Teachers Saw the Difficulty, Not the Gift

What the research found

A twice-exceptional child, or “2E” for short, is a child who is gifted and also has a condition that calls for special education support. In this study that includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. The two things sit together in the same child. That combination is easy to describe and surprisingly hard to see.

The researchers interviewed 14 elementary school teachers in Medina City, Saudi Arabia. Seven were women and seven were men. They had between five and fourteen years in the classroom, and most held a bachelor’s degree. Each teacher sat for a semi-structured interview of 45 to 60 minutes, built around eight questions. The team then read the transcripts closely and coded them for recurring themes. This is a qualitative study. Its aim is to understand how teachers think, not to count how common anything is across a country.

On the gifted side, the teachers were articulate. Most named problem-solving as a strength, mentioned by 92.86 per cent of them. Strong memory, communication skills, and abstract thinking each came up for 85.71 per cent. These are the qualities you would hope a teacher would notice in a bright child, and they did.

On the difficulty side, they were equally clear. Every teacher, all 14, described poor reading and writing. Around 78.57 per cent noted trouble with maths, and 71.43 per cent mentioned problems with concentration. So the raw observations were there. The teachers were watching real children and reporting real things.

The finding that matters is what happened when those two lists met. The teachers tended to treat giftedness and disability as two separate conditions in the same child, rather than as one intertwined profile. The authors conclude that the depth of the teachers’ understanding of 2E traits was limited. School systems, they note, often log these children as having a learning disability while quietly overlooking the giftedness. And although the teachers could see the academic struggles, few said they had actually referred these children for support.

The authors are candid about why this happens. Training on teaching and understanding 2E students, they write, is not officially provided to general education teachers during their preparation. The teachers were not failing to care. They had never been given the concept.

What it means for you and your child

Read this study for what it is. It is a close look at how 14 teachers in one city talk about a small group of children. It cannot tell you how many teachers elsewhere think this way, and it cannot prove that a lack of training causes children to be missed. The authors say as much. They flag the small sample, the single location, the focus on elementary teachers only, and the absence of any special education or gifted specialists. Numbers like 92.86 per cent describe these 14 people. They are not national statistics.

Within those limits, the study is still useful, because the pattern it describes is one many parents recognise. A capable child struggles with reading or sitting still, and the struggle becomes the whole story. The ability is either explained away or quietly filed as inconsistent. The reverse happens too. A visibly bright child’s genuine difficulty gets read as laziness, because surely a clever child could do it if they tried. Both readings split a single child into two, and both lose something.

The practical lesson is that the two halves need to be named together, out loud, by you. If a school report describes only your child’s difficulties, it is worth asking directly what the school sees as their strengths, and whether anyone has considered that the two might be connected. If a report celebrates only the strengths, ask about the friction. The teachers in this study could describe both when prompted. What they lacked was the single frame that holds them together.

It is also worth noting the gap between observing and acting. These teachers saw the difficulties clearly, yet few had made a referral. Noticing is not the same as a plan. So a fair question to any school is not only “what do you see?” but “what happens next, and who owns it?” A named next step is worth more than a sympathetic paragraph.

None of this requires a label to begin. You do not need a formal diagnosis to describe your child honestly as someone who is strong in one place and stuck in another, and to ask that both be taken seriously at once. That combined picture is exactly what this study found teachers struggle to hold on their own. Bringing it to them, clearly and calmly, is one of the most useful things a parent can do.