Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research please help:researching GT kids & extracurriculars

Hi everyone,

I don't believe there are any forum rules against this but apologize if I offend by posting here. I was an active member of these forums at one point, but am now amazed to realize I have not posted in several years. I am coming back now to ask a favor of anyone who will listen!

I have been invited to speak at this year's Asia Pacific Conference on Giftedness, and will be presenting three papers on the topic of "nurturing giftedness in alternative learning environments". One paper involves a survey on gifted children's experience of academic extracurricular programs. It is designed to be taken by children, parents, and activity leaders/teachers. It is completely anonymous unless you choose to give your name, and takes about fifteen minutes.

This is a sorely under-researched area (no studies have been done previously which went beyond simple participation rate statistics), so I feel this is an important study and I would appreciate very much if anyone here would be willing and able to contribute a response to this survey. The survey form is online at http://goo.gl/Erfe3. Thanks all!

Hey Zhian
I can't believe it's been so long! I hope all is well and would love to hear how things are going when you get a moment.
I'm off to do your survey!
Grinity

Your survey is totally flawed. You ask to list the activities then you ask questions about one activity.

That's a bit harsh, Wren! It's common for surveys to ask for less than all relevant information because otherwise it's too much to ask of respondents. Presumably Zhian is looking both for a fairly comprehensive list of all the kinds of relevant activities people do, and then a bit of drill down into some of them, with no assumption of representativeness.

OK, ColinsMum, tell me which activity I should drill down into.

Why should I? It doesn't matter; pick one, based on any criterion you like. What is your problem with this?

I don't think the information is going to be valuable because you're not controlling who is taking the test.

My kids could be totally regular, and I could *think* they're gifted, and therefore my answers on your survey would be an inaccurate representation.

Sort of along the lines of 'garbage in, garbage out'...

Selection bias is always the bane of the social sciences. And it can't be eliminated, so the best you can do as a researcher is disclose the shortcomings of the selection process up front.

Why not create a tree to answer the questions on each activity?

I think its a good start. it will provide preliminary data to refine the next steps.
KJJ that could happen but if the participant reads the instructions about who is considered gifted and how its designated for the study that will head off alot of overachieveing parents.
I dont think there are all that many ubermoms of the mundane trolling the web to participate in polls they arent really the target population for. there might be a few that find it and want to be funny by putting in weird activities, ( jonlaw? you did that didnt you?)
but these possible occurances dont make the overall data not valuable.
I for one am very interested in learning the width and breadth of activities self-identified parents of gifted kids report of the activities of their children vs the reports of self identified kids.
just because a study is limited does not mean it has no value.

Wren, I also dont understand the difficulty with picking one activity. social behavior models would predict that most parents would pick the activity the kid spends the most time at, the one the parent thinks is most important or is most focused on, the newest activity or the one the kid enjoys the most. For the purpose of this preliminary work i dont think its an issue. whatever the reason for picking, the answers are still valid and of interest. and its not a flaw. its just a different question than the first question. would you really want to answer those questions for every activity you wrote down in question one. most people wouldnt bother because the survey would have become too tedious and they would just quit.