This article presents the achievements of a programme at a research and development institute in Israel, where researchers in biology, biotechnology, agriculture, and chemistry supervised talented ...high-school students in performing research work and guided them in preparing individual matriculation projects. Not only did a number of the students' dissertations reach a level equivalent to a Master's degree and gain publication in the scientific media, but almost all of them felt that this was the most meaningful school work that they had undertaken. Research scientists conducted scientific supervision, with pedagogical support from the Association for the Advancement of Science Education in Galilee. An important part of the programme is to familiarise students with the Internet and related multimedia and technology tools, as the medium for carrying out collaborative, interactive project-based learning. However, the main task is to prepare students to cope successfully with the explosion of information of our era. We teach them how to think, analyse, and access suitable information and use it to solve problems. This programme could be used as a model to enhance science education for other countries.
Improving the quality of care for gifted pupils also brings problems related to their favouring. Favouring, as a part of the labeling theory, leads to the selection of gifted and stagnation in their ...development, making it one of the risk factors. This study identifies and analyses pedagogical situations leading to favouring of gifted pupils. The qualitative research is conducted in the elementary schools in the Czech Republic (Central Europe). Data are obtained through observation of school lessons and from interviews with teachers and were subsequently analysed by the situational analysis. The study has found five typical situations, such as teachers' increased expectations of gifted pupils, privileges only for gifted pupils, gifted pupil as the teacher's assistant, additional tasks only for gifted pupils, and gifted pupil as the captain of group work. We also detect typical features leading to favouring as a privilege, representation, performance, segregation, lack of purpose, and rigidity. The study draws attention to the existence of high-quality formalized care for the gifted (anchoring care in school legislation), for which school practice is not sufficiently prepared.
The article deals with the problem of gifted pupils´ conformity, which may form a social barrier to their development during school teaching. The aim of the research is to analyse the inclination to ...conformity of gifted pupils during the application of differentiated enriching curriculum. The research sample consists of 86 diagnosed gifted pupils from the level of education ISCED2. The research instrument is semantically differentially based on the principle of the tool ATER. The study results suggest non-conformal inclinations of gifted pupils, which are subjectively declared in relation to the five statements describing work on a task during the application of differentiated enriching curriculum in school lessons.
The aim of the study was to ascertain the degree of conformist behavior of gifted pupils in the adolescent age during the application of different phases of differentiated enriched curriculum. To ...diagnose the tendency of gifted pupils toward conformist behavior in education, a technique based on the ATER instrument, with the use of the two-factor semantic differential, was applied. We found that most gifted pupils declare non-conformist tendencies in education. By testing the hypothesis, it was verified that the tendency of gifted pupils toward conformism is not affected by the type of school they attend, nor the quality of the relationship of the classmates with the pupils themselves, which the gifted pupil declares, or the quality of relationship of the gifted pupil to other pupils. We also found that the need for gifted pupils to have friends in the classroom encourages a greater tendency towards conformist behavior.
The article presents a study the aim of which was to evaluate selected forms of pedagogical activities with gifted pupils declared by 681 teachers in the questionnaire. One of the main findings of ...the research was that the teachers are able to modify the contents of the curriculum, and on the contrary, they have problems with modifying the educational process and introducing selected principles of inclusive pedagogy into practice. Furthermore, it was discovered that the better quality level of the care of gifted pupil s is declared by women, pedagogues with a longer practice and pedagogues of humanities.
In addition to the opportunities afforded to them, the development of care for gifted pupils is also associated with the problematic handling of the 'gifted' label. These associations could affect ...several aspects of her/his life. The aim of this qualitative study was to discover the positive and negative consequences of the labelling of gifted pupils and to find their coping strategies, which would eliminate the negative consequences of labelling. Two hundred and eight intellectually gifted pupils aged ten to fifteen participated in the research. They were pupils of regular, inclusive elementary schools from the Czech Republic. The source of data was a questionnaire with open-ended questions. The positive aspects of labelling mainly concerned the academic and personal spheres, for instance, feeling good about oneself and extensive opportunities with regard to further education. Negative consequences affected the personal (problems resulting from giftedness) and academic (perfectionism, high expectations) areas, but above all, the social sphere. We discovered that gifted pupils are singled out from their peer groups, used for school work, and even bullied. The gifted pupils developed several coping strategies to deal with the negative consequences of labelling, such as helping others, conforming and denying their giftedness.
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