How to Identify a Gifted Student - Essay Sample

Introduction

A gift is potential or the ability to do something. It can also be referred to as expertise in a certain field. It is a talent that one has been born with which is different from other people by having special abilities that are abnormal. Giftedness can be explained as contemplated rumination between mental giftedness and creative giftedness and the disparity between talent and ability.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Most articulations of giftedness have concentrated on the discernment ability which is measured in IQ (Feldman, 1982; Lubart, 2006). Creativeness has been proven to be part of a gifted student by professors who work with these students because high IQ helps in critical thinking, one of the many qualities of a gifted student is.

Gifted students are very creative. These students are logical when doing various operations, and they also have a great sense of imagination. They are able to think outside the box and have a very great sense of humor. They are also sarcastic when doing their talking. They are expressive. These students mature early in terms of mental compared to other age mates or even some a little older than them in age. This type of students have a special ability to understand critical and complicated matters unlike other students, they are also able to learn and control their feelings better and those of their fellow students, and know how to react to every situation in a mature way. They also easily get annoyed or angered because they have a high conjecture upon themselves. They can break down emotionally easily.

Gifted students are intellectuals or cognitive. The students are very bright and fast learners. They are distractors in nature which is due to their love of problem-solving. They are able to have solutions even in the trickiest situations because they start reading information materials at a very tender age so they gather a lot of knowledge that makes them different to other students. They are involving or bearing. These students show a lot of prominence on topics or material that they are interested in. They are more eager to learn on topics of interest and curious with questions, unlike other students. A talented student is simply a student gifted in some form of expression. Talented students have skills or thinking process that is a little bit high above normal students. Their way of thinking and doing things and their human performance is high above normal performance.

These qualities and characteristics are looked at to determine gifted students in our district. Gifted students behave in a totally different way compared to other students. They have special abilities to do special tasks or can do certain tasks that other students can't manage to. They are also top of their classes academically.

In Edina, public schools being a nationally recognized school has a lot of students totaling to about 8500. This school supports gifted students fully and have ways to identify them, they also have education processes that help in mentoring the students and make sure they achieve and maximize their potential. The schools have gifted education specialists. The schools hold challenges that help in identifying gifted students. They are also identified through evaluation tests and monitoring where they record the student's data for easy follow up which they begin from the tender age. The school has the service placement and change of service which looks out for the student's well-being and observes their performance.

Approaches to Identifying Gifted Students

There are two approaches that are used; the formal data-gathering approach and the responsive learning environment approach. In the formal data-gathering approach, there is a team of professionals where they identify gifted student through the cognitive means by use of educational tests and use of rating scales that are collected maybe annually and recorded as data to observe a student's growth and performance. These rating scales are recorded and they help the observers to monitor and follow on gifted students characters, behaviors and progress. The other approach; the responsive learning environment teachers help in setting up challenges that help in the growth of the gifted students. These challenges help the students to strengthen their critical thinking abilities and help them to discover their special or abnormal talents and abilities as well as making good use of them. This also helps in guidance counselling and motivation. By the use of scales and checklists through programs that help gifted, teachers are able to learn the characters of the student and help them in judgment as well as supporting their progress. Teachers play the biggest role in identifying gifted and talented students with the help of the programs.

The rating scales help in identifying and understanding the learning, social leadership, self-determination, creative thinking and motivational characteristics of the gifted students. by understanding these characteristics the needed help and guidance is given to the students which lead to full utilization of their talents and abilities. Regulated tests are also given to the students which help in testing the cognition and academic ability of the students as well as test the student's capabilities and achievements.

References

Feldman, D. H., & Benjamin, A. C. (2006). Creativity and education: An American retrospective. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(3), 319-336.

Young, C. M. (2019). Identification of gifted students in Australian Catholic primary schools.