Giftedness Essay

This essay will critically examine giftedness as a characteristic of diversity in a classroom, and provide assessment and teaching strategies that can help support students from this group in the classroom environment. In New Zealand one of the principles of the New Zealand curriculum is inclusion, which states "The curriculum is non-sexist, not-racist, and non-discriminatory; it ensures that students identities, languages, abilities, and talents are recognised and affirmed and that their learning needs are addressed" (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 9). This inclusion leads to classrooms that have very diverse students varying culturally, intellectually, physically, socio-economically and linguistically (Alton-Lee, 2003). Giftedness is

7). but the disadvantages are that some school may make it too wide or too

Various methods are used to gather data about the student for example, observations, teacher rating scales, product, process and performance results, nominations by teachers, parents, communities and peers, tests - standardised achievement, intelligence tests and teacher designed tests (Riley, 2004, as cited in Easter, 2011). The benefits of using checklists and rating scales are they can be used to accurately identify gifted students including those from Maori and minority cultures as long as the teacher has a good knowledge of the culture and how this may influence how giftedness is manifested. Products, processes and performances when taking into account different cultures ideas of giftedness are also effective (Bevan-Brown, 2009). Standardised tests of intelligence, achievement and creativity are useful to identify gifted students because they have high reliability and validity and the results can be compared to the norm, but it must be remembered that these test also have disadvantages due sometimes having a too low a ceiling that the gifted students knowledge or talent is above this level and so is not noticed, some have cultural and linguistic bias and some are not appropriate for children who are gifted with learning difficulties (twice exceptional