The Effects of Birth Order and Family Size on Academic Achievement, Divergent Thinking, and Problem Finding Among Gifted Students

Abstract

Birth order, family size, and other familial structural characteristics are important variables to consider to understand the transformation from gifts to talents. The current study explored the influence of birth order and family size on academic achievement, divergent thinking (DT), and problem finding (PF) with a sample of 156 gifted male and female Arab students (M= 12.21 years, SD= 1.75). Regarding academic achievement, we hypothesized that first-borns will be overrepresented in our sample, which was true; i.e., nearly half the gifted students in this study were first-borns. Comparing ordinal position in academic achievement, first-borns possessed higher grade point averages (GPAs) than did other-born children. Family size was also related to academic achievement—participants from smaller-sized families had significantly higher GPAs compared with gifted students from middle- and large-sized families. As for the influence of birth order and family size on both DT and PF, our findings were partly supported. A multivariate analysis of variance showed significant differences for birth order and the interaction between birth order and family size in the originality dimension of PF. Non-significant differences were found concerning family size. The follow-up analyses of variance showed that later-born gifted students scored higher than first-, second-, third-, and fourth-born children in PF originality. Later-born gifted students who scored higher on originality were from smaller families. No significant influences for birth order and family size were found concerning fluency for both DT and PF as well as DT originality. This was the first study to examine the effect of family size and birth order on PF, and there is a need for future research to elucidate the influence of familial structural characteristics on PF.