CTD Researchers Win Mensa Award

Scholars from the School of Education and Social Policy’s Center for Talent Development (CTD) at Northwestern University received the Mensa Foundation’s Award for Excellence in Research for a study looking at whether interventions designed to help underachieving gifted students actually work.

The meta-analysis published in Gifted Child Quarterly was coauthored by Saiying Steenbergen-Hu, CTD’s research director; Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, professor of education and retired CTD director; and Eric Calvert, associate director.

It’s the second time Steenbergen-Hu and Olszewski-Kubilius received the award, which is given for outstanding research on intelligence, intellectual giftedness, and related areas. In 2018, they were honored for work looking at whether talent development programs and out-of-school learning can be used to improve STEM education for all students, particularly gifted ones.

In the most recent study, the trio looked at 14 recent studies that examined whether efforts to help talented but underachieving students actually make a difference in how well they do in school and how they feel.

The interventions, it turned out, didn't really help. But the gifted children did report feeling better emotionally and socially compared to their peers who didn't receive interventions.

Qualitative studies, which look at more detailed aspects, suggested that these interventions made these students more motivated to learn, better at regulating themselves, and they found school more meaningful.

But Steenbergen-Hu, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Calvert cautioned that the findings should be viewed “in light of the relatively low quality of the evidence from recent research on underachievement interventions.”

Steenbergen-Hu’s work, which focuses on the efficacy of educational programs on K-12 students’ academic achievement and social-emotional development, was awarded the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Year Award in 2012, 2018, and 2021. She also received the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Decade award in 2011-2020. Her publications have been cited more than 1,700 times.