accidentally shaping how teachers judge their personality.
Sometimes a parent’s biggest challenge is getting their student identified as gifted in the first place. Without that magic identification and label, your student is likely to go without appropriate academic challenge for years at a time.
However, receiving that coveted “gifted” label may unfortunately end up causing new problems! Research on 300 German teachers reveals that being identified as “gifted” can be a double-edged sword for high-capability learners.
How the “Gifted” Label Impacts Teacher Impressions
In their 2013 study on teachers’ implicit personality theories about the gifted, Baudson and Preckel looked at 321 practicing and prospective teachers in Germany and their assumptions about fictional composites of student profiles.
The researchers generated vignettes describing students and their ability level, either gifted or average, the student’s gender, and their age. That resulted in eight different combinations of vignettes.
Teachers read the vignettes and they were asked to rate the student’s personality using a standard “Big Five” personality scale (extroversion versus introversion, emotional stability versus neuroticism, agreeableness versus disagreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience).
When “Giftedness” Implies a Worse Personality
The findings: In this experiment, labeling a student as “gifted” caused teacher ratings to become more introverted, less emotionally stable, and less agreeable as compared to identical students who were labeled average. Unfortunately, none of these stereotypes of gifted children is actually correct.
In reality, high cognitive ability is associated with the personality trait of openness to experience. The teachers did get that one right. To their credit, teacher ratings were also not particularly influenced by gender or age of the student. But the rest of their (negative) personality impressions were based on baggage and stereotypes of giftedness.
Why Your Student’s Teacher Has a Negative Perception of Giftedness
Why were the teacher ratings systematically biased in this way? It’s no secret that humans overall tend to overgeneralize from isolated experiences and to use heuristics, like stereotypes, as shortcuts in judgment.
But while teacher bias is probably the inevitable default, countermeasures like basic training in the empirical science of giftedness could help chip away at the stereotypes. Unfortunately, less than half of American teachers receive any training in giftedness or academic acceleration at all!
It’s possible that a few extreme and memorable experiences with profoundly gifted students create the impression of a correlation between “giftedness” and a challenging personality (this more extreme ability group does show some differences even compared to moderately gifted populations).
But most high ability students are not profoundly gifted, and there’s even some reason to think moderately gifted students are more well-adjusted than peers of average ability. Teachers should be able to see the gifted for who they are and not as caricatures.
The Impact of Personality Bias on Gifted Education
This teacher bias element is just one of the factors that make accessing gifted education within conventional schools a steep uphill battle for even the most devoted parent advocates. Surely nothing good can come from teachers thinking that your gifted kid is more disagreeable and moody than others. Imagined introversion may get interpreted as standoffishness.
Having every teacher on the same page about academic challenge from day 1 is a huge advantage of purpose-built gifted environments.When everyone’s “gifted,” the label stops distorting how adults perceive the kids.
At GT School and GT Anywhere, we’d rather spend our energy making sure every highly-capable learner works up to the top of her personal potential rather than trading in binaries and stereotypes.
P.S. Join me for an Above Grade Level seminar-style discussion of Julian Stanley’s Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (here’s a reading on SMPY), 1pm Central on Thursday 2/26 (register for free here).
If 'Gifted' is the label that is needed to get a high performing kid an appropriate level of instruction - then so be it.
Outside of early and maybe middle elementary school it is all but impossible for a teacher in a standard class to provide the appropriate level of instruction for a capable and determined student. By the end of 5th grade you will have students who have 12 grade plus reading levels who may be ready for full Algebra or Geometry, while others have rudimentary reading and difficulty with arithmetic.
In Middle and High school, the difference between capable and less capable students becomes too great to bridge in a single class - the more capable students learn faster and the cumulative difference grows with time.
About the only approach that will address this absent tracked classes seems to be some form of AI instruction for the students whose understanding is too far from the class mean.