Not exactly "recent" research, but stuff I've been looking at lately. Joan Freeman is well-known in the UK as an expert in giftedness. I've posted before that I have a bad feeling about her personally because of how she appears in the Channel 4 series Child Genius - however, I think my feeling is more of the "she reminds me of someone I didn't like" character than anything more rational, so I'm trying to read her work objectively.
Anyway, her main recent contention is that identifying children as gifted and treating them specially is a very bad thing. (Maybe you are starting to see why I then have misgivings about her participation in the TV series!) The research on which this is based was a longitudinal study starting in 1974 of UK children identified by their parents as gifted. The main paper I've been able to find about this is here:
http://www.joanfreeman.com/content/JEG%20Giftedness%20In%20the%20Long%20Term%2006.pdfIt appeared in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted in 2006. First question: what kind of journal is this? Is it a respected peer-reviewed journal? Its web page is here:
http://journals.prufrock.com/IJP/b/journal-for-the-education-of-the-giftedbut I couldn't immediately find a list of the members of its editorial board, which was a little surprising.
Here's an extract from the paper:
The Target group was 70 children aged between five and 14, described as gifted by their parents, almost entirely without testing, all of whom had joined the National Association for Gifted Children (the UK association is made up mostly of parents). Each Target child was matched with two Control children of the same sex, age and socio-economic level, sharing educational experience in the same school class. This careful matching enabled ability to be assessed on the Raven�s Matrices intelligence test raw scores, not the less-accurate percentiles. This group pattern test is non-verbal so that scores are very much less affected by home and school educational effects, and so is internationally widely used as a �culture free� test.
The First Control group was measured as of identical ability as the Target identified gifted children, though not labelled as such.
More questions, not addressed in the paper:
- isn't it nothing short of astonishing that it was possible to find such First Controls for the gifted children? (Identical Raven's score, same sex and SE class, and members of the same school class - a school class at that time would have been about 30 children.) Were there large numbers of gifted children who were excluded from the study because no control was available? If so, what about the way that biases the sample? If not, why not?
More info: once we have a target group of 70 children and a first and second control for each child, that's 210. She writes:
Of the whole sample, 170 children were at the 99th percentile of the Raven�s Matrices. Stanford-Binet IQs ranged from the 46 children with less than IQ120 to 18 children with above IQ160; 13 reached the Stanford-Binet test ceiling of 170 IQ.
Now the Second Controls were *not* supposed to be gifted - so the number of children who were at the 99th percentile of Raven's Matrices includes, apparently, all the gifted children, all the First Controls, *and* 30 of the Second Controls. (Or not all the first two groups and more of the last, of course). Huh? Maybe "the sample" is actually supposed to include all the classmates of all the 70 identified children? Even so, that would only be 2000-odd children, so 170 at the 99th percentile is still weird.
The rest of the paper I won't quote, but it amounts to that the labelled gifted children had more emotional problems and were no more successful than the First Controls, and it is clearly Freeman's belief that this is because of the labelling, although she refrains from stating this baldly. She does not seem to have researched the parents' reasons for identifying their children as gifted. Correlation is not causation! One has to wonder whether those parents were seeking help because they saw emotional problems in their children, so that the observed emotional problems were the reason for the labelling, not the other way round.
What surprises me - I'm an academic myself, though not in this field - is that issues like this would not be picked up by the referees of the paper, and explanations inserted before publication. I'd be very interested to know from those of you who are active in gifted research and/or have been reading it like me, how this work is regarded or what you think of it. Am I missing a more rigorous presentation of the same study somewhere? (I know she's written books, but those do not undergo peer review at all, so I'm less interested.)
