GIFTED UNDERACHIEVERS - INSIGHTS FROM THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC FUNCTIONING ASSOCIATED WITH GIFTEDNESS AND ACHIEVEMENT

Group differences according to giftedness and academic achievement wer e examined for the acquisition and transfer of a strategy. 101 high ac hieving gifted, underachieving gifted, high achieving nongifted, and a verage achieving nongifted middle-school students orally solved sets o f verbal and figural analogies across several phases: before being tra ined to use a strategy (baseline), after training, at proximal transfe r (analogies from the trained domain), and at distal transfer (analogi es from the non-trained domain). Group differences between the two gif ted classifications, two achievement groups, and four gifted classific ation x achievement groups, were remarkably parallel. That is, student s who excel on measures of intelligence, achievement, or both, tended to exceed their peers in spontaneous strategy implementation, strategy acquisition and generalization, and the number of analogies solved. T hese results also suggest that deficits in strategic functioning are o ne source of underachievement in the gifted population.