Listening to Able Underachievers

Creating Opportunities for Change

Michael Pomerantz, Kathryn Ann Pomerantz

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136636998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a new contribution to raising attainment in secondary schools, with specific reference to able underachievers who are currently achieving C grades or less when they could be getting As. Standards are depressed each time a single able underachiever demonstrates a competence that is below his or her real potential. It lowers morale in that the progress of the whole school is reduced proportionately in line with the able pupils who aren't achieving their real potential, and resources are wasted every time these pupils start misbehaving or creating problems in school.

This is a new and innovative approach, which is based on discussions with the pupils themselves and incorporates not just the usual basic subjects but also the creative areas of the curriculum and the wider community as a whole.

Head teachers, senior managers, teachers and students, indeed all who are interested in raising standards and ensuring that pupils achieve their full potential will find this book to be an excellent resource.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to the study of Able Underachievers

Purpose of the book

This book is based on the exploration of what the authors found when they questioned a group of Able Underachieving teenagers to elicit their views as to why Able Underachievers underperform at secondary school, and what they think can be done to reduce this underachievement.

We suspect that underachievement is an expensive problem that thus far has never been satisfactorily measured or understood in terms of its extent and the social costs to the school, to the larger community and ultimately to the economy and the life of the nation. Wills and Munro (2000) suggest that 10–15 per cent of intellectually able students are underachievers. Whybra (2000) argues that probably over 50 per cent of gifted students work in school four or five years below their ability. If the level of underachievement is so extensive, then it suggests that the problem needs to be investigated and tackled systematically. We often hear the expression ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste’. We owe this investigation not just to the nation but to the individual children and young people who enter the educational system with innocence and trust.

If we discover ways of improving the situation for Able Underachievers in school there ought to be a dividend that will benefit a wider cross-section of the school population. Teaching that is more responsive to the needs of Able Underachievers could well be appropriate for less able students as a positive side-effect. For example, in schools that make good provision for their most able pupils, provision for pupils with special educational needs is also found to be good (Eyre 1997).

In presenting these findings to several professional audiences, we were told repeatedly that the suggestions made by our respondents would be widely applicable and that most pupils, rather than just Able Underachievers, would benefit from changes at school.

Background

Before starting to write this book we had already become familiar with much of the published literature in the field of able students and we had noted that the language used was definitely more characteristic of what adult professionals write than what teenagers might be inclined to offer by way of partial explanations to account for underachievement. Here are some paraphrased examples to convey the flavour of adult language:

• Able Underachievers are not adequately motivated by teachers in the classroom;
• the curriculum is inappropriate for Able Underachievers;
• the government does not invest enough in resources or training for teachers;
• the peer group culture is too strong and pulls Able Underachievers away from hard effort;
• Able Underachievers want to avoid being singled out for attention or praise for their accomplishments;
• the media is to blame as it does not celebrate pupil achievements adequately;
• parents have failed to instil an adequate achievement ethic in their Able Underachievers;
• some teachers are not up to the task of inspiring Able Underachievers to work to their potential; and
• everyone is out to blame someone else for the problem and its lack of resolution.

This last point involves a circular and counter-productive pattern of social blame, and ignores the contribution that Able Underachievers themselves could make to the debate if one is to be convened. Where is this debate being held today? The voices of Able Underachievers, individually and collectively, are not well documented in the literature. This book tries to redress the balance.

Definitions of Able Underachievers

We do not intend to dwell long on complicated notions about who (exactly or technically) Able Underachievers are, as this could be protracted and would detract from our main purpose which is to describe the plight of a group of able underachieving pupils who are not receiving a fair share of the educational provision on offer in schools today. Perhaps they never have. Notions of ‘definition’ are well documented elsewhere.

It is worth noting that the House of Commons Select Committee (1999) enquiry into the education of highly able children was unable to identify an agreed definition of able pupils or the size of the sub-population that constitutes able pupils. Despite looking at a large amount of evidence, no consensus was reached on these matters. We did not want to repeat this exercise here. It is well known that many Able Underachievers are hard to identify (Teare 1997). Among those educators most prominent in the field there was a shift in emphasis around 1998–99 towards the view that identification is best established through making provision. For example, if teachers were to include more challenging tasks in the classroom for all students, the most able might become apparent more by the way they approach the challenge than by teachers merely identifying a cohort based on outcomes or achievements.

As a starting point we might consider that Able Underachievers are those pupils in school who could be gaining marks or grades like As or Bs on assessments of their work when in fact they tend to be achieving Cs or below. In terms of the National Curriculum and predicted functioning on the SATs at the end of Key Stage 3, we are talking of pupils who are capable of performing above Level 6 (in some subjects) but whom staff believe will not be likely to achieve this standard. We are specifically talking of the pupils in the top third of the student talent pool in terms of ‘potential’, but whose performance as assessed or measured in school does not generally reflect this.

Among the top third of the talent pool there is an indeterminate number of pupils who are Able Underachievers. There is great scope to argue about the size and the potential impact of this group in schools. We could arbitrarily agree on a defining standard such as a particular measure or test of potential, and then likewise arbitrarily agree on another defining measure or test of attainment. Having completed this quantitative task we could again arbitrarily (for the third time) determine mathematically a cut-off point to use for dividing the talented group into subsets called Able Underachievers' and Able Achievers' within the top third of the student population.

Later, another team of researchers would use different criteria or measures to do basically the same job and publish their findings. Later still, another research team would spot the difference in the findings and the size of the Able Underachievers' subgroups. General readers among the public then would be left (predictably) with the time-honoured problem of watching an educational debate spiral out of control, leaving little advance in our collective understanding of the needs of Able Underachievers. We sought a different approach to the problem.

Measurement

Elsewhere, readers could study the intricacies of the methodological problems facing researchers who try to measure human activity such as potential or attainment or discrepancies, in order to enhance research. The debates have raged for years. At one extreme, proponents of formal assessment argue positively about the rigour employed in testing large groups of individuals, which they feel results in stable, valid and reliable data upon which to draw assumptions and make predictions. At the other end of the continuum, equally convincing arguments suggest that tests of'potential' are too narrow and ought instead to capture multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993), assuming that new instruments can be developed to measure this, although this is not proving to be an easy task. We should also perhaps try to assess a broad range of skills including, for example, leadership and social awareness that would be difficult to quantify (Ogilvie 1973). Still others emphasise further methodological problems or biases with testing on the basis of ethnicity, social class, gender or even reading skills among the test takers (Wallace 2000).

Selection process

We were impatient in this current study to move on rather than to await the outcome of the long-standing debate which we have just outlined.

Our work took place within one large, predominantly rural, local education authority (LEA). We decided to ask the head teachers or their representatives in 11 randomly chosen secondary schools to select or nominate Able Underachievers who could subsequently be interviewed in order to hear their perspectives. To facilitate this process we offered school staff four staged criteria in the selection process, knowing elements of error might be introduced in the selection as we lacked a universally agreed rule for Able Underachiever subject selection. Subsequent analyses showed that the schools randomly selected were not significantly different from the rest of the secondary schools in the LEA on several comparative measures such as GCSE results, social deprivation (free school meals index) and school size. This showed that the randomisation procedure had been effective and that the selected schools were not statistically different from the other schools in those areas where comparative measures were used.

Staged criteria

The staged criteria through which school staff were asked to draw up a list of potential interview candidates are listed in Appendix 1. From this list, interviewees were randomly chosen. In the end, we selected 26 Year 9 pupils to interview. This year group was targeted because of significant educational concerns regarding underachievement at Key Stage 3.

The 26 Able Underachievers, finally identified after the four stages were applied, constituted the interviewee group of volunteers where p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction to the study of Able Underachievers
• 2. Teachers communicating with Able Underachievers
• 3. Developing relationships with peers, siblings and parents
• 4. Thinking and learning with Able Underachievers
• 5. Responding to personal and emotional needs
• 6. Creating opportunities for change
• Appendix 1: Staged criteria for the selection of Able Underachievers
• Appendix 2: Transcripts and the use of a grounded theory approach by means of ATLAS.ti
• References
• Index