Determination of Attitudes and Opinions of Classroom Teachers about Education of Gifted Students

Abstract

The identification and education of gifted individuals who lead the development of the societies are very important. Classroom teachers play effective roles in both diagnosing and education of gifted students. This research aims to determine the attitudes and opinions of the classroom teachers about the education of the gifted students. The research model is a descriptive survey model. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in the direction of the principles of pragmatist philosophy was used. The mixed method is preferred because it provides a multidimensional and holistic view by balancing the limitations of 'prejudice' in the quantitative method 'inability to understand the context' in the qualitative method. The study group is consist of 220 classroom teachers volunteering to participate in the research working in 16 primary schools, 10 of the public and 6 private in Ankara in the second term of the 2017-2018 academic year. The quantitative data were collected by Attitude Scale towards Gifted Education. The scale consists of 14 items. There are three sub-dimensions: ‘Need and Support Dimension’, ‘Resistance to Objections Dimension’, ‘Ability Grouping Dimension’. The qualitative data were collected by semi-structured interview form consists of 4 questions about opinions on the education of gifted students in Turkey, and was applied to 35 teachers. The scores gathered from Attitude Scale towards Gifted Educationwere analyzed according to gender, age, occupational seniority, having a gifted studentin the class, graduated faculty, and type of school of teachers. In the analyzing of quantitative data, t-test and ANOVA were used. The analysis of the data was done with SPSS 20.0 software. Content analysis was performed for qualitative data that was gathered from interviews. In content analysis, similar expressions were organized in the context of certain concepts and themes and interpretations were made Qualitative data were analyzed using frequency distributions and percentages. In this study, the average of the total scores of the classroom teachers' attitude scale with respect to gifted education was found 2.91 and the range of this score was evaluated as' ambivalent'. The research also evaluated whether the attitudes of teachers differed according to gender, age, seniority, having a gifted student in the class, graduated faculty and school type variables. The results of the study show that there is no significant difference according to the scores obtained from all the subscales of attitude scale and the total score, between seniority, having a gifted student and graduated faculty variables. Significant differences were found in terms of gender, age and school type variables, according to some sub-dimensions. The qualitative part of the research, it was tried to determine the views of classroom teachers on diagnosing and education of gifted in Turkey. The results show that classroom teachers have a lack of knowledge about the diagnosing and education of the gifted and need in-service training in this context. In addition, crowded classes and content and application process of the BILSEM exam are the factors that negatively affect the quality of education and need to be solved among the problems in the diagnosis and education of gifted students.