| In the Educational Quality Act of 1985, Colorado's educational community recognized the urgency of developing successful strategies for encouraging students to complete high school. The failure of any student to graduate creates serious problems for the student, school, and community. Recently, studies on underachievement, delinquency, and dropouts have suggested that a significant portion of the discontinuing high school population may be gifted. For the individual dropout, restricted personal development is perhaps most devastating, imposing vocational obstacles on potentially the best students. For the school system, this is a failure to carry out the mandate of education.;Data from school records and a structured interview were aggregated in a descriptive profile of the gifted at-risk student. Data from the HSPQ were analyzed using the discriminant analysis, resulting in significant group discrimination and 79% correct classifications from a discriminant function of four personality factors. The study concluded that: (1) specific personality characteristics tend to encourage an adversary relationship between at-risk gifted students and traditional schools; (2) traditional schools by their demands for conformity share responsibility for the alienation of some gifted students which may lead to their dropping out of school; (3) family problems, including divorce and lack of encouragement for education, interact with insensitivity in schools to greatly increase the risk for gifted students to drop out; (4) many school curricula are too rigid, uninteresting, and poorly paced for the learning style and speed of gifted students; (5) alternative school practices can and should be used as a model for dropout prevention with at-risk gifted students; (6) some teachers lack training in the different characteristics and needs of gifted students, which often leaves them unaware of and insensitive to these characteristics and needs; and (7) early identification of potential dropouts in elementary school is absolutely necessary in the search for effective solutions.;The purpose of the study was to identify dropout risk factors in a gifted secondary population. Comparisons on personal interview questions and the High School Personality Questionnaire were made between two sample groups of 30 gifted high school students identified as achieving and at-risk/dropout and matched for age, grade level, and gender. |
