A study of children of high intelligence with relatively low school achievement

Abstract

The thesis reports studies of adolescent boys of I.Q. 135 and above, with relatively low school achievement. Twenty-three Subjects were submitted to a questionnaire and interview which were designed to reveal their reactions to various aspects of school routine and the degree of their dependency on their home environment. And equal number of Controls were chosen from the tops of classes and the same number of teachers were asked to give their forecasts of the answers to the questions. The Subjects' responses showed that, contrary to theoretical expectations, these adolescent boys showed few feelings of resentment against authority, and that they were almost unanimous in blaming factors within themselves, such as lack of intellectual ambition or plain laziness, for their failure at school. The Controls, too, showed little sign of the rebelliousness usually associated with adolescence, although the teachers had anticipated that this problem would be paramount. Work, however, conducted at equal levels through daily psychotherapy or once-weekly Child Guidance revealed that lack of ambition and laziness were largely a result of feelings of resentment against teachers or parents, who were blamed in one way or another for the boys' failure at school. This would tend to confirm that the feelings of adolescents are so mixed that it is impossible for them to decipher them clearly and give them expression. Although the majority of both Subjects and Controls were without manifest resentment against their parents and teachers, it was noticeable that disagreements between the two parents or between parents and teachers in such areas as ambition for the child were much more in evidence among the Subjects than among the Controls. The questionnaire itself was designed in three sections, with the same questions being asked in various contexts in each of them. This was to give the adolescents a chance to display their legendary inconsistency. But, as has already been stated, the inconsistency turned out to be indeed a legend, except in areas which dealt directly with school procedures, such as examinations and homework.