4.6.8 Gifted Students’ Perceptions of Challenge: It’s Hard, It’s Fun, and They Want It

In 2012, Boser and Rosenthal posed the question: Do schools challenge our students? “Elementary-school students . . . revealed that they aren’t being challenged by the math work—37 percent of fourth-grade students reported that their math work is often or always easy” (Boser & Rosenthal, 2012, p. 15). What would students in grades 2-5 from 16 schools say in response to a different key question: What does challenge mean to you? Students’(n=78) comments painted an overall picture of their perceptions of challenge.

Our research questions guided the coding of qualitative interview data. Inductive analyses (Thomas, 2006) included reading transcripts, applying codes, creating categories, and determining themes. The first phase was open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), which involves assigning codes to phrases or statements. This was followed by combining codes to form categories, condensing those categories, then using axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to determine emerging themes.

Verbatim comments revealed the depth of insights of how students interpreted and responded to challenge. Three themes emerged from the analyses: challenge provokes thinking, challenge requires a little push of help, challenge is fun and welcomed. Students said,

I think that challenging is pushing your brain a little farther than it’s gone before. (State 2, Focus Group, March 16, 2016)

You have to go bigger and do something that’s harder that really like makes you think harder. (State 1, Focus Group, October 19, 2016)

It would at least feel like that you’ll need at least like just a little push of help. (State 1, Focus Group, October 19, 2016)

It “. . . makes us think super hard about things.” (State 3, Focus Group, October 12, 2016)

When students were asked to compare their work in their gifted classes to general education classroom work, they commented:

It’s different from the classroom because sometimes it can be challenging work, sometimes it can be fun and challenging work and sometimes it can be just work or something like that. (State 1, Focus Group, October 13, 2016)

It was important for these young students to recognize and articulate personal perspectives on challenging work by remembering they can vs. cannot do something, and they are ready for the challenge with, perhaps, “just a little push of help” (State 1, Focus Group, October 19, 2016). These students’ responses to challenge should be central to educators’ planning and developing curricular opportunities to ignite learning for all students.

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