Hasan,

If I may suggest that the increase in gifted and talented education in schools is theoretically the result of a shift to an equity perspective in education resulting in differentiated curriculum in schools that address the unique needs of special populations.

Usually the first steps in providing differentiated curriculum to students is to identify students with special or unique abilities that have not been addressed through the standard curriculum.

Identification methods include a multiple measures approach: teacher report from observation and formative assessments; student performance on outcome based nationally-normed assessments; pscyho-social factors often reported through assessment, interview, and observation with school psychologist or counselor; parent requests; and lastly administrator recommendation or approval for student participation based on attendance, individual student plans, student future goals, etc.

Important considerations for teaching gifted and talented students are:

1) If they have been in regular classrooms for extended times they may have developed self-stimulating behaviors such as daydreaming, distracting behaviors, or acting out.

2) Students who have been praised for their "traits" such as being "smart" may also develop ego threat when faced with newer, more challenging curriculum and therefore choose to not engage as a strategy to protect their ego's from potential failure and looking "dumb."

3) A student given more challenging work may resent the difference in difficulty or quantity of work compared to their non-designated "gifted" peers.

4) Finding the students' valued individual goals is important for their seeing task-value and choosing to engage in new more challenging work.

Finally, with the combined level of intellectual knowledge of researchers and educators in this area, hopefully the "system" will move away from labeling students as "gifted and talented" or giving labels to any students. Research in the area of psycho social factors of learning shows labeling to be counterproductive and misleading. Rather, adults as educators should find the strengths of each student and provide support and praise for the effort each puts into the process of learning. Students benefit from adults modelling a willingness to take risks in learning and from providing a safe space to "fail" as part of the learning process.

Hope this helps,

Janet

Janet

Thanks  for response. All right, what is important issue for research at early childhood ?

Which fields are problematic?  Identification, interventions, curriculum development?

Hasan,

I am currently on a committee researching this very issue. We will meet again in a week and will have identified from survey key issues in our state for implementing ECE. I paste a list of areas of concern we have identified at this time for public school implementation of ECE programs. Are you interested in public or private implementations?

Issues to consider:

a. Financial implications for in-home providers, stand alone; Head Start. Head Start is a natural platform from which to advance the ECE. Though need to identify potential role and infrastructure supports. Head Start has been focused on oppressed population; what happens when middle class steps in?

b. HRDC provides services across three different counties; could be pulled in under the public sector using a completely different governance structure.

c. How do you build enough teacher capacity?

d. There is a curriculum development component; do the programs need to be certified or accredited

e. Training for this is big investment to grow cadre of new professionals. Ex: Sputnik race needed engineers.

f. Substantial fiscal impact and how to handle - There is a year to year budget implication

g. Capital investment for classroom handled in different ways depending on context

h. The biggest budget item is personnel

i. The next layer in terms of complexity is teasing out what are the offsets public versus private; lots of models; block grants; transfer programs; coop arrangements; there are some intergovernmental components;

j. What has Education Office done to establish guidelines around implementation of ECE? Eg. Student/teacher ratio in a pre-K classroom; certification requirements

Hope this helps,

Janet

Journal for the Education of Gifted Young Scientists (JEGYS) covers issues such as differentiated instruction in mathematics, science and social sciences for gifted students, education and training of the young scientist, giftedness, gifted education, scientific creativity, educational policy on science and math education for gifted students, teaching of the history and philosophy of science, teaching techniques and activities in the education of the  gifted young scientist, is a scientific and academic journal. JEGYS aims to be a scientific media sharing scientific research, practices, theories and ideas about gifted education and education of the gifted young scientist.

The JEGYS is an international refereed scientific journal which publishes review and research article, teaching techniques and activities for the education of the gifted young scientist, book reviews and interviews in Turkish and English. Submitted articles are evaluated in a double blinded peer-reviewed fashion. The JEGYS is an open access journal, published two issues a year.

Please see the last issue of JEGYS

http://www.jeysg.org/dergi.asp?ai=0&aai=19&aaai=21

We are happy to inform that JEGYS have accepted Index Copernicus.(publishing index)