Underachievement

Last week I spoke mister Piet Groenewegen about the possibilities of doing my graduation research within the begaafdheidsprofielscholen (gifted schools) in the Netherlands. What I had in mind was to compare regular secondary education on the one hand, with begaafdheidsprofielscholen on the other. The problem seemed to be that mister Alexander Minnaert was already performing a research on this exact subject. Aside from this, the participating schools would not be looking forward to another question list.. What to do then?

I told him that my subject of interest is underachievement in schools. Achievement is usually measured with the use of an IQ test. A common problem with IQ tests is that they cannot cover all aspects of giftedness. I said to him that more knowledge is needed on the subject of underachievement. This problem is present in the begaafdheidsprofielscholen. He agreed with me that this subject is an interesting one, and that too little is known about it (or even acknowledged) in the participating (and all other) schools.

As the weeks go by my research question is getting more solid, and now the methodology comes into the picture. In what way will I collect the information about underachievement from the schools?

I've been playing with the thoughts of conducting interviews at the schools, which Mr. Groenewegen thought was a good idea, also because the participating schools have developed an aversion against the question lists. An interview would be a nice change of methods here.

This Friday I'm meeting with Mr. Groenewegen and a colleague.  Until then I've got time to specify the research question a bit more: what do I want to achieve? What results do I look for specifically? If you have any ideas, please share them with me!