A Commentary on “Differentiating Low Performance of the Gifted Learner

Abstract

In 2003, the bookstore manager at the university came to me, book in hand, saying, "I just read this book I think would really resonate with you." I borrowed that book and began reading the same night, not putting it down until I finished at 3 a.m. The book was Herbert Kohl's (1991) I Won't Learn From You: And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, a collection of thought-provoking essays on topics related to how students handle being subjected to compulsory public education. The title essay is a powerful one, in which Kohl describes several children who make conscious decisions to not learn what the teacher is providing. Kohl calls not learning a healthy coping mechanism for dealing with threats to one's personal integrity, identity, and loyalties that result in a deliberate rejection of educational offerings, no matter how well meant. The authors of "Differentiating Low Performance of the Gifted Learner: Achieving, Underachieving, and Selective Consuming Students" (Figg, Low, McCormick, & Rogers 2012) endeavored to empirically validate qualitative findings that a difference exists between gifted students with high academic self-perceptions who deliberately underachieve (i.e., gifted selective consumers) and gifted students with low academic self-perceptions who underachieve (i.e., "conventional" gifted underachievers). They further sought to distinguish these two groups of underachievers in terms of thinking styles. Quantitative findings of this study, however, indicated no statistically significant differences between gifted selective consumers and conventional gifted underachievers with regard to academic self-perception or thinking styles, "though the study has produced support for the current trend in the literature that these students do, indeed, differ qualitatively from the underachieving student." The authors were innovative in combining Sternberg's (1997) theory of mental self-government with Zhang's (2002) type grouping to construct a theoretical