Promotion offers for gifted students

Many approaches to promote the gifted have already been undertaken. In general, these approaches can be differentiated into external and internal differentiation measures.

Specifically, whereas external differentiation measures refer to educational programs that separate gifted children from their classmates, internal differentiation concerns distinct instructional methods for the gifted in a heterogeneous classroom (Heller, 1999). With regard to external differentiation, three main approaches of gifted interventions can be distinguished, namely (a) acceleration, (b) enrichment, and (c) grouping (e.g., Hagmann-von-Arx, Meyer, &

Grob, 2008). Although these approaches may be intertwined with each other, they can still be distinctively described.

First, acceleration refers to strategies that allow students to pass faster through the regular school system than their schoolmates. These acceleration strategies include early

entrance into school, grade skipping, and visiting college courses while still being in high-school (i.e., advanced placement). In a recent meta-analysis, Steenbergen-Hu and Moon (2011) reported acceleration to positively affect academic achievement and, to a lesser extent, social-emotional development.

Second, enrichment refers to additional learning offers for the gifted besides the regular curriculum. Thereby, a differentiation between vertical and horizontal enrichment can be made (Nogueira, 2006): Vertical enrichment offers aim at intensifying a certain topic such as, for instance, geometry by providing specific lessons. Horizontal enrichment offers, by contrast, aim at providing additional subject matters such as, for instance, learning a new language. Generally, these enrichment offers take place outside of school time (e.g., in the afternoon or during the holidays). However, it is also possible that these enrichment offers take place during school lessons. They are then referred to as pull-out-programs. In her comprehensive review about educational practice among gifted and talented, Rogers (2007) concluded enrichment offers to be less compelling than acceleration measures. However, in combination with acceleration, enrichment offers seem to be very beneficial for the gifted.

Vaughn, Feldhusen, and Asher (1991) explicitly reviewed the effectiveness of pull-out programs and found small to medium positive effects in the areas of academic achievement as well as of critical and creative thinking. They thus concluded pull-out-programs to benefit gifted learners.

Third, grouping or ability grouping refers to the separation of gifted students from their average peers into homogenous learner groups. There are several levels of grouping:

multilevel classes (i.e., all students in the same grade are divided into different ability groups), cross-grade grouping (i.e., students from several grades are formed into groups based on their achievement), within-class grouping (i.e., students in the same class are divided into different ability groups), or entire schools for the gifted (cf. Kulik & Kulik, 1992). Furthermore, a differentiation can be made between enriched classes, in which gifted students are grouped to receive richer educational experience, and accelerated classes, in which gifted students are grouped to receive instructions that allow them to proceed faster through the learning materials. Meta-analyses by Kulik and Kulik (1992; 2004) revealed multilevel classes to have no or only little effects on students’ achievement. Cross-grade grouping and within-class grouping, by contrast, were associated with positive effects on achievement. However, enriched and accelerated classes for the gifted appeared to have the strongest impact on achievement.

As already mentioned above, the three approaches are strongly overlapping as they all provide gifted students with learning materials beyond the curriculum. Therefore, investigations to test the differential effectiveness of these approaches can hardly be conducted nor can their results be appropriately evaluated. In this vein, for instance, Wai and colleagues (2010) longitudinally investigated the general benefit of early promotion offers on gifted students’ later success and achievement. More precisely, instead of distinguishing between the types of intervention approach, the authors counted all accelerating as well as enriching opportunities that aimed at cognitively stimulating the gifted as equally appropriate promotion offers for their study. Wai et al. (2010) found that the more promotion offers a gifted person received as a child, the more success (e.g., publications, PhDs, patents) he or she achieved 20 years later. For instance, by using a median split, the authors reported that the group of gifted students, who received a higher degree of promotion, was about 2.3 times as likely to produce a successful publication as the group of gifted students, who formerly received a lower degree of promotion. To conclude, this study shows that promotion offers by any means benefit gifted students as long as these offers are cognitively stimulating.

Furthermore, several studies also investigated the effectiveness of specific curricula for gifted students (Gallagher & Stepien, 1996; Reis, Westberg, Kulikowich, & Purcell, 1998;

Sternberg et al., 1996; VanTassel-Baska, Zuo, Avery, & Little, 2002). VanTassel-Baska and colleagues (2002), for instance, examined the effectiveness of a language arts curriculum, which was supposed to foster abstract thinking skills for gifted students. Specifically, they compared gifted students’ achievement in literacy analysis and interpretation as well as in persuasive writing after having either participated in a special language arts curriculum or after having received traditional language lessons. They found that gifted learners who received the language arts curriculum highly outperformed gifted students who received traditional lessons with regard to their high-level thinking performance (i.e., literacy analysis and interpretation, persuasive writing). VanTassel-Baska et al. (2002) concluded that gifted students need differentiated curricula that particularly promote their abstract thinking skills.

Gallagher and Stepien (1996), by contrast, did not find gifted students to benefit more from a problem-based history curriculum as compared to a traditional history curriculum with regard to their American history knowledge afterwards. Importantly, however, the participants of this study were particularly talented in mathematics and science so that the specialized curriculum in history might have not fitted their giftedness. In line with this idea, Sternberg and colleagues (1996) demonstrated that a curriculum that was appropriately matched to the gifted learners most benefitted their achievement. More precisely, Sternberg and colleagues assessed

the students’ patterns of ability, namely their analytical, creative, and practical ability, and either assigned a gifted student to a curriculum that matched his or her ability pattern or to a curriculum that did not perfectly fit to the student’s ability pattern. Sternberg and colleagues found that those gifted students who received a curriculum that matched their pattern of ability outperformed those students who were mismatched. To conclude, as already proposed by ATI (Cronbach & Snow, 1977), promotion offers seem to be more beneficial when they are matched to the gifted learners’ particular prerequisites. For instance, as indicated above (1.1.1), high cognitive potential is the most generally accepted component of giftedness (e.g., Sternberg et al., 2011) and is thus likely to also represent the most common characteristic among students having been identified as gifted. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to provide learning offers that capitalize on the students’ high cognitive potential by stimulating more complex learning processes in order to further develop the students’ cognitive potential.

However, whether such a precise match between the gifted learners’ prerequisites and a specific learning offer is considered when identifying gifted students for promotion offers in the practical context is doubtful. In the following, the present dissertation will thus dwell on the practical approach to gifted identification, concluding with implications for respective promotion offers.

1.1.4 Linking theory to practice: Gifted identification in the practical