A COMPARISON OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE ABILITIES OF UNDERACHIEVING AND HIGH-ACHIEVING GIFTED ADOLESCENTS - A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Few researchers have examined the narrative abilities of underachievin g gifted students. This study investigated the ability of eighth-grade underachieving gifted adolescents to spontaneously produce oral narra tives by comparing their stories to those that were produced by achiev ing gifted peers. It was hypothesized that evidence of difficulty gene rating the stories relative to the macrostructure (organization of ide as across sentences) and the microstructure (organization of ideas wit hin sentences) would be exhibited by the underachieving gifted subject s. Twenty 13-year-old eighth-graders served as subjects in the present investigation. All were identified as gifted by their local school sy stem and were enrolled in the gifted program at the time of their part icipation in the study. Ten of the subjects met criteria for the under achieving gifted group and ten met criteria for the achieving gifted g roup. The stories produced by the underachieving gifted subjects were compared to those produced by their achieving gifted peers for differe nces in 13 dependent measures of story length, episodic integrity, sto ry grammar components, and sentence complexity. Differences in the mea n number of occurrences of each of the 13 variables were found. The re sult of the MANOVA revealed that when the 13 dependent variables were considered in combination, the stories told by the underachieving gift ed subjects differed significantly from those produced by the achievin g gifted subjects at the p <.05 level of significance. Results of the univariate analyses indicated that these differences were not accounte d for by any one element of story macrostructure or microstructure, bu t rather that the stories differed across multiple dimensions, each of which contributed to the overall difference. The results of this stud y suggest that the language of underachieving gifted children may diff er from that of gifted peers when narrative language is examined. Resu lts are discussed relative to the limitations of the study and implica tions for future research.