Pa. Hayes et al., A COMPARISON OF THE ORAL NARRATIVE ABILITIES OF UNDERACHIEVING AND HIGH-ACHIEVING GIFTED ADOLESCENTS - A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION, Language, speech & hearing services in schools, 29(3), 1998, pp. 158-171
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.