Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How can he not see the problem?

Wait..what? Isn't that huge? And, if so, don't you think that could be a reason your child is having a little trouble with grades? They need to make it hard for kids to get all A's. So maybe they are extra picky about stiff, or tend to assign work that requires a level of attention to detail that is not usually required of children that age. Which wouldn't necessarily be bad or unreasonable, but you would want to be aware of it.

What kind of school is this?

It is a parochial school and the scholarship is available through an outside organization to all the kids in the archdiocese. It does not affect the standards that the school imposes.

The teacher is really not being extra picky in most instances, and the work is generally not challenging for DS. The problem is truly just that DS leaves questions unanswered or obviously didn't read the questions thoroughly.

Got it. Thanks for the clarification.

I attended a talk by a gifted specialist earlier in the year who covered this exact thing. The strategies he suggested have pretty much been covered by other posters (pre-check etc), but I thought I'd just add that he felt it was very common in gifted kids and that it is more of an issue the more global/holistic a child's thinking style is. They just don't pick up the detail in the question (and others have already mentioned, he felt it was much more likely to happen when the work was too easy).

Don't know that that is helpful - just to let you know it's not uncommon

What do you mean by "pre-check" as opposed to double-checking after the work is done?

I was taught pre-check as a test-taking skill. You read over the question and annotate it, basically. I used to highlight the actual question so I could make sure I answered it.

Met with DS's teacher (who we love by the way!) about this.

Here's what we came up with.

SHE suggested (did I mention we love her?) that some of the issue may be that DS is insufficiently challenged and she is going to move forward with additional differentiation, including pre-tests, differentiated assignments and opportunitites to test out of standard homework.

She also recommended that we give DS the ability to check his own homework by creating an answer sheet to give him after we've seen that he's done the work, and then make him responsible to see if everything matches up and make the appropriate corrections.

She agreed to write at the top of DS's classwork assignments the number of answers that should be there if DS's work is complete. That way, he can count them when he thinks he's done to see if it matches up. This is our attempt to help him see that there are unanswered questions. She did this yesterday on his Math test, and he came home saying that it helped a lot, and the "A" he received on the test, seems to support that. :-)

We also passed along the suggestion found here that DS use a piece of paper to cover up the questions except the one he's working on. She thought that was worth a try to help him focus on the problem at hand.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he is able to continue making progress on this. Thanks for all the great suggestions!