Engaging gifted students in the early years

There is a vast amount of literature related to gifted students and their education. Decades of research has culminated in clear and consistent information about identification, characteristics, underachievement, strategies in the classroom, accelerative options, social/emotional needs, and how to plan appropriately challenging learning programs. Despite this, gifted students remain widely under-served, under-stimulated and demonstrate limited academic growth on school-based, standardised and national testing. Karen Rogers, in her meta-analysis of decades of research in the field of gifted and talented education, identifies five key “lessons” that describe what is consistently known and understood to be key strategies for gifted students. 1. Gifted learners need daily challenge in their specific areas of talent. 2. Opportunities should be provided on a regular basis for gifted learners to be unique and to work independently in their areas of passion and talent. 3. Provide various forms of subject-based & grade-based acceleration to gifted learners as their educational needs require. 4. Provide opportunities for gifted learners to socialise and to learn with like-ability peers (most likely not same-age peers). 5. For specific curriculum areas, instructional delivery must be differentiated in pace, amount of review and practice, and organisation of content presentation. (Rogers, 2007) The “daily challenge” message makes it clear that classroom teachers are the critical ingredient in ensuring gifted students are learning every day, and this message is reiterated within the AITSL Australian Professional Standards for Teachers Standards. Teachers of ability grouped, streamed or mixed-ability classes have strategies available to them as they are planning and implementing differentiated learning for gifted and talented students within their class. Engagement In order to maintain engagement in their education, it is important that gifted students are actually learning when they come to school each day, and see school as a place where their prior learning is recognised and new learning occurs. To ensure this happens on a daily basis, we must: Pre- and formatively assess students to determine prior knowledge and avoid students practicing and repeating skills, knowledge and understandings they have already mastered. Gifted students often experience school as a place where week after week, topic after topic, and year after year, they are asked to unnecessarily practice and repeat skills. It is important to find quick and efficient ways to find out what students know and have mastered, and to plan class and homework that introduces and builds upon new learning. Make sure students are not asked to complete ‘core’ work before they can access the work that is genuinely at their level and will offer challenge. Extension and challenge tasks that are given out after students have finished, fall into this category. A core principle of differentiation is that all students are working at their level from the beginning of a class, rather than having to ‘earn’ the work that they should be able to access from the beginning of a lesson. Gifted students often experience years of being ‘rewarded’ for completing their work by being given more, and over time they become demoralised or learn to avoid the extra work by finding ways to waste time. Avoid asking the strongest students to mentor, coach or teach other students. Teachers often do this with the rationale that this helps both students. In reality, neither the weak nor the strong student benefits from this arrangement. It is important to remember that our brightest students deserve to be learning new material rather than being a substitute teacher, just as other students expect to do every day. Gifted students enjoy and should be able to work with intellectual peers on a daily basis, in order to feel accepted, express their ideas without fear of criticism and to be appropriately challenged. Avoid asking students to catch-up on missed work if they are out of the classroom to access extension work or gifted programming. This is especially true if the missed work includes unnecessary practice and repetition! Whenever students are involved in withdrawal or pull-out programs, it is important to look for ways to assess knowledge and credit learning between the classroom and pull-out program. Gifted students enjoy learning when they can see the big picture and whole-to-part teaching works well to achieve this. Strategies such as introducing an ‘essential question’ or ‘big idea’ at the beginning of a unit of work, can increase student motivation to learn the necessary underlying skills and knowledge, and serve as a reminder to teachers to keep a focus on the high order aspects of the learning. Essential questions or big ideas must be higher order and interest can be increased by making them provocative, ambiguous and/or thought-provoking. Daily challenge There are a number of ways that teachers can offer daily challenge to students as they plan their differentiated success criteria, learning goals, resources, lessons, activities, assessments and programs. Level of abstractness – consider extending the thinking that students do, by increasing the level of abstractness. This can be done through questioning and task design, and can be a simple way to ensure students are thinking about and engaging with learning at a higher level without necessarily changing the activity or resource. Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is a good resource to assist with this planning, and research done by Davis and Rimm (2004) found that it is important for gifted and talented students to be working in the top three high order areas (Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation) the majority of the time. Pace – differentiating the pace at which gifted and talented students are able to access and move through new material is vital to ensuring students are engaged and experiencing daily challenge. In order for teachers to differentiate pace, they need to be pre and formatively assessing to determine what students already know and how quickly they are grasping new knowledge, skills and conceptual understanding, with an aim to reduce the amount of unnecessary repetition and practice. Degree of complexity – making a task more interconnected with other ideas can increase the rigour of the thinking required from students. We extend students when we ask them to think about multiple ideas and the connections between these ideas, rather than asking them to engage with one idea at a time. The SOLO Taxonomy (1982) is a good resource to assist with planning this type of learning, questioning and assessment, and teachers should aim for gifted and talented students to be consistently working in the top two areas (“Relational” and “Extended Abstract”). Accelerative options – Extension, enrichment and the strategies listed above are important ways to plan appropriately challenging learning experiences for gifted and talented students, however accelerative options are equally important, if not more so. Accelerative options are any learning material that offers above-grade material or access to this material. For many gifted and talented students, there is only so much differentiation, extension and enrichment that is possible before they genuinely need to explore and learn above-level material. VanTassel-Baska and Stambaugh (2006) argue that accelerating content must be considered as a priority by teachers when planning learning experiences for gifted and talented students. Learning gain As teachers we need to ask if we have the information we need to measure the learning gain of our gifted students. If we can’t measure learning gain, it is unlikely we are offering them daily challenge and may mean they are not learning at all, even if they seem to be achieving. To ensure we can measure learning gain, we need to design our pre assessments so that we can find out the point at which students do not know material. If a preassessment is too easy and students get every aspect correct, then we have not discovered a baseline from which to plan our teaching and we will not be able to measure learning gain if it occurs. We also need to ensure our summative assessments offer enough difficulty to assess the advanced learning that students have been accessing. Implementing these strategies in no way implies that gifted students deserve more than any other student. Rather, we are endeavouring to level the playing field for these students, to provide the same degree of challenge as other students experience each day at school, to foster the same ability to persevere with tasks that are difficult, to see themselves as learners, and to experience school as a place where learning occurs on a daily basis. References Biggs, J., and Collis, K. (1982). The SOLO Taxonomy. New York: Academic Press. Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: Longmans, Green. Davis, G.A., and Rimm, S,B. (2004). Education of the gifted and talented. University of Michigan: Pearson. Rogers, K.B. (Fall, 2007). Lessons Learned About Educating the Gifted and Talented: A Synthesis of the Research on Educational Practice. Gifted Child Quarterly, 51(4), 382-396. VanTassel-Baska, J., and Stambaugh, T. (2006) Comprehensive Curriculum for Gifted and Talented Learners, 3rd Edition. College of William and Mary: Pearson.

Identification of giftedness can help schools and parents determine their child’s academic and social emotional needs. Educators in the field of gifted education recommend multiple assessment strategies be used in the classroom to determine giftedness. However formal identification showing levels of giftedness, can only be administered by a registered professional. These can include school psychologists and private educational and clinical psychologists. Commonly used assessments in Australia include: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children WISC-V (Age 6 -16) Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence WPPSI-IV (Age 2 -7.7) Stanford-Binet V (Age 2 - 85+). Educational psychologists consider a gifted IQ to be 130 or higher (98th percentile) on any of these three tests. The IQ scores and levels of giftedness however, have different meanings when comparing the WISC or WPPSI with the Stanford-Binet. If you need to compare two different tests, you can look at the percentile score, rather than the IQ number. For example, a profoundly gifted student whose IQ is at the 99.9 percentile will score a full-scale IQ of 145+ on the WISC-V and WPPSI-IV. However, they will score 180+ if administered the Stanford-Binet V. Levels of giftedness on the WISC-V and WPPSI-IV are as follows: Level 1 (terms superior to moderately gifted on IQ tests) have IQ scores of around 117 to 129 Level 2 (terms moderately to highly gifted on IQ tests) have IQ scores of around 125-135 Level 3 (terms highly to exceptionally gifted on IQ tests) have IQ scores of around 130 to 140 Level 4 (terms exceptionally to profoundly gifted on IQ tests) have IQ scores of around 135-141+ (or 145+ on either a verbal or nonverbal domain of the test) Level 5 (term profoundly gifted on IQ tests and generally score at the 99.9th percentile), have IQ scores of around 145+. IQ and levels of giftedness on the Stanford-Binet V are as follows: Mildly gifted, IQ range 115-129 (prevalence > 1:4) Moderately gifted, IQ range 130-144 (prevalence 1:40 - 1:100) Highly gifted, IQ range 145-159 (prevalence 1:1000 - 1:10 00) Exceptionally gifted, IQ range 160-179 (prevalence 1:10 000 - 1:1 million) Profoundly gifted, IQ 180+ (prevalence < 1:1 million). The challenges in administering these tests vary. They take several hours to administer and score, which makes them expensive. The verbal component scores may be impacted by culturally or linguistically diverse student groups and so they can be less effective in these individuals. They also do not measure other forms of giftedness, such as creative giftedness The strengths of these tests are that they are written for targeted age groups. They also have rigor in standardisation, rigor in the medium of measurement and consistency in administration requirements. These tests, therefore, are reliable, valid, and objective. The assessments have a long history based on large normative samples and validity has been established in multiple countries.  These instruments measure both verbal and non-verbal reasoning. They are administered individually, and the reports not only give a test score but also observations about behaviours during the testing process such as levels of attention and emotional dependence. This individual administration may also reduce anxiety levels for the student.

Researchers at Deakin University are interested to hear your views and experiences of school attendance and school attendance challenges. Are you a school staff member in an Australian school program? OR Are you: The parent of a school-aged child? Living in Australia? Fluent in English? Follow this link to complete the survey. Upon completion of the survey you may enter a draw to win a retail gift voucher. Contact glenn.melvin@deakin.edu.au for further information. This study has received Deakin University ethics approval (reference number: HEAG H 94_2023) Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B

Maths has an identity problem.

We only attend the campus two or three days a week and also work from home. School has been a wonderful process over the past few years I’ve been doing it. The teachers have been very nice over the whole period. A normal school wouldn’t have worked for me as I’m a very gifted child in some areas but in others areas I’m very low at as I have dyslexia. Let’s start with reading. Dyslexia makes reading very hard for me and I find it very hard to read big words. The teachers help because they let us use talk to text and iPads rather than handwriting. Now let’s go to science. Science I’m very gifted and I often work at year 7 science level. But that’s not the most gifted subject at all. There’s one more that stands out the most and that is maths. I’m doing year 10 maths at the age of 8. The other subjects I am at normal level although I have a deep understanding. I use assistive technology to write this (called my Mum) and she also helped me to aurally learn a script of 69 pages. 

"It gave me the enthusiasm to bring these ideas back to my school and advocate and cater appropriately for our gifted and talented students"

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Artwork Title: Flirting, flying, bursting, burning, yet hugely and hatefully heavy.

We asked the AI bot ChatGPT about the challenges of giftedness