Underachievement in Gifted Students: Possible Causes and Interventions (2016)

Undergraduate: Katherine Cordova

Faculty Advisor: Suzanne Gulledge
Department: Global Studies

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Research on the topic of gifted students in the educational sphere has been conducted for the greater part of the last century. However, this research has neglected a specific demographic: the underachieving gifted student. Within education research, while there is no absolute definition to label an underachieving gifted student, the widespread commonality among research highlights the discrepancy between the student's potential ability and actual achievement. This translates itself into an anomaly of high IQ and standardized test scores, but poor school performance. Recent research examines the causes of gifted underachievement, and its findings include multi-faceted and interconnected factors that range from school environment and curriculum to a lack of motivation and goal-orientation within the student. With their findings, researchers are exploring interventions that could be used to reverse these students' academic paths, turning their intellectual potential into reality. The scholarly intent of this work is to analyze various causes of underachievement in gifted learners and to present some of the interventions that are aimed to improve their academic performance.