Fully including the gifted in school science education

One of my publications is:

Abstract

All students should be entitled to educational provision which they can access and which challenges them sufficiently to support their development. In any class in a public education system there will likely be a small proportion of students for whom the provision offered for most students will fail to challenge them in any meaningful way.These ‘gifted’ students may not obviously be excluded as they will typically engage (albeit, not always in very deep ways) with teaching and they will usually perform well on objective assessments of academic achievement. Indeed they will often significantly out-perform their classmates – which may be interpreted as evidence that they are benefitting from instruction.Yet often the most able learners are not being meaningfully challenged in class, and so are not being supported in ways that match their educational potential.This chapter considers the nature of this problem, and some of the complexities around it, as well as exploring how learners who are gifted in science can be fully included in science education.Accepting that the notion of there being ‘gifted learners’ is sometimes considered unsound, divisive, and elitist, this chapter adopts a nuanced but pragmatic notion of giftedness (i) as always relative to some particular learning context; (ii) as open to degrees of giftedness; and (iii) as a judgement made at a particular time in relation to some particular educational episode rather than for all time. It is suggested that the area of giftedness in science learning has been under-researched but a number of classroom strategies are recommended.These include designing class learning activities with high demand, but then using scaffolding to offer differentiation by support; extension work for gifted learners with a focus on creative production and knowledge integration; and involving gifted learners in a peer tutoring role in ways that facilitates learning for the tutor as well as their peer.The chapter is underpinned by a belief that failing to offer gifted learners who are required to attend formal schooling a form of educational provision that is genuinely educative for them is not only detrimental to these learners and the wider society, but is unacceptable on moral grounds.

Contents:

• INTRODUCTION
• QUESTIONING THE GIFTEDNESS CONCEPT
• The contentious nature of giftedness
• GIFTEDNESS AS AN INCLUSION ISSUE
• Meeting the scientist supply needs of the economy
• Meeting the needs of a liberal education
• A PRAGMATIC NOTION OF GIFTEDNESS
• APPROACHES TO MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE GIFTED LEARNER IN SCIENCE
• Separate classes for the gifted?
• Moving the gifted through the system more quickly?
• Offering the gifted something extra
• SCIENCE TEACHERS RESPONDING TO DIVERSITY IN THEIR OWN CLASSES
• Differentiation by support when designing learning activities with the gifted students in mind
• Differentiation by output rather than outcome
• CONCLUSION

The authors' manuscript version may be downloaded here.

Read more about the theme of Gifted Learners here.