Wilma Vialle

On being gifted, but sad and misunderstood: Social, emotional and academic outcomes of gifted students in the Wollongong Youth Study.

This research examined the relationships among personality factors, social support, emotional well-being, and academic achievement in 65 gifted secondary students, a sample drawn from a longitudinal study of over 950 students. The research demonstrated that, compared to their nongifted peers, gifted students had significantly higher academic outcomes for all subject areas except Geography and Physical Education. Teachers rated the gifted students as being well-adjusted and less likely to have behavioural or emotional problems than nongifted students. The gifted students, however, reported feeling more sad and less satisfied with their social support than their nongifted counterparts. There were no significant differences in terms of self-esteem, trait hope, problem orientation, or attitudes towards education. Within the gifted sample, the research found that the students who were most likely to get poor grades were those who scored high in psychoticism and low in conscientiousness, trait hope, joviality, and in attitudes towards schools. Interestingly, self-esteem was entirely unrelated to gifted performance.

Are we exacerbating students' learning disabilities? An investigation of preservice teachers' attributions of the educational outcomes of students with learning disabilities

While claims of the importance of attribution theory and teachers’ expectations of students for student performance are repeatedly made, there is little comprehensive research identifying the perceptions preservice teachers have of students with learning disabilities (LD). Accordingly, 444 Australian preservice primary school teachers were surveyed using vignettes and Likert-scale questions, to ascertain their responses to students with and without LD. It was found that preservice primary school general education teachers held a negative attribution style towards students with LD. Preservice primary teachers perceived students with LD as a lacking ability in comparison to others in the class. Recommendations for research and training programmes conclude the paper.

Acceleration: A coat of many colours

The word “acceleration” continues to generate controversy. Although the literature makes it clear that acceleration in its various guises is a positive intervention for many gifted students, educational practitioners in Australia continue to resist the evidence and campaign actively against allowing students to take this option. This article synthesizes 3 research projects conducted in New South Wales, Australia, exploring different forms of acceleration. The first project involved an investigation of the Early Entry policy for gifted children in one region of the state; the second reports on the experiences of students who skipped at least 1 grade; and the third examines a vertical programming system that allows students to accelerate within subjects at an academically selective high school. Based on these research studies, this article explores the issues that are at the center of the acceleration debate.

Can Australian Universities Take Measures to Increase the Lecture Attendance of Marketing Students

Lectures are a central element of traditional university learning, but Australian lecturers increasingly face very low levels of lecture attendance. A significant amount of research exists that investigates the drivers of lecture attendance. However, those studies typically study single factors in an isolated manner, thus overestimating the importance of individual factors. This study contributes to the understanding of lecture attendance (and nonattendance) by including a range of factors that potentially affect lecture attendance simultaneously, thus accounting for possible interactions between factors and identifying the key drivers of lecture attendance. The study uses a survey among all students of an Australian university to compute a regression model with the probability of lecture attendance as the dependent variable. Results indicate that only four of the factors previously investigated are significant for marketing students (i.e., the difficulty of the subject, the quality of the lecture as perceived by the student, the quality of the student as indicated by his or her average mark, and the format of the lecture), which leaves little opportunity for Australian universities to improve attendance with simple measures. Instead, the data suggest that universities need to improve the quality of lectures to achieve better attendance levels.

Does the Teacher of the Gifted Need to be Gifted

Abstract This paper reports on the first phase of a study investigating the qualities of effective teachers from the perspective of gifted students. A questionnaire was administered to students in Years 7, 9 and 11 at an academically selective high school in New South Wales, Australia. The data demonstrated that the personal-social qualities of the teachers were more highly valued than their intellectual qualities although there was a shift between Year 7 and Year 11 toward the intellectual end of the continuum. Overall there were no gender differences but in Year 9, girls favored the teacher’s personal characteristics more than their male counterparts. The open-ended questions, however, demonstrated that the characteristics (personal-social vs intellectual) cannot be neatly dichotomised. Recommendations are made for teacher training.

Insiders or Outsiders: The Role of Social Context in the Peer Relations of Gifted Students.

This phenomenological study explored the lifeworlds of 27 academically advanced elementary students in three very different schools that endeavored to meet their diverse needs. Schools that had established formal social and emotional structures were found to have student populations far more accepting of diversity. As a result, academically advanced students at these schools who participated in the study were able to form positive relationships with peers without resorting to maladaptive types of social coping strategies. The findings of this study illustrate that the social and emotional support and development provided for gifted students in school settings are likely to be as important as their academics.

Giftedness and Gifted Education: The Need for a Paradigm Change

This commentary addresses Subotnik et al.’s target article from the perspective of researchers active in the field of giftedness. First, we self-critically examine the current standing of giftedness research within the scientific community. Second, the authors’ critique of gifted education is sharpened in three respects: (a) gifted identification, (b) effectiveness of gifted education, and (c) credentials of gifted education. Finally, four necessary and productive lines for future research are proposed.

Termanal Science? The Work of Lewis Terman Revisited.

Lewis Terman has been one of the most significant pioneers in gifted education with his extensive work in intelligence testing and his longitudinal studies of gifted children, the latter study being unparallelled in education generally. Nevertheless, recent criticism of Termans work has focused on the shortcomings of his work, particularly its bias against women and certain ethnic groups. While these criticisms may be warranted in the context of our current understandings, this article attempts to place Termans conclusions in the context of his own time and space. The author concludes that, notwithstanding the unacceptability of his ideas on women and race, Termans work still provides an important foundation for the field of gifted education.

Teaching Research and Inquiry in Undergraduate Teacher‐education Programmes

Abstract Teacher training institutions continue to evaluate their pre‐service programs to ensure that subject offerings and approaches produce the desired characteristics of quality in graduating teachers. A recent trend in the research and policy literature has been the call for the development of the teacher as a reflective practitioner with a concomitant demand that teachers undertake research and inquiry in their classrooms. This paper reports on a case study at a university in New South Wales, Australia in which students and staff were surveyed regarding their understandings of the research process. The survey indicated that staff included only minor coverage of the research process in their existing subjects which was in accord with student perceptions that they had little knowledge of the processes. Students overwhelmingly supported the inclusion of a compulsory subject in research methods in the third year of their teacher education program. Further, students indicated a strong belief that the stu...

Student perceptions of high-achieving classmates

The reported study investigated students’ perceptions of their high-performing classmates in terms of intelligence, social skills, and conscientiousness in different school subjects. The school subjects for study were examined with regard to cognitive, physical, and gender-specific issues. The results show that high academic achievements in particular school subjects lead to negative reactions in the peer group whereas high achievements in other school subjects result in positive peer reactions. In contrast, the respondents’ gender and the gender of the successful classmates had little influence on student perceptions of high achievers. The results are discussed in regard to their implications for gifted education.