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

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.
Wren i just saw your last post. a tree would be too complicated and people wouldnt finish the survey.
Wren--I see your point (although I haven't actually looked at the survey itself) because our DD8's experience with different extracurriculars has been all over the map (e.g., getting kicked out of dance (almost literally!); learning about but not really caring about chess; milling about aimlessly in soccer; loving IMACS). But maybe the study is a first step and not intended to be a comprehensive review--but perhaps also the person running the study doesn't understand how off the mark it might be. It might actually be helpful to them if you emailed the tree you suggest based on your personal experience to give them the opportunity to understand that. (DH is a statistician and is always going on about various biases, so it's a topic I hear a lot about wink

Best,
Dbat
First, answer the questions on extracurriculars using a line graph. What age started, finished, or still continuing.
Then ask questions on a sport extracurricular activity that was done the longest, then an artistic extracurricular, like music or art etc. And answer the questions on the longest activity or continuing one again. That way you have a sample of different types of activities and the answers for them.

If you opened up the survey, you would see what I mean. Othwerwise, the data seems rather useless. And what use would the end product be, if the data was useless?

Looking at the survey she is not interested in non-academic extracurricular programs.
From her survey the statements below show this.

"nurturing giftedness in alternative learning environments"
One paper involves a survey on gifted children's experience of academic extracurricular programs.

The questions are geared towards the quality and effectiveness of extracurricular academic programs.
Which in my opinion are quite lacking for the younger students in science in general and even more so for technology (especially computer programming topics).
There are plenty of math programs for elementary students to be working ahead in/greater depth.
This survey may begin to quantify the short comings of many of these after-school, weekend "enrichment classes"

I do not see how responding to one activity effects the results of her survey. She is asking some general questions on the benefits of academic programs that your child has taken. The survey is not asking about the details of a given program or on how many programs your child has taken. The questions are related to, Do you see any real value in these enrichment programs?
(For example, the quality of the program, some important reasons for participating in the classes etc.)
For most people there are probably some good and some bad experiences. It is possible that maybe the question that states to choose an activity, could be further explained as to choose an effective experience or not so positive of an experience.

But I have to ask, What is it about this survey that you find so flawed. It appears that it is asking a topic that is different that what you wanted asked?
Well, obviously my reading of it was flawed. I did not pick up on quality and effectiveness of extracurricular academic programs. In fact, I didn't even list her CTY math online. Hence, my bad.

OK, I went back and did the survey and this time, there was a slot for the activity you chose. Not the case when I first tried it. And it seemed some other questions were changed.

I think when I took this, I wondered why there weren't more quesitons about whether you felt the program your child was currently in was adequate. The questions were asking me to compare the extracurricular offerings to what my child gets in his school, but since I happen to have a kid in a great HG program, he does in fact get very good education during the school day. It would be nice to know if the responders feel their child is in a good school situation or a bad one when doing any sort of comparison.
Wren,

I agree with your original statement about the survey having serious flaws:

1. The survey asks for a list of non-sports activities and then wants you to write about one. People will have completely different activities and different reasons for picking them.
For example, my kid goes to French. Someone else's kid might play guitar. I like French because my son learns French and will easily be able to live in the French-speaking country his father is from. My son likes it because he sees his good friend. The reasons for playing guitar could be completely different: say, improve manual dexterity. What about the Girl Scouts? Or art class?

If I had written details about guitar lessons instead of French, the reasons I would have listed would have been completely different.

My point is that it all seems kind of random and I don't see how the results will tell us something meaningful and/or generalizable.

2. There seems to be no control group (reasons for non-gifted kids enrolling in these types of activities). Lots of non-gifted kids go to after school classes, take music lessons, art, or join the scouts.

Even if we overlook the problems in #1, how does the author know that the reasons chosen by parents of gifted kids are different from those of ND kids? She didn't ask, so it's all speculation.
She never said it was some serious intellectual endeavor, it could be marketing report. The questions sound like a marketing study.
Originally Posted by Wren
She never said it was some serious intellectual endeavor, it could be marketing report. The questions sound like a marketing study.

She said it was for the Asia Pacific Conference on Giftedness, which seems to be an academic conference:

Quote
The event aims at providing professionals with reliable methodologies and best practices to identify and nurture talented children.

"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"

the questions sound like sociology qualitative research preliminary data gathering to me.
I really dont understand all the criticism of the OP. Everyone here is constantly complaining about lack of research on their kids. When someone is starting out to do something interesting and asks for help All i see is criticism because its not quantatative hypothesis driven research. It may not be the study you would do, it may not be ready to publish in Nature but its a start. if you can do a better study, then do one. but please stop harping on this poor researcher. S/he is probably chased off for good with all the non constructive criticsm. I was hoping they would come back and share some results, but in their place, I would be afraid to reveal anything to this lot of criticism.
Originally Posted by AlexsMom
Originally Posted by Kjj
I don't think the information is going to be valuable because you're not controlling who is taking the test.

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.

It seems like it would be relatively easy to find kids who've taken appropriate tests to pre-screen them, then have their parents take the quiz.

Shooting it out into the ether and hoping you get a reliable result because you've plopped it on a gifted chat forum is not what I'd consider "doing your best".

I think it's an interesting question, but I don't know if the answer is ultimately valuable-I deliberately look for extracurriculars that are non-academic so the girls can work on their social skills with regular people.

The last thing I want them in is the gifted kid hip hop class. Blech, no thanks.
Originally Posted by g2mom
I really dont understand all the criticism of the OP. Everyone here is constantly complaining about lack of research on their kids.

I could have added a note to my message. The criticisms I've read here are the kinds of points that drive responsible peer review in any discipline. Science wouldn't advance if people couldn't criticize other people's work. I can see that if you aren't a scientist, it may sound kind of harsh.

The goals of peer review are to help authors improve their work, to reduce the numbers of substandard studies the make it into journals, and sometimes, to force a revision to an idea or set of findings. It's not a perfect system, but it's a lot better than the alternative. In most cases, a badly designed study is worse than no study at all. A lot of researchers, myself included, prefer to hear honest comments up front so that we don't hear them later when the stakes are higher (such as when you're standing in front of 200 people at a conference).

If the OP works as a researcher, she's been getting these kinds of comments since she did her first undergraduate research project. We all get them. I get comments like this every week and just received some a half-hour ago (and will get more tomorrow after people read a grant application I wrote).
But Zhian (I thought it was a male name) did not ask for peer review. S/he asked for help with a survey.

and what was given was pretty harsh "peer" review in a negative tone. not with an aim to improvement.
also based on the comments, I doubt any of you are Social Scientists (which brings in the question of peer) and are familiar with qualitative research. it is very different from what you might be used to.
for the record I am a scientist of the empiric nature. I give and get reviews daily. but when someone starting out in a field is brave enough to bring out an idea, I dont shut them down with overwhelming criticism (intitially anyway). especially when it is not asked for.
also asking for help gathering preliminary data hardly requires a study section review. I am glad i wasnt a student with some of you guys. i never would have enjoyed science enough to go on.
Rigorous peer review has a place. unfettered criticism of a student on a web site asking for help gathering preliminary data isnt it. I agree peer review is a process that makes science better. but the OP didnt ask for peer review.
however, if youre available i'd love some comments on my next grant before it goes in.....
and i have this paper that i've never been able to get the discussion just right........
I agree with Val, there are too many papers poorly done that get published.

I wrote about CTY math. Twice in her survey questions, I answered, it provides accelerated subject work that she doesn't get at school and it let's her work at her own pace.

Findings that the conference on giftedness will be surprised to learn.
I'd like to thank everyone for responding - both to the survey itself and to this thread with your comments.

For the record I will note that I am a man. smile

I appreciate everyone's comments criticising and defending my study. While Wren's points about being asked to choose a single activity are valid, so are the responses he/she has received; the fact is, no one would complete a survey asking detailed questions about every single activity in the list. The list is merely to give some ideas about what types and numbers of activities gifted kids participate in; the main purpose of the survey is to take a sample of such activities and research opinions of those.

The type of activity may make a big difference in each individual case, but over a large enough sample you arrive at generalizable patterns. For example, thus far I am seeing the strongest patterns in the differences between children’s and parents’ perceptions of the most common and most important benefits of these activities.

In terms of selection criteria, sending the message out on this forum is far from the only thing I've done, and each vehicle I've used to get responses has been chosen because I knew I would get respondents who fit the criteria for giftedness stated at the beginning of the survey. Anyone who does not fit those criteria should not be taking the survey. Of course I can’t be certain that people are not lying about fitting the criteria, but I can’t be certain they’re not lying about anything else either - the potential for dishonesty is part of the game in the social sciences.

Also, I did not change the survey questions after I posted my initial message, Wren. If there were new questions popping up on you, your computer must not have loaded the survey properly the first time.

And finally, g2mom is correct; this is a qualitative, preliminary survey, aimed primarily at identifying avenues in need of deeper research that I cannot begin to realize given that I am not currently teaching in a school or associated with an academic institution (I finished my MA in December and will start my PhD in August), and thus have no support for this research, financial or otherwise.
By the way, it would be wonderful if any of you who have responded would be willing to ask your kids to do the same (particularly older kids, as the questions are probably at a reading level that's a bit high for elementary kids, even gifted ones).
Originally Posted by zhian
Anyone who does not fit those criteria should not be taking the survey. Of course I can’t be certain that people are not lying about fitting the criteria, but I can’t be certain they’re not lying about anything else either - the potential for dishonesty is part of the game in the social sciences.

My take on it is that I know parents who have bright children, but who believe their children are, in fact, gifted. They are walking bubbles of cognitive dissonance-you can't tell them their kid's not brilliant, and they have excuses for every result that doesn't show giftedness.

I'm assuming these people are going to be taking your test, as well. In some social circles, having a smart kid is a status symbol.

But maybe it's not enough to skew the results appreciably.
I do feel like the results will be skewed in other ways too, because there is no baseline about how we feel about our kids' current education setting. If I had responded to this before my son was grade-skipped and then moved to an HG school, my responses would have been much different because he wasn't getting what he needed at school and we did try to do more afterschool stuff to fill the void. But now, he's in a great school setting and the afterschool classes he takes are not more of an academic challenge than he currently gets during school.

But I also do appreciate that you are starting to get data. I hope it will lead to useful information. Thanks.
I also think how randomly I chose the activity that I did. I chose the math and answered the questions about accelerated math.

What about if I chose Chinese language classes, which she has been doing for 3 years. The answers would have been different.

Or piano. And even ballet, because physical activity is good for brain development.

So if you get a bunch of people like me, focusing on the accelerated studies, particularly in math, you don't get the multiple other activities. DD gets chess in school, others will take chess as an extracurricular. How does that skew because so many kids do get chess in school. That less parents of gifted kids are taking chess?
Originally Posted by zhian
In terms of selection criteria, sending the message out on this forum is far from the only thing I've done, and each vehicle I've used to get responses has been chosen because I knew I would get respondents who fit the criteria for giftedness stated at the beginning of the survey. Anyone who does not fit those criteria should not be taking the survey. Of course I can’t be certain that people are not lying about fitting the criteria,
And finally, g2mom is correct; this is a qualitative, preliminary survey, aimed primarily at identifying avenues in need of deeper research that I cannot begin to realize given that I am not currently teaching in a school or associated with an academic institution (I finished my MA in December and will start my PhD in August), and thus have no support for this research, financial or otherwise.

Suggestion: send this survey out to other forums, like mothering.com, but remove the giftedness requirement. Instead, insert a question asking if the respondent's child has been tested for admission to a TAG or other giftedness program. If so, was the child admitted? You could use the "No" respondents as a group of non-gifted students for comparing to the gifted ones.
What would be interesting to see is how IQs are affected by challenging course work, whether extracurricular or in gifted classes.

Have IQs at 5, when many people are testing and then again at 10, and what kinds of course work the child had, whether the parent had to accelerate the math at home or not.

And then again at 15. Where was the child? IQ, grade level, and do comparisons. I wish Davidson would do something like this since they admit so many kids young. They could request retesting at certain ages and then have some good material. But they don't.
Originally Posted by Val
Suggestion: send this survey out to other forums, like mothering.com, but remove the giftedness requirement. Instead, insert a question asking if the respondent's child has been tested for admission to a TAG or other giftedness program. If so, was the child admitted? You could use the "No" respondents as a group of non-gifted students for comparing to the gifted ones.
I wouldn't agree with this b/c it depends on whether the OP's definition of "gifted" is the same as the schools'. In one state or district a child might be tested for TAG/GATE and not admitted and be of much higher ability than a child who is admitted in another state with much more liberal admission practices.

Where I live, for instance, they are of the opinion that high IQ or intelligence is not necessary to be gifted. I've been told that it is possible to have an IQ of 100 and still be gifted if you exhibit behavioral characteristics of giftedness and high achievement or high grades (you could get in with two of those three with smack dab 50th percentile ability scores if your parent was pushy enough or the GT coordinator was of that bend).

I've also been told that 99.9th percentile IQ scores don't necessarily mean gifted and had to fight for inclusion in GT for my 2e child with those IQ scores b/c her achievement and behavioral characteristics weren't consistently what they expected of a gifted student.

Unless you are going to do a study utilizing families who've had IQ testing done at some location where most of the testing is done for GT purposes, you probably are going to get some people answering who meet your definition of gifted and some who don't. Perhaps the only way to tighten the group responding is to put some definition at the beginning as to who you want responding or to ask some questions like, 'has your child had an IQ test or group ability test administered and what were the scores (subtests and composite)?"

eta: in looking at the survey entry page, I do see that there is a definition of gifted to include IQ of 125+, formal GT id in school, or exceptional ability in any one area. That is more liberally than I, personally, would define as gifted, but that is probably influenced by my experienced with over and underidentification locally to my area as enumerated above.
Cricket2: those are very good points! Thanks.
The question of the "baseline" - asking about the educational setting to which extracurriculars are being compared - is one I hadn't considered and will have to consider as a complicating factor when doing the analysis. I appreciate having it pointed out and I think this is one of the few places where people would have caught it; certainly the peer review committee for the conference didn't mention it!
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