Implication for the Improvement of Practices - Essay Example

Implication for the Improvement of Practices Introduction Understanding the causes of the Underachievement of Gifted and TalentedSpecial Needs students is central to the field of education practice. The Gifted Students have been tagged ‘bright but unmotivated’ students by their respective classroom teachers who rush to such conclusion without prior assessment to determine the real cause of the underachievement. The current study is timely and central to provide the turning point towards the establishment of effective intervention to revamp the Underachievement amongst this particular cohort of students. Body The study will help provide a precise definition of the underachievement and provide sufficient Roadmap for the identification of the underachievement. The lack of a proper and a conventional framework to identify the underachievement will be a lucrative step towards restoring this phenomenon. Many classroom students presently cannot understand the hidden causes and to some extent the obvious causes in sudden declined performance amongst these students. Thus, the problem cannot be diagnosed and identified long before it escalates causing underachievement. In many occasion, these inabilities result from the lack of knowledge amongst the educators to assess the students. The current study aims at providing answers to these teething problems (Wolfle, 1991). Moreover, the study will greatly reverse the unworking present intervention that only look at remediation process and efforts while negating in the development of high abilities and strengths attached to these students. Instilling assessment knowledge and procedures to the educators and particularly to classroom teachers who are continuous contact with the Underachieving students and even those have not shown decline in performance but are at higher risks is central to improving the education practice. On the other hand, the student will also be helped long before these problems worsens and thus benefiting from their gifts and talents. The study will add to the present knowledge as previous researchers have failed to know the number of underachieving students. Therefore, the study will help determine the number of these group of students for appropriate matching intervention. The education practice has failed due to this fact as there can never be an effective plan to help the particular group of individuals without knowing the number of those affected. Therefore, this will greatly alter and improve the practice of policies will be designed with the number of the affected already known and thus helping revamp the situation. Furthermore, there has been missing knowledge as the educators do not know even the number of students with special needs that suffer from the hidden talents and abilities. Therefore, the current study will help uncover this and focus more attention on these groups of students and apply programmatic interventions to help revamp this phenomenon. The present study will help revamp the situation by assisting the educators to develop appropriate intervention strategies that effectively address the particular area of need exhibited by the students being referred. The problems within the schools that harbors Underachievement will be extinguished as treatments will be differentiated to match the particular needs of underachievers. Therefore, the current studies will provide a panacea for how to revamp the underachievement in the Gifted Students whose talents appear in a diverse manner. In doing so, the number of the Gifted Student who have underachieved will reduce since the will be already a framework that will effectively work towards the reversal of this situation. The education practices will thus improve based on this panacea. Moreover, the difficulty of educators to distinguish between issues linked to academic motivation and special needs linked to students’ disabilities unrecognized by many classroom tutors will be eliminated. Where such difficulties removed, the educators will be at ease to revamp this situation since each issue related to motivation will only attract motivational intervention and thus revamp the situation due removal of the cause-intervention mismatch that had derailed the restoration of underachievement in a number of years. On the others, those special needs related to students’ disabilities will also receive the particular intervention that match specific disability and hence learning disabilities arising from such disabilities will be reduced if not totally extinguished. Thus, the ever increasing problems whereby many talented students fail to realize their potential will be counteracted. The increased trouble that the underachievement of talented and gifted students has caused to educators and parents will be a foregone case. The high potential and ability students have too often poorly performed at a level commensurate with such potential and abilities due to lack of counteractive interventions. Therefore, the current study is timely as it advance from the reviewed literature currently available and has subsequently identified the academic gap. Thus, the primary objective of designing efficient intervention measures that fill this gasp is crucial. This will be possible since many researchers have never noted the exact causes of underachievement. Therefore, such previous studies outcome relies on the term ‘may’ when suggesting possible causes of intervention such as lack of self-efficacy, self-regulation skills, and goal-directedness. Therefore, since the current study has known such loopholes, the researcher will fir example focus on a particular suggested cause at a time say lack of self-efficacy and investigates its correlation to underachievement without the trial and error approach that has been employed over the years. So, the only intervention that purely focused on increasing self-efficacy in such cohorts lacking it will be designed and implemented to thwart directly that particular one cause without coming with many interventions that will lead to cause-intervention mismatch. Such in-depth probe will be done to subsequent cause one at a particular time until all the so called ‘may’ causes are counteracted. For instance, where the current pieces of literature have unearthed some low achievers to do so du suffering from either hidden or obvious disabilities, as well as their response to filthy educational environments and conditions, it would be a problem well solved as a problem well defined is half solved. Here, the researcher will investigate the issues circumventing poor educational conditions such as inappropriate tutors or inadequacy of teaching aids and facilities and recommend a particular cause-intervention recommendation that directly revamp the identified achievement derailing factor. This will be possible and attainable as an effective framework that would be conventional to clear the doubts of defining gifted underachievement will be designed. The problem of underachievement has escalated to this great level due to lack of straightforward definition of gifted underachievement. The lack of one conventionally agreed upon definition of, Therefore, one of the greatest implication of the current study is to bring to the existence for the first time a conventional definition of gifted underachievement. This will bring up the lacking homogeneous portrait of the gifted student. Therefore, despite the variation between any average populations drawn gifted students with respected talents and strengths, there must be a base for defining gifted underachievers. The definition issue is central to the current study as it will help advanced on the unworking common current definition that stems for ascertaining the discrepancy between ability and achievement. Therefore, coming up with a common and one agreed definition of a gifted underachiever will facilitate the steps towards designing effective interventions that ranges from identification of a gifted student underachieving earlier enough and subject him to effective established and research-based intervention. The causes of underachievement in the gifted study can never be resolved by a blanket interventions. Subsequently, this is one of the greatest concern for the current study. Therefore, the present study will improve the education practices by emphasizing to the educators that the individual cause of underachievement like poor educational condition requires a specific intervention. Therefore, the educational stakeholders must attempt to isolate the reasons for behaviors of students prior to trying to revamp the underachievement. Therefore, this will greatly towards the reduction or elimination of ramification of mismatching the cause and interventions of underachievement. Further, despite the known difficulty of identifying the reasons for high ability showcasing low levels of achievement, the current study will positively ease this by unearthing all the possible factors for underachievement before rushing to the mismatching intervention that are known to be greatly disastrous. Therefore, the current aims at fully stressing to the practitioners to explore the causes of underachievement amongst these high ability students to help these children. A bright student stands to suffer greatly in the hands of the educators who do not subject their students to effective assessment. For example, there is a need to assess the students that suddenly starts to showcase greatly academic discrepancy despite being known to have performed unquestionably before. Assessment reveals the cause of the underachievement and therefore designing effective treatment. For example, students have declining performance but where teachers cannot identify them as ‘learning disable’, it becomes even harder to restore such conditions. Therefore, the current study will help suggest recommendation with some particularly focusing on parents to ensure they provide the true description of their children at the point of admission and even on a continuous basis to help the educators understand them during the assessment. Parents must be incorporated in this fight against the underachievement amongst the gifted students to help provide adequate information about their children such as whether a students was given birth to prematurely. Such information is necessary since underachievers who are prematurely born might unknowingly and suddenly develop learning disabilities that cannot be easily identified by the classroom tutors. Therefore, the implication here is that the current study will create a coordinative and integrative working relationship between parents and teachers to help fight for their children and students’ underachievement (Rimm, 1997). With the information flow about the situation from parents to teachers and vice versa, the student progress is assessed and under control and hence hidden or obvious reasons can be noted at early stages to help before the problem escalates. Further, there is a problem of underachievers with Special Needs or exceptionalities. Therefore, it is disastrous to treat these two cohorts of students as separate and unrelated. The present study will showcase that these two issues are intertwined and inevitabilities to be separated. Thus, there must be a first reversal of the current miss-conceptualization and the present knowledge about both Special Needs Underachievers and Exceptionalities with respect to underachieving talented and gifted alongside the special population such as Learning Disabilities, Gifted ADHD or gifted students with the physical disabilities, emotional problems and behavioral problems. Therefore, the current study will focus on illustrating to the educators how these two groups of underachiever’s correlates and reciprocal to each other. For example, there is a possibility, and this is the study expectation that a high ability student have learning or emotional problems that impact underachievement. Therefore, the implication is that the treatment of Special Needs and Exceptionalities-attached underachievement as different entities will be halted and seen as one problem followed by designing a single intervention or a combination of interventions that work together to revamp the phenomenon. Therefore, the present study will greatly impact on the practices by sensitizing educators that interventions that do not deal with special needs of these groups of students always do more serious harms to them. Hence, practitioners will have to consider these possible areas if exceptionality during their attempts to restore students’ underachievement behaviors. Moreover, there is scarcity of the research on efficient intervention models for the underachievement special needs students in schools (Frasier & Passow, 1994). There has been a few if no investigators that have applied a quasi-experimental designs to uncover the efficacy of suggested interventions. Thus, previous researchers have only focused on interventions that effect immediate outcomes amongst the acutely underachieving gifted student’s cohorts. Therefore, such studies ethically find it hard to showcase a true comparison in their respective studies as research withhold interventions that they believe is central to underachieving gifted students (Siegle & McCoach, 2001). Therefore, the current study must work towards eliminating such challenges to help the students achieve their potential without having to withhold the interventions that would have revamped these conditions. Also, the study’s implication will that it will help in eliminating the inconsistencies found in reviewing the documented effectiveness of most interventions that have always been inconclusive. The practitioners have subsequently found it inappropriate to utilize inconclusive interventions thus causing a dilemmatic situation should an educator attempt to utilize these half-baked interventions. Further, even with the inconclusive interventions currently available a number of them still fail to surpass long-term success. Therefore, the project will be of great implication to the field of education in its attempts to reverse the ever-increasing underachievement amongst the potential high ability and talented students. This is because, the study focuses on giving consistent and conclusive long term-based intervention that can be relied on by the educators. The ability of the current study to use the comparison or control group is beneficial as the results will be generalizable to the whole population of the gifted underachievers. The previous have studies (Whitmore, 1980 and Supplee, 1990) failed to employ control groups, and, therefore, their respective findings presents difficulties to rely on when making a generalization about the entire population. Therefore, the current studies will use these studies as the stepping stone to further emphasize the significance of ensuring sufficient education and the necessity of establishing student-centered classroom environment using controls and treated cohorts to make it possible to generalize the outcomes (Diaz, 1998). Therefore, the current study will help stress and communicate to the educators that uniquely designed intervention with double exceptionalities require vast integrative strategies. Therefore, educators must try as possible to blend mechanism like self-regulatory and compensatory opportunities and skills to establish a firm sense of self and raise self-concept to revamp underachievement. This will create a greater implication in improving the education practice. Conclusion In conclusion, the project will focus on interventions that develop the strengths, interest and talents of the underachieving students. The project will use self-selected Type III enrichment projects to design systematically intervention for the underachieving gifted students. The approach will greatly alter the current perception in revamping underachievement that have only focused on the ramification of difficulties and paying less attention to exploring the students gifts and talents. Therefore, focusing on the students’ interest and strengths is in a positive direction towards revamping underachievement. Therefore, this study effectively utilizes the five effective features of Type III enrichment technique to present an effective change in the educational practices. The first technique that will help improve the practice is fostering an effective student-teacher relationship. Secondly, there will be a recommendation for effective utilization of self-regulation approaches. Thirdly, the students will be presented with opportunities to study topics linked to the achievements. Fourthly, the students will also be allowed to focus on areas of interest in preferred learning styles. Finally, the educators will be sensitized to the significance of allocating effective time for students’ interaction with appropriate peers. Therefore, the type III intervention process will impact greatly towards the restoration of underachievement through change of behavior and achievement. Therefore, a flexible student-focused enrichment strategy will be recommended to educators in their efforts to restore the underachievement in gifted students. Reference American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Dabrowski, K. (1938). Typy wzmozonej pobudliwosci psychicznej (Types of increased psychic excitability). Biul. Inst. Hig. Psychicznej, 1(3-4), 3-26. Diaz, E. I. (1998). Perceived factors influencing the academic underachievement of talented students of Puerto Rican descent. Gifted Child Quarterly, 42 (2), 105-122 Frasier, M. M., & Passow, A. H. (1994). Toward a new paradigm for identifying talent potential (Research Monograph 94112). Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut. The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Rimm, S. (1997). Underachievement Syndome: A national epidemic. In N. Colangelo and G. A. Davis (Eds.) Handbook of Gifted Education (2nd ed., pp. 416-435). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Siegle, D. & McCoach, D. B. (2001). Promoting a positive achievement attitude with gifted and talented students. The social and emotional development of gifted children: What do we know? Waco, TX: Prufrock Press. Supplee, P. L. (1990). Reaching the gifted underachiever. New York: Teachers College Press. Whitmore, J. (1986). Conceptualizing the issue of underserved populations of gifted students. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 10(3), 141-153 Wolfle, J. A. (1991). Underachieving gifted males: Are we missing the boat? Roeper Review, 13(4), 181-184. Read More