Part I: Introduction
Gifted and talented students are so “smart” that they can be left alone with a textbook and will learn the material without much help from the teacher. Gifted and talented students are blessed with such skill, it is unfair to the average students if I spend time with the gifted students. Gifted and talented students have no problems. Gifted and talented students do not deserve more educational funding or resources.
The preceding statements are all myths about gifted and talented students. In reality, gifted and talented students need just as much – if not, more – resources and assistance than their average-by-comparison peers. Yet there exists a reluctance to grant this extra help to a set of students who are, by definition, “gifted” with higher abilities than average students. Thus, challenging and nurturing their abilities becomes less of a priority and these gifted and talented students are left to flounder in boredom in a regular classroom. Lack of recognition and a failure to acknowledge the talents and skills of students with such abilities early in their education can easily lead to negative consequences later in life. Gifted and talented students become depressed and frustrated.
(This section is unwritten, but will contain the following aspects:
- solutions to the problem with an emphasis on one specific solution
- how the solution can be implemented to solve the problem)
Part II: History of Gifted and Talented Problem
Foremost, a topic of great controversy in the world of gifted and talented education is the very definition of the term “gifted and talented”. Some educators define it by demonstrated precociousness while others cite well-known intelligence tests like the Stanford-Binet as in...
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Marland, S. P., Jr. (1972). Education of the gifted and talented: Report to the Congress of the United States by the U.S. Commissioner of Education and background papers submitted to the U.S. Office of Education, 2 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. (Government Documents Y4.L 11/2: G36)
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New York: Cambridge University Press. Ryser, G. R., & McConnell, K. (2003). Scales for Identifying Gifted Students. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.
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The problem associated with how students are chosen to join a gifted and talented program stems from the way that we define giftedness. Because there are countless ways in which any individual can define talent, the government created a federal task force in 1972 to study gifted education in order to standardize the way in which schools choose students for and implement their gifted and talented programs. The task force’s results are known as the Marland Report and include much information as a result of their research, including a decision that a public school’s gifted and talented programs should aim to serve between 3 and 5 percent o...
The Talents Unlimited Model was created under the philosophy that all students, both those identified as gifted and those not, would benefit from enrichment programs. The model is used to educate teachers on how to use differentiated instruction to use “higher order cognitive tasks to help students with varying abilities use their preferred thinking talents to manipulate instruction to solve problems, see broad relationships, evaluate varying perspectives, draw comparisons among disparate viewpoints, and predict causes and effects” (Schlichter, 2009, p. 434).
His anecdotes presented in the article are appropriate in terms of his subject and claims. The author responds back to the naysayers by saying that people only look at the test scores earned in school, but not the actual talent. He says, “Our culture- in Cartesian fashion- separates the body from the mind, so that, for example we assume that the use of tool does not involve abstraction. We reinforce this notion by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and number on IQ tests. And we employ social biases pertaining to a person’s place on the occupational ladder” (279). The author says that instead of looking at people’s talent we judge them by their grades in school or their IQ score, and we also employ them based on these numbers. People learn more each time they perform a task. He talks about blue collared individuals developing multi-tasking and creativity skills as they perform the task they are asked to
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Donovan, M. Suzanne and Christopher T. Cross (2002, August). Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy2.library.drexel.edu/lib/drexel/-docDetail.action?docID=10032383.
Special focus needs to be allotted to not only the kids struggling but the kids who are excelling. Learning is the sole purpose of school, and for advanced students who already mastered the classroom skills, they need an extra challenge so they are learning too. Gifted education is essential for fully developing and engaging precocious children. Lubinski said, “If you’re trying to solve problems in the world like climate change and terrorism and STEM innovation, and transportation and managing our health care, you want intellectually precocious youth who have had their intellectual needs
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One of the most controversial things about gifted and talented education is the criterion educators use to identify the gifted and talented. In the past, a student’s intelligence, based on an I.Q. score, was considered the best way to determine whether or not they qualified as gifted. As a result of using this method of identification, many gifted and talented students are not discovered nor are they placed in the appropriate programs to develop their abilities. Talents in the arts or an excellent ability to write are not measured on an I.Q. test but are abilities that may certainly qualify a student as gifted or talented.
Ormrod, J. E. (2012). Essentials of educational psychology: Big ideas to guide effective teaching, 3rd, ed. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Shaunessy, E. (2003). State policies regarding gifted education. Gifted Child Today Magazine, 26. Retrieved March 7, 2004, from http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=10445176&db=f5h
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