THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING VS. TEACHER-LED LEARNING ON GIFTED AND TALENTED VS. NONGIFTED AND TALENTED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

In the age of the Internet, where information is readily accessible, many people are expanding their knowledge through self-directed learning without being in a traditional classroom setting. This raises the question of how well people can learn on their own without the aid of a human teacher. In our previous work (Leddo et al., 2017), we found that middle and high school gifted and talented (GT) students learned basic computer programming equally well on their own as when taught by a human teacher while non-GT students learned better when taught by a human teacher than on their own. Nittala, Leddo and Nittala (2022) replicated these findings with high school students learning advanced biology material and found that while non-GT students learned better with a teacher than on their own, GT students actually learned better on their own than with a teacher. The present study investigates whether these previous findings hold up with younger, elementary school students. 80 GT and 80 non-GT students were randomly assigned to teacher-led or self-directed-learning conditions where they learned the Pythagorean Theorem. Results showed that both groups learned better with teachers than on their own, and that this increase in performance of teacher-led vs. self-directed learning was greater for GT students than for non-GT students. This result runs counter to our previous findings and suggests that younger students may not yet be ready to learn well on their own but that having a teacher may actually help younger GT students develop the knowledge that they later will use to learn well on their own.