By: Muthaira Abid and Marry Falade
MF: Could you tell us your major, what year you’re in and where you’re from?
R: I am a psychology major in the honours program. I’m in my third year and I’m from Quebec.
MF: What are your preferred pronouns?
R:She/her/hers
MF: Could you tell us one fun fact about yourself?
R: I cut my finger when I was seven. I don’t know if it’s fun, but it’s weird.
MA: Could you give us a short overview of your honors project? Starting off with your research topic?
R: My research project is titled – Giftedness Beyond High-school. My supervisor was in the Faculty of Education and we conducted a thematic analysis on social media content pertaining to their experience in post-secondary education. First, we addressed the gap in the literature about gifted students beyond high-school and then inquired whether the students are satisfied in post-secondary education and if their needs are being met as they have very different needs from their same age peers. While there are many programs that address meeting these needs in primary and secondary education, ones applicable to secondary school are limited.
MA: What sparked your interest in your research topic and how did you build your hypothesis?
R: I was actually inspired to turn into giftedness research as I myself found out that I was gifted the summer of my first year at UBC. While university was great, I felt that something was missing and going wrong. I would have trouble focusing and I found it hard to do the assignments when it came down to writing down the sentences, doing the readings and the assignments. Therefore, I got an evaluation done and was identified as gifted but I found out that I also had ADHD and dyslexia. This interaction of giftedness and disabilities is called twice exceptionality, meaning that you have characteristics belonging to two exceptional populations. This sparked my interest in knowing – what does being gifted actually mean? I then fully immersed myself in the field of giftedness and did an internship at a giftedness clinic back home in Quebec. I feel in love with how the psychology of gifted individuals interacts with a special education. This is how I came upon giftedness and gifted education as a field of research. Moreover, when I went to arts advising to inquire about any considerations for gifted students in terms of acceleration or differentiation – there was nothing that gifted students could do. The only option was to take more classes, but with two learning disabilities that was not feasible. That is when I came upon a void and it inspired me to start researching post-secondary learning environments for gifted students.
MA: What made you feel like this was an important topic to research, and was there anyone who inspired you to look into this topic?
R: This summer I lived with a family of three children that I was taking care of while the mother was completing her undergraduate degree in psychology as well. She went back to university in order to specialize in giftedness in psychology and so we kind of fed off of each other. She is actually doing her PhD now and researching twice exceptional students with dyslexia gifted students that also have dyslexia. We would read academic articles together and we would bounce ideas off of each other. That was a very conducive environment to push me forward. This was also combined with stories of friends that were identified as gifted and that are in post secondary education. In addition, gifted education is not just for gifted students. There have been theories that suggest that giftedness is at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the stage of ‘self-actualization’. What gifted education does then is create an educational environment that encourages and fosters the abilities that would help every individual reach self-actualization. This for me is a way to approach education on a whole different level.
MF: What was your favourite part of the process?
R: It was a difficult process since it was my first time conducting my own research. For me, the most interesting thing was that I had autonomy. I’m responsible for something, I’m not waiting on somebody to give me the answers. I’m looking at the literature and finding what is out there. As much as my supervisor specialized in gifted education, nobody has done research on post-secondary education and gifted students. It was a process of first convincing my supervisor that this is something that the field says we should research, and then going on this journey together. It felt very empowering to be autonomous that way, not depending on a textbook or having to ask questions to someone to see if you have the right answer. It’s new, it’s exciting. So that for me was really great.
MF: I bet! That sounds awesome. So you’ve been saying that it takes a lot of hard work to work on a research project and you described a few things that you found hard about it. Is there anything else you found hard and how did you overcome these obstacles?
R: I thought that coming into the honours program, I had two years to do a project. Over the summer, I was communicating with my supervisor and we were thinking the first year we would develop a questionnaire and then the second year we would do interviews and do an analysis. Then coming into my first honours seminar, I learned I had eight months to do this. So we had to make a drastic change of plans because we didn’t have enough time to go by our original plans. I’m really determined – or maybe you could called that being stubborn – so didn’t want to abandon this research topic. So we decided we’d do a content analysis on data that’s already available on social media. But this was a very complex process. In psychology, we have methodological and ethics training for experiments that collect data with participants in person, but there’s only one line in the Tri-Council Policy that talks about internet research, which says that you don’t need Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) approval for your study if it doesn’t ‘violate the subject’s expectation of privacy’. But there’s a lot of interpretation and grey area in what a person’s expectation of privacy actually means. So I had to do a lot of research to determine what this meant. There isn’t one way to do things as is established with research with live participants. To my best knowledge after doing a lot of research, I came up with a research design and submitted it to the BREB. In research, there is always a Research Participant Complaint Line in your research institution so that participants can communicate with someone if they feel like their rights are not protected within the research process. After starting my project, there were complaints submitted to the Research Participant Complaint Line. This was a big concern for me, because when you design a research project you really want to ensure that your research respects participants rights and privacy. Giftedness Beyond High School is my first research project, and having complaints submitted by participants is very discouraging because it means that something went wrong, and you don’t really know what that means for the future of your project. This experience taught me that the ethics process is way more open and accessible that we think. We don’t have to have all the answers: you don’t have to wait for BREB feedback to ask questions. You can send your questions to them before, and you can discuss issues you are encountering with them. It’s always better to email them and say “hey, I have this problem”, and then have a meeting with them before you even try something, so that it’s proactive instead of reactive. So that for me was a very difficult time, especially because communicating with participants online, you get all sorts of people. The type of consent we were asking for, which was an opt-out consent, always receives complaints, even if it’s accepted in the field. So internet research was very complex.
MF: Yes, it must be tricky, especially when it’s new territory like internet research, and ethics come into play.
R: Yes and UBC BREB hasn’t come up with a set of guidelines yet – they’re in the process of it.
MA: Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
R: The data turned out to be vast and very rich. I was thinking that we were going to get a couple pages worth of content, but turns out we have over 200 pages of qualitative content. I realized that that is too long for an honors thesis, so I decided to focus on data pertaining to post-secondary education curricula for this project – How do gifted students experience post-secondary curricula? What do they like about it? What don’t they like? What works for them?
What we came to observe is that they are very dissatisfied with the emphasis on output versus the process. This means that in university, you go to lectures, you memorize the material and get a grade. But gifted students struggle because it is not meaningful to them and they do not connect to the material. It is a very passive way of learning because the student is not asked to contribute their own original ideas. They are not asked reflective questions, or asked to actively engage with the material. Instead, the main mode of learning relies on the answers being told to them in lectures or they have to read them in textbooks, and then they are just tested on their ability to remember it. Gifted students struggle with finding meaning with this passive learning format. Furthermore, it is easy for them to become demotivated. Gifted students do not need repetition or the need to be explained a concept 3 or 4 ways. They read it once and then it is often automatically understood. I remember that there was a comment about how 16 weeks of content could fit into four weeks. Having to wait 16 weeks is very demotivating as they do not feel like they are contributing or engaging with the material. The issue is mainly with the type of intellectual stimulation that they are being provided. They don’t necessarily need more things to do, but rather they feel like the type of stimulation in post-secondary education is not deep/complex/comprehensive enough. Additionally, they struggled with a lack of adult mentors. In gifted programs, they have smaller class sizes, they do a lot of discussions and so it is a very creative and innovative process. But they lose that in post-secondary education. They do not get to ask all the questions they want to ask and delve deeper into material because there are three 300 or 600 other students in the class – they have to wait for others and it is very demotivating. Many not only lose motivation to continue, but often drop out as well because they don’t feel purposefully involved in their education.
One of the best environments that gifted students perform well in and seem to enjoy is graduate school as they get to engage more deeply in the material, they have smaller discussion groups where ideas are more complex and they really feel like they are learning something.
MA: What was the most surprising observation from your study?
R: On a separate theme from the curriculum, we found information on identity development and learning habits. What was very surprising to me was that the gifted students have not really learned how to study. This might be a result of high school being too easy for them before so they never really had a challenge as they were never forced to learn to study. When they come to university, it is like a slap in the face! Oh my God, I am realizing I have to study for the first time and I have no idea how to do this! What am I going to do? This is very frustrating for them because it is not like they do not understand the material – they understand it very well but it is just they do not know how to study in order to demonstrate in the exam that they know the material. In university, exams often measure your rote memorization ability as it applies to course material. And sometimes it even depends on what type of answers the professor is looking for. Gifted students struggle with that: how do I study to show them that I understand? How can I best memorize things? How do I give the answer that the professor wants? This might be also due to the fact that in some were in gifted programs in primary and secondary school, and therefore were not in a standardized curriculum so they might not have had this type of exam. So then the question remains- do we force them to fit into the mold and to develop these skills? Or do we adapt to the environment to be more conducive to developing their creative and innovative abilities?
MA: What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
R: I am going to focus on this curriculum and the cognitive content and learning environment for my thesis. I am doing a poster presentation on the project at both MURC and PURC. I am also applying to conferences in different associations of giftedness and gifted education in the United States and Europe. I am planning on presenting results in more psychologically and educationally inclined conferences so that both themes are covered and results are accessible to both fields. Our hope is that we may get published so that we can make changes in the education system and make a meaningful difference.
MF: How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world? You were kind of bridging into that.
R: It has an amazing potential to be applied later on because it uses a transactional approach which has been mentioned in gifted education studies before, but it’s studies hardly actually use it. What education research does right now is they evaluate programs, meaning that they investigate student performance within a certain program in order to ameliorate that specific program. Education research based on transactional relationships isn’t embedded in a program. We’re not trying to answer “is this program satisfactory?” or “how do students perform in that specific program?” It is to a certain extent, but it’s embedded in the perspective that students are valuable in their own needs and interests. In this perspective, the educational environment’s role is to create a context in which those interests and valued abilities can be appreciated, fostered and developed. It can be used for gifted students, average/normal students, and even students with disabilities. It’s not limited to particular academic subjects or levels of schooling. It also includes considerations for students’ socio-emotional, psychological, intellectual and developmental needs. It’s the whole of the student that is at the centre of this approach. So using this approach in education in general, it has the potential to reorganize how education functions today and to take off the burden that is put on the professors and teachers themselves. It is evident that today we don’t have anywhere near enough teachers or support in classrooms to provide students with the individualized approach they need. The current standardized system then puts pressure on teachers and school psychologists to do more when they don’t have the resources to do that. What the transactional approach is doing looking at how we can change the context, to make it more flexible, so that it’s easier for educational professionals to provide support for students and maximize their potential and achievement.
MF: Those would be some exciting changes to see for sure. If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
R: I wouldn’t use the internet. Big data research using the internet is too ethically sensitive right now, and it would avoid issues of ambiguity regarding participants’ expectation of privacy. Also, I wouldn’t use internet data because I would have liked to ask specific questions. Unfortunately, there was just not enough time to do this. I’d also like to follow students that were in a gifted program in high school through their transition to university to see what’s actually going on within that phenomenon.
MF: You’ve been touching on this throughout the interview, but how has your honours project helped you to grow, both personally and professionally?
R: It introduced me to the whole world of research. Having to do a literature review and writing a paper — we do that for assignments, but this was more in depth and more specialized, and often way more interesting because you can research something you are actually passionate about. That really helped me find new motivation. It also introduced me to the mechanics of conducting a research project. We learn about it in classes, but it’s totally different to actually do it. Writing an ethics application, waiting for that to come through, actually contacting participants, collecting the data, doing the analysis – those are processes that are very exciting, but also very boring because they take time. It really helps familiarize yourself with how it works and to understand how other research projects function. You’re developing critical thinking skills that you don’t develop as much just by taking a class on methodology. It also helps to figure out what you want to do later and to make the connections that will help you achieve your goals.
MA: What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
R: I think PSYC 217 helped, but it is kind of sad that there is no course that covers giftedness in psychology. This is not just here at UBC, but it is a difficult topic to find someone to supervise you at the PhD level.
MA: Tell us about how you stay organized and manage your time while doing an honours project. How do you prioritize? How do you motivate yourself?
R: Organizing is a result of having deadlines. To be honest, organization was a challenge so I don’t really have any tips to share. But staying motivated, you really have to look at your deadlines and back track how much time you need for each stage and then in each stage you have to be motivated and complete it or you would not be able to accomplish your project. for me it was easy because I absolutely loved my topic and the novelty of it kept me going.
MF: Great, thank you. What was the most challenging part about doing an honours project? What was most rewarding?
R: The most challenging part was fitting into the curriculum. As I said before, I had this whole 2-year project that I wanted to do and I had to give up on it, or at least drastically change it because I couldn’t do it in the time frame the honours program allows. Also, learning how to write a thesis, how to write with academic language and things like that. It’s difficult at the beginning but then it gets a bit easier. One of the most rewarding things was just having the opportunity to do my project. Something I struggled with in my first and second year was that you produce assignments, you do exams, but it doesn’t feel productive, because there’s nothing unique about how I do it. Everybody else is doing that. Even if I’m doing an assignment that may be different from others, it’s not necessarily my own ideas. I’m asked to do an assignment on a topic that I’m not necessarily passionate about or want to explore. But, this is entirely me. It’s my own project, I came up with the idea, and I’m building it from scratch. That in itself is very rewarding. It’s showing that with motivation, hard work, perseverance, and the right support you can get to do something productive. That’s what keeps me going. That and the fact that what I’m doing actually has really important implications for the future. It’s giving purpose to my studies.
MF: How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
R: Networking is a bit more difficult for me because my research is with a faculty member in the graduate Faculty of Education. I’m not part of a lab within the Psychology Department so I don’t really interact with professors and grad students. Most of my networking was done back when we had in-person classes, when it was easier to communicate with profs. During my classes I would always carry a notebook with my and write down deeper, more reflective questions that came to mind during classes. Then I would go to the professor’s office hours and actively seek them out to talk about these questions. I would try to learn more about my professors and think: What does this prof do? What research has he/she published? If it interested me, I would read more about it and make an appointment to talk with the professor. It’s very rewarding intellectually, but it is also rewarding because they notice you and are more likely to engage with you. That really made a complete change in my learning experience. That’s mainly how I did my networking. Also, when I used to work at a developmental lab, my lab manager would help me find people and faculty members that were interested in the same topic as me and that’s how I found my supervisor. So really taking advantage of the environment you have around you and not waiting for an opportunity to drop into your lap.
MF: That’s some good advice. What are your other interests outside of Psychology? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
R: I’m part of University Singers. It’s a course in the UBC School of Music, a very advanced choir of about 40 people. I grew up doing music: piano, clarinet, saxophone, singing in choirs and playing in a wind orchestra and jazz band. So being part of University singers is what keeps me grounded during university. It’s very rewarding to keep that part of my identity alive. And honestly, it’s what keeps be balanced and takes care of my mental health. It’s nice to switch gears, to get into a different, more creative mindset and to be able to share music with others in concerts.
MF: That’s really cool. What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time?
R: In 5 years I would still be in university. I want to get my PhD and Psy.D. I want to be able to do research and to practice as a clinician. I also want to get certification as a neuropsychologist which will allow me to do assessments for learning disabilities. What I really want to do is work in the field of giftedness, and to do that I need to be able to administer tests. I want to make a difference in education as well, still being a part of both fields.